By Bernie Bell

In the meadow…..last year this plant appeared – we think it’s a hybrid of a pink hardy Geranium and a blue hardy Geranium, as we have both in the flower beds.  I hoped it would come through the winter and come up again – it has – and it’s flowering! 

I’m pleased.

Other pleasing flowers….Hot eyed Mafia Queen Big Poppy

‘Big Poppy’

Hot-eyed Mafia Queen!

At the trim garden’s edge

She sways towards August.

A Bumble Bee

Clambers into her drunken, fractured goblet –

Up the royal carpet of down-hung,

Shrivel-edged, unhinged petal, her first-about-to-fall.

He’s in there as she sways. He utters thin

Sizzling bleats of difficult enjoyment.

Her carnival paper skirts, luminous near-orange,

Embrace him helplessly.

Already her dark pod is cooking its drug.

Every breath imperils her. Her crucible

Is falling apart with its own fierceness.

A fly, cool, rests on the flame-fringe.

Soon she’ll throw off her skirts

Withering into vestal afterlife,

Bleeding inwardly

Her maternal nectars into her own

Coffin – (cradle of her offspring).

Then we shall say:

She wore herself in her hair, in her day,

And we could see nothing but her huge flop of petal,

Her big, lewd, bold eye, in its sooty lashes,

And that stripped, athletic leg, hairy

In a fling of abandon – ‘

by Ted Hughes

Giant Cultivated Thistley Thing….(aka Cirsium)

A humungous Clover head….Bee’s Delight

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