ABSTRACT THURSDAY - FOLIAGE - AND MORE!

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I woke this morning and saw that the clock said 10.40 a.m.!  Having got out to go to the bathroom at 7 a.m., I decided that I had nothing much to get up early for, so got back into bed and promptly went back to sleep.  I guess all that hard work in the garden yesterday had sapped my energy.  

I’m now feeling fine and raring to go - so it was a pleasure to wander round the garden in the sunshine although the breeze is still quite strong and a little on the chill side.

We have lots of different coloured foliage that I thought would be good for the AT challenge this morning, especially the Euonymus, which is a beautiful golden yellow and green, the Heuchera, Purple Palace, a glorious plum/purple colour and which looked wonderful in the morning (almost midday!) sunshine, but I was drawn to our poppies, some of which for some reason this year, have variegated leaves.  

Many of our poppy plants are ones that we have split from the plant we brought from Mr. HCB’s mother’s garden after she died over twenty years ago and which we have nurtured year by year and split quite often.  In fact, many of the seeds have been sent to various Blip friends - and I hope they are now enjoying wonderful large, red poppies.

I saw this tiny feather caught on one of the leaves, and whilst I was taking a shot of that, this little insect appeared - and I know it isn’t really abstract, but I thought as it had posed so beautifully for me, I had to give it 15 minutes of fame on Blip but I’m not even sure what it is.  

I thought it would be interesting to find out why plants have variegated leaves and found out the following:

Variation in leaf colour arises because of a lack of the green pigment chlorophyll in some of the plant cells.  Variegation can also be the result of a viral infection, showing as discoloured veins or leaf areas. This form of variegation is relatively rare, but it is stable.  

We now have several clumps of poppies, but as I wandered along the front of our herbaceous border, I was sad to see that our very first poppy was open, but had obviously either been blown over in the strong wind and the stem had died off.  I decided to bring it indoors, hoping that putting it in some water might revive it, but as I cut it, some of the petals fell off, so all I could do was take a photograph - see extra - and hope that the other buds don’t go the same way.

Mr. HCB is busy erecting his new contraption - otherwise known as a runner bean frame - and I have no doubt this will be blipped at some time in the future.  It was quite expensive, but is looking good and it was either buying this or new bamboo canes, as most of his were very old and many had broken after being blown about last year.  I think it’s just as well there is no cricket at the moment, otherwise I don’t know when all this work would have got done!

“It's exciting to see things coming up again, 
     plants that you've had twenty or thirty years. 
          It's like seeing an old friend.” 
Tasha Tudor