Friday 8 May 2009

Broandband, Favourite flowers and Music

First let me apologise for not answering any comments in the last couple of days, the village lost broadband for 36hrs..not good, thanks BT. As you are probably aware I work from home online so I was totally stuffed! There is of course some irony in the situation as I work for er BT!


We all have our favourite plants and this is one of mine, the Perennial cornflower Centaurea Montana. I think the colour is amazing; the rayed petals are really interesting. I also love the scaled pattern made by the bracts on the calyx, which is so reminiscent of the calyx of its wild relatives the knapweeds and star thistles. One of the other things I like about this plant is that we inherited it; it appeared in the middle of the veg patch the first spring we were here, I have since divided it and moved it to more appropriate places in the garden.



On Wednesday night we went to a concert at Peterborough Cathedral in aid of the Great Fen project. This project is to reclaim 3,700 hectares of fen habitat between Peterborough and Huntingdon, this is an area of land about ten times the size of Central park in New York or three times the size of Richmond Park in London. They still need to raise about £7m to buy the remaining farmland. Anyway, the concert by the Britten Sinfonia featured music by Vaughan Williams, Mahler, Delius, Sibelius , Britten and the world premiere of a piece by John Woolrich called Whittel’s Ey. The music, all pieces with wildlife connections were played beautifully in wonderful surroundings, there is something special about music performed in churches that makes it far more intimate than concert hall performances.

9 comments:

  1. Gary, I thought your first paragraph highly amusing!! Well done BT, talk about 'shooting yourself in the foot'!

    I love Centaurea Montana but have never grown it! Why? I am not sure, it just never gets to my plant list - which consists of more unusual plants. This is the sort of plant you usually get given and I haven't seen it growing anywhere to beg a bit yet!

    Best wishes Sylvia

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  2. Of course I will probably be sacked now!

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  3. Your photos are fantastic! Really great blog, will keep up with it!

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  4. Thanks Emma, glad you like them.

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  5. The concert sounds fabulous, I love music in churches, Fi x

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  6. Gary, I'm jealous of skills with a camera - great pics

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  7. Thanks Martyn, but you should see all the ones that don't make the final edit!

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  8. These flower photos are getting better and better. Isn't this fantastic! You seem ahead of Dorset in flowers coming out.

    Lucy

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  9. Lucy, I seemed to have got my setup sorted for lighting etc now.

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Thank you for your comments.