Flowers, Exotic and Not

I was just saying to Dave the other day, "Don't we usually have a purple crocus in the garden?" And then, as if summoned forth by my words, it bloomed in the grass days later! It was promptly plucked by a pigeon, but fortunately I got a photo first.

Our daffodils have also appeared, and Olga, on cue, has begun knocking the heads off with her garden escapades. It's an annual ritual.

I bought this little cactus years ago for Dave. At the time, that ring of tiny orange flowers circled the top. Since then it's been steadily growing in its misshapen, cactusy way, and now it's sent up what looks like a large yellow bud. I think we may get a proper flower!

The orange things, it turns out, are almost certainly fake. Apparently this is a thing. The mere fact that they've been there for years suggests that they are not natural. I guess, deep down, I suspected as much.

Finally, here's one of our orchids, blooming once again. You can see flower stalks from two other orchid plants in the background. Give us another month or so and we should have orchids galore around here!

Speaking of gardening, we had some drama yesterday. Dave and I were sitting in the living room when Dave exclaimed and pointed to a guy walking around in the back garden! He turned out to be a gardener from next door. The neighbor (the one who took down the big cypress tree) is having her landscaping redone and asked the gardener to bring her climbing rose back over the fence so she could put it on a trellis at the back of her property. Until now, it's been winding its way through a tree in our garden -- you may remember we had our tree trimmers spare it during our recent pruning. It is indeed her rose, because it's rooted in her garden, so we couldn't really argue with them to leave it alone.

I'm concerned that the gardeners' work may have damaged the greenery in our trees -- much of it ivy. If that ivy was rooted on the neighbor's property, and they cut the vines at the base, all that green growth will die and that will look like hell. There's still some climbing rose up there, now deprived of its roots, that will certainly die. Ugh -- we may have to have the tree trimmers back again! Only time will tell.

But anyway, for the time being, I'm not going to think about any of that. Because this morning, we're off to Malta!