Hellebores are starting to come out in the garden. These are wonderful winter flowers, coming at mid-winter and continuing through till late spring. This maroon one is particularly nice.
This hellebore is the one that was in the garden when I came here. Every year I've bought a couple more to add to the collection. My favourite is a freckly pink one, but sadly that doesn't seem to have a flower stalk this year.
The snowflakes are also beginning to come out. These bulbs seem to be incredibly hardy, needing no fertiliser or care. They often pop up in the gardens of abandoned country cottages, blooming away long after the people who planted them have moved on.
The weather here is now quite cold, too cold today to enjoy being outside; a "lazy wind" (so called because it blows straight through you, not going around you) has kept up all day, although the sun was bright. I've spent most of my time watching "Wives and daughters", the BBC adaptation of Mrs Gaskell's novel, and reading a novel called "The summer before the war" by Helen Simonson, who wrote "Major Pettigrew's last stand". "The summer before the war" is a bigger, more serious novel (First World War) but I found it very enjoyable. There are echoes of E.F. Benson, because the novel is set in Rye, where the author grew up. There are a lot of themes in the novel, but they are never hammered hard; the position of women, particularly educated spinsters, the stultifying effects of "society" and "propriety" and of course, the brutality of war.
Back to work tomorrow. Oh God, it's the school holidays. Again.
Chilly here too. No snowdrops yet though.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed Major Pettigrew, so will have to track this one down. Thank you.
And good luck at work.