Great timing...

 The photographs will be here any day...
Please be Patient...

Yet another oops. I remembered, after two days of light drizzle, that I'd left my camera outside. Half an hour after shamefully retrieving it, the rain started pelting down. And - yeay! My camera, though a bit confused (different screens keep flashing on and off), still works. Lucky me. Great timing...

Unfortunately I can't upload any of my latest winter photographs just yet (there's a wee issue with the website). Not that winter pictures are all that inspiring. But they tell it like it is, I guess. And at least I don't have snow for six months.

Lots of things are still green, the Viburnums are flowering, and the big Phormiums (flaxes) look amazing. So forgive me if I show June photographs from previous years. This year looks much the same as any other, after all. This morning there was a modest frost. It was rather hard getting out of bed and walking over to the house - but hey! I'm tough.

 Viburnum tinus
Winter Flowering Viburnum

Tougher than Minimus my cottage cat, snuggled in her cat-nest underneath the woolly bed cover. She wasn't coming out. But she has been a bit off-colour, with a small wound on her leg (a bite that has abscessed, a rip from something sharp, who knows). Minimus goes all sulky when this sort of thing happens.

Barking mad dogs...

The dogs are both barking mad, and a bit bored with me (I've been spending the start of these frosty mornings on a Youtube train in Norway, a nine hour trip from Trondheim to Bodo). By 11am it's theoretically warm enough to go outside and do things that dogs like doing.

 My dogs.
Pebbles and Winnie

And there's a new puppy in our extended family, a brown spotty German Short-Haired Pointer called Frida, who joins Escher the big brown dog. On Monday I puppy-sat for four hours. Oh boy! Oh joy! A new puppy! A chewy, squeaky, sleepy, cuddly new puppy. Photographs to come. I left my dogs at home in their kennels. Sorry about that, collies.

 And trusty green wheelbarrow.
Winter Bonfire

My horrible bonfire...

Today I cranked up my horrible bonfire, after a week's blessed absence, to burn more hedge trimmings. I also gathered up loads of Hen House Garden mess, all dropped from the huge gum trees (pieces of bark, leaves, and branches). There's twice as much trundling and raking, but at least I get more flames and less smoke. Four and a half hours. Hmm...

And now I need to go back outside to poke at my fire. Grr. Don't like it. Don't want to keep on doing this. There must be a better way.

Next Day

Hmm. Refuse to do any burning. Have just gone for a semi-frosty walk with the dogs and the Fred cats. I need some blobby tough evergreen shrubs for the Hen House Garden, which is full of spiky greenery (Astelias, Phormiums, Carexes) and little else.

 The stiff spikes behind the Astelia are Phormium tenax.
Green Astelia in Winter

Not Hebes, because there isn't enough sun. Thinking, thinking...