Feeling Better

Thankfully my headache has finally lifted, I had a sinus infection, and I can bear to look at the computer screen again!

Now getting ready for my volunteer days at Cambo and attending Stanza. Turns out my friend from Skye will also be at Cambo, so that will be great fun, as we normally only meet to garden at Drum, in Aberdeenshire.

I can't wait for the Raymond Carver session at Stanza. Prior to the headache I re-read A New Path to the Waterfall and loved it as much as ever, and found new things to take from it. It will be a personal highlight of the week for me.

I've finally finished weeding all the paths in my garden. They are now clear, if rather muddy, but the clean lines do set of the borders much better, and I managed to clear loads of a really pesky weed - the water aven, related to cultivated geum, but not as pretty.

And the Imperial Fritillaries are through, and they are providing foxy notes below the sweet scent of the daphne.

Their smell always reminds me of the time my brother and I spent on a Dutch bulb farm when we were teenagers. The sheds had all sorts of machinery to grade the different sizes of bulbs, but the underlying smell was always of Imperial Fritillaries. (We went there as a Dutch family used to come to Ayrshire to buy stock snowdrops from all the estates round us to improve the genetic mix of their stock plants and they stayed at my parents hotel. The two families got friendly and they invited us over for a few weeks one summer.)

This is a photo of an orange one from my garden.