Ipernity Nos 0001-2000

- but alas, only temporarily. I ran the pump on the tube well for three days, which filled it only about 10 % full! and it drained dry again within five days :-< Not sure what next steps should be, but both the alternatives of a clay lining which would involve trucking in 50 tons of clay, or a huge rubberised lining, are prohibitively expensive, so we may end up with a swampy sunken garden at this end of the property...

Chrysathemum

Orchid

Honey bees were at work this afternoon in the heat of the south-facing walled fruit trees.

Giant trees – Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostrobides) Its existence as a species was discovered from fossils in 1941 by Japanese paleobotanist, Shigeru Miki, who was studying specimens that had come from the States. By a strange twist of fate, that same year, a Chinese forester, T Kan, who was with the Red Army partisans, came across an unusual deciduous (sheds its leaves in the winter) conifer next to the temple in the village of Mo-Tao-Chi in China. He asked the village schoolmaster to send him leaf specimens in Spring. However, it was 1946 by the time Professor Hu of the Botanical Institute in Beijing received samples. Professor Hu, who had seen Miki's published work, alerted the world to the existence of a tree thought to have died out 3 million years ago. In 1947, the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard provided funding for a seed collecting expedition, and by 1948 samples were sent to the world's main botanical gardens. There are trees grown from this batch of seeds at Emmanuel College and the botanical gardens in Cambridge.

tinyurl.com/pcq82b8 The Enrico Caruso of Blackbirds serenading me in the garden this afternoon. Well, actually, I think he was singing to a potential mate, but he went on almost continuously for more than an hour, and the volume meant I could hear him from some hundreds of yards away! Be sure to turn your sound on, for the link.

Chaffinch

The Necropolis built on the site of an old quarry beside the ancient Glasgow Cathedral is an amazing place to visit. The architecture on some of the Victorian tombs and mausoleums is of a very high standard, and extends into Art Deco and work by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The Necropolis is Glasgow's answer to Pere Lachaise. If you do a search amongst my images for "Necropolis" you will find others I have taken there.

Ford Zodiac Mk III 1963 with new Halogen headlights fitted! picasaweb.google.com/coldwaterjohn/FordZodiacAutomaticMkIII1963?authkey=Gv1sRgCM2Ko8K9y4iSWA