Not my tree, but...

it's a nice one: Acer griseum (Paper-bark Maple), Cruikshank botanical gardens (behind Zoo Building) ...my second home. For years I thought it was a kind of Tibetan Cherry, nope - wrong genus and it's from central China. In Pinyin, should you want to speak to Chinese person about the tree or buy one out there, it's xuè pí. Taken with the Nokia N95 on the way into work on Wednesday morning in bright sunshine (nothing lasts does it?)

Yellow flowers

For some reason in full sun I've got to underexpose yellow flowers and then increase exposure slightly in the photo editor else they look totally washed out!

Dark leaved Celandine don't wanna wake up @ 8am


By 11am they're quite happy!

Foggy March Woodside Sunset

Spring's almost here!

Much nicer than dead sticks and boring stuff about pruning huh? Crocii in the front garden, 10th March, 10.30am, sunny, air temp approx. 10.3C :-)!

Pruning the rasps - done!

Raspberry canes

Notice the side branching on the 'before pruning' shot - the height of the canes had already been reduced by 50% in the autumn. A lot of the thin weedy new stems were removed along with some of the old woody ones. The text book way of pruning gave me a wonderful crop of leaves 2 years ago, I'm pretty sure I've repeated what I did last year, which worked a treat ...we'll see!


No it wasn't dark when I'd finished, it rained. Before putting the camera to bed for the night it stopped ...and I thought 'who knows it might work' - yeah, all you see is the subject surrounded by cool blackness - yeah, discovered a new technique for the blog!!!!