Hello Hellebores

The forecast was for rain today and yet we did not have any, just a few sprinkles now and then. It was very windy though. I enjoyed a dry walk in the woods with Xena and we met a man with two Vizslas, one only 6 months old who was ever so cute. I wonder if he had to pay the ridiculous lockdown prices for his puppy, I see the average price now seems to be around £3500 and I even saw one advert for £5000 - what a fat chancer that breeder is! The honest breeder are still charging the usual pre-lockdown prices.

I went to the nearby garden centre which has a pet shop so I could buy some food for Xena  - I order her main food online and it is delivered direct from the supplier, but this is the topper that she likes on her dry food. The garden centre is undergoing huge renovations and they told me they were setting up a large farm shop with a butcher, greengrocer etc which is such good news as it is about 5 minutes form our house.

The vet phoned to say that the sample he took from the wart-like thing on her back is a tumour, which could be a benign cyst or not, and the only way to tell if it is malignant is if she has it surgically removed. However as the wart has dried up and dropped off and there is no lump on her back at the moment, we decided to leave it and watch it as I do not want unnecessary surgery on her. So we will just jeep an eye on it.

The weather was dull again today so I preferred to photograph the hellebores in the garden rather than woodland scenes. The problem is they are so low to the ground that they get quite mud splattered when it rains, so it was hard to find one to photograph that looked clean.