Green thoughts ...

I've heard visitors (usually piling off a touring coach) ask as they walk past this bit of Benmore Gardens if there's "anything to see up there". They're presumably looking for flowerbeds and banks of colour - and yes, you can see these round the ornamental pond that I keep taking pictures of. But this quiet vista of green is far more typical of the gardens, and very much what I come for.

This afternoon the rain of earlier had stopped about 10 minutes before I took this, and the sun was beginning to break through. (By the time we reached the top of the Chilean garden it was shining brightly and hotly on our backs.) A bird was singing the most extraordinarily virtuoso song, answered with slightly less panache by another slightly further off. There wasn't another soul to be seen. The grumpiness induced by a dull, wet morning and early afternoon had dissipated. 

A good place.