Valerian

#BloomScrolling #NiceAndSimple

Carreg Coetan Arthur, a dolem in Newport (between St David's & Cardigan), Wales c. 3000 BC

#StandingStoneSunday

Rosa "Mutabilis". All the colours on one rose 🙂
(I seem to recall this variety was discovered in a garden in Italy c. 1894 but Internet won't confirm it.)

#Rose #BloomScrolling

Rosa alba semi-plena. First flower!

Two more buds about to open. This isn't a rose if you want abundant flowers. Hopefully next year will bring more.

(A Christmas present last year but it was finished flowering by then.)

#BloomScrolling #Rose #MuchAnticipated

A Tale of a Cactus

One of the house cacti (i.e. not one of mine) was this tiny little thing (about 3 red-tinged narrow stems) which lived in a small ceramic pot on one side of the deck. It's been there for years. Occasionally getting water. Not growing but not dying.

Earlier this year, it was knocked over and its pot broke. So I put it in one of my pots and incorporated it into my collection. It grew more stems and turned a nicer shade of green.

A few months later, when I moved the columnar cacti to a shared planter, I put the little guy in the front. It grew more, thicker, greener stems. It's almost quadrupled in size. And last week, it flowered for the first time. Lovely big red flowers.

Cacti need love too.

#BloomScrolling #Cacti

An enthusiastic Gymnocalycium and Mammillaria matudae (too high, too soon).

#bloomscrolling #Cacti

My cacti are flowering very enthusiastically, so I'll share some photos this week.

My oldest plant. I have no idea what it is*. It doesn't flower very often and the flower only lasts a day but it's spectacular enough visitors were taken to see it.

I bought it 15 years ago as a tiny ball and it's grown. A lot. For the past few years it's been in a terracotta pot which it has well out grown. I managed to pull it out and put it in a larger plastic pot. And it flowered.

#bloomscrolling #Cacti

(*Possibly Soehrensia schickendantzii. Google insists on Echinopsis sp. but the growth habit seems wrong.)

Have no been posting lately. Been... not busy, not not wanting too, justnot quite getting there.

So, on the first of November I will start writing a first draft of a novel, as I have every year for the last 20 odd years (some odder than others). I always stress about it. Because, I don't know if this idea will "work".

There are the years when I've toying with a story for month. have characters, conflicts, things to happen, a setting and.. a few days in, it stalls after a couple days. Whatever I do, it just won't go forward. The last few years, this has been worse. I just can't seem to get excited about writing new things.

Last year, I had some pushy characters and some ideas for scenes, but that was all. No plot. Far too much world building than I felt up to. I knew if I trred to write it, it was going to stall but, as I said, pushy characters. So, I decided to start writing it and also work on a rewrite of another WIP I was keen to work on. A few days in, any thought of rewriting the other WIP was abandoned as the "new" story took over, and started to unfold and grow, excessive worldbuilding and all. It's been so long since I was this excited over a new project.

And then there was when I was over this whole thing but a friend said I had to or the space-time continuum would collapse or something. So, there was I was on 31st October with trains. Picture of trains. Specifically early 1870s when the main line to Hobart was built. And that was it. Not even a character until I started typing and needed a name. A week in, I discovered it was a murder-mystery, where the body had been revealed when the train derailed, and it ended up with a surprisingly coherent, if odd, plot.

I don't know why ideas I'm enthusiastic about stall out and other times I can write a complete novel starting with almost nothing, (and sometimes the complicated lists of scenes, with character names and snippets of dialogue that I've been collecting for months coalesce into a finished WIP).
I don't know how things will go until I start writing. The best I can do is have another idea waiting, in case the first one doesn’t work. So, I worry.

Photo "memories" on that other place. Now I want to go to visit Cornwall, Meh.

Chysauster Village, on a foggy day. Best way to visit. Cut off from the rest of the world. Just me and the houses.)

(Late Iron Age, about 1st - 3rd century CE (which corresponds to the time of Roman occupation elsewhere, I know). Courtyard houses, which are basically a round yard with a large room at one end and smaller rooms in the arms/outer walls.)