Witch Hazel

Today, I had arranged to meet a good friend, J, at Sir Harold Hillier Gardens. As the  morning started bright and sunny, I decided to cycle. It proved  a good decision as the lanes were traffic free,  apart from a few other friendly  cyclists, and the occasional delivery van, and there were many drifts of  snowdrop flowers in the verges and  gardens I passed. There was a lot of avian  activity, too, with finches flitting through the  hedgerows, and skylarks singing above the fields.

J and I  enjoyed a lovely  few hours walking through  the gardens (and having lunch!). We met on a horticultural course, many years ago, so we do have a shared passion for plants. Here are a couple of the splendid Hamamelis (Witch Hazel) plants  we found in flower. The gardens  hold  a national collection of Hamamelis cultivars.   

This  evening I joined a Zoom meeting of Winchester Cafe Scientifique about Chimpanzee Culture. Different groups of wild chimps exhibit different behaviours eg one group may use wooden hammers to crack open nuts, while another  group uses stones. There is ongoing research using  camera traps and collecting and analysing faecal samples (-yuk!) to try to discover how this is related to geography or genetic differences.
The lecturer, Dr Mimi Arandjelovic, was very enthusiastic about  her subject matter, and the  research techniques being used to process and interpret all the data, which fortunately made this rather esoteric topic more accessible  and interesting to me.