Full of promise ...

Two days ago, I blipped a single wonderful Himalayan poppy flower that I saw in the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, one of a host of blue blooms. This is my young hopeful - a Mecanopsis plant that I bought last year from our own Botanic Gardens at Benmore. I left it out during the winter in the pot in which I'd bought it, and planted it out in a larger pot this Spring. It was earlier this week that I noticed it was doing more than shooting out new leaves and growing taller - and this cluster of alien-looking  whatever-they-are looks quite promising to me.

Mecanopsis apparently like acidic soils such as are found around here, but as my plant is in general purpose compost except for the original root ball I'm going to have to find a suitable fertiliser for it. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the strangeness of the plant, with its resemblance to something - and now I'm going to show my age - out of the Quatermass stories.

A footnote to that: When my friends at school, all of us aged 12 or so, were raving about hiding behind the sofa while watching Quatermass and the Pit, I felt cheated because we didn't have a television. Then I found the scripts in Penguin Books in a bookshop on Arran, and felt bereft no longer. The scripts were terrifying in their powers of suggestion, and I had all three of them. 

I still do - must look them out.