the running wave

Time for another walk around my favourite field!  Today we met a delightful girl riding around the field and she stopped for a chat.  She told me that it is three miles all the way round, which certainly surprised me!  No wonder it takes me an hour to complete the walk, with occasional stops to take photographs.  Today was no exception.  There were lots of lovely things to see, the best being the young fresh beech leaves, green and shiny copper. There is an gnarled old hawthorn tree along the route and I have looked at it every time we have passed by over the winter months, wondering if it was still alive.  It has looked completely lifeless, until today.  The lichen covered branches have sprouted lovely rosettes of flower buds! There was a fabulous orange tip butterfly flitting ahead of us and it just would not stop long enough for me to take a good photograph.  This is blurred, but gives an idea of how vivid the orange was on the wing.

My daughter is getting married this summer and, well ahead of the event, she has been with her girlfriends this weekend, having fun!  A hen weekend?  Well, sort of! To kick things off, I went with her to a lovely event held in the pretty East Lothian village of Stenton.  East Lothian Flower Farm joined forces with florist, Ode de Flora, to hold a floristry demonstration and then we had the opportunity to make up our own vase, using a gorgeous array of flowers grown locally on the flower farm - tulips, ranunculus, anemones, clematis montana and deliciously fragrant narcissus.  It was a really delightful evening, with bubbles of course, and we enjoyed every minute. Here is my vase from Friday evening.

While Japan revels in its glorious cherry blossom, and our wild cherry has more or less faded now, we have moved into the delicious springtime realm of apple blossom.  I am almost tempted to say it tops the cherry, although I am not sure that I can bring myself to really believe that!  They are both magical, and so is the flower of the quince.  I have cooked with quince for many years but never seen its lovely flower before, until today.

It's my Mother's birthday today.  27 April 1917.  From her photo album, here's a photo taken when she was twenty years old!   I lost her on my birthday in July 1976.   Happy Birthday Mum.  I will always miss you. xxxx

After several days of glorious sunshine the weather has taken a bit of a dive over the last couple of days.  The air has turned cold and the wind has picked up, but not enough to blow away the east coast haar yesterday.  The haar is an enveloping mist which blows in off the North Sea.  When the dogs and I left home yesterday for a walk around Athelstaneford, it was sunny in the garden, but by the time we reached our destination the landscape was very murky and grey. I saw my first hawthorn blossom of the year and despite the restricted views it was a good walk. To finish off I swapped a P D James book with Helen Dunmore's  Birdcage Walk , in the village telephone box!

On Monday and on Tuesday.  A truly gorgeous girl!

A few vases for Easter Monday!  No Easter is complete, for me, without a posy of primroses.  When I was a little girl, Easter was a lovely occasion with family arriving bearing beautiful chocolate eggs decorated with pretty sugar work flowers, and we would walk by the Basingstoke Canal and pick huge bunches of primroses.  Lovely memories of happy Hampshire childhood days.  So today's primroses are to relive those memories, and the other little posies are for the joy of Springtime and to remind us that Easter is a time for new and renewed life. The Pastis bottle, with yellow archangel, is for Notre Dame.  Yellow archangel, apart from its rather appropriate name at this time, is a statuesque plant, which I think is fitting as a tribute to that remarkable building in Paris, which, after the events of the last week, has probably touched the hearts of more people than any another other building in the world, at any time, ever.  Here, on Easter Monday, is to its resurrect