Pastel Perfect

I was surprised to see that I hadn't already blogged this picture, because I am quite fond of it! I love the colours of the hydrangea and the contrast with the little marmalade hoverfly (which looks like it's balancing on one leg in that picture).

Whilst I don't know the name of this kind of hydrangea (I would guess it's hydrangea macrophylla?), it's apparently a lacecap as opposed to a mophead - meaning that it has large, showy but sterile flowers around the outer edge of a number of much smaller fertile ones -you can see the two types in the picture. Mophead hydrangeas are the ones you immediately think of when someone leaps out from behind a wall and shouts "hydrangea!" - i.e., the ones with big round fluffy-looking flowerheads. The colour of your hydrangeas will be affected by the pH of the soil, which is rather interesting.

Dappled Light

A return to my traditional "yay! flowers" approach to photography - although as I recently proved, I am trying to break the cycle of addiction. This is some kind of rose, which was boldly protruding from a stranger's garden fence. If this were the olden days, perhaps I would have picked it and stolen it away with me, leaving them with a sadly denuded floral display. Fortunately, however, the power of the digital camera means I didn't have to.

We also discovered some very cool African Geese. Sadly all the photos I took of them were rubbish, but when I tried to find a better one on Google, it seems that all the other photos out there are even worse. Consequently I may, somewhat shamefacedly, put up the rubbish pictures, just because I want to convey how awesome these geese are. They have strange knobbly heads and one of them (I'm guessing the male) had a huge dewlap which wobbled disconcertingly as he walked around.