Water-lilies

The weather is meant to be cooling down - so hopefully I can get back to editing Greek photos (and selecting ones to print!).
In the meant time, I did say the water-lilies in the Botanic Gardens were quite lovely - here are a few.
I love the names for water lilies, too - nénuphar in French, Nymphaeaceae as the Latin family name, which makes me think of naiads and dryads.

Summer days...

It's still hot and sunny here.
We made time for a quick visit to the Botanic Gardens this morning because there was a patchwork exhibition on which I didn't want to miss. Of course while we were there we had to fit in a short walk around the gardens - along the borders where they plant annuals, down the herbaceous border, around the ponds and back. Plenty of waterlilies in the ponds - photos to follow. I'm not sure that we've ever seen them looking so beautiful before.

This was in a wildflower border:

And the mating dragonflies were down among the waterlilies.

June Cards

Phew - this weather has been fabulous but way too hot to spend much time in my attic, where the temperature has been mostly over 28C.
So not much more photo-editing has been achieved, unfortunately.
Instead, I'm picking out my favourite June cards. Lean pickings, as it was such a busy month between one thing and another.

I've been trying to photograph graffiti around town for an older SCS photo challenge, and this first photo is one I spotted today. I saw the second one a couple of weeks ago - one of the days when my camera was in being cleaned, and I just had C's little pocket camera. But since it was an area of town I don't often walk through, I was glad to have it when I saw the wolf.

I've seen baby robins in the hedge! Have to wait for them to emerge before I can get any photos, though.

Creeping, Crawling

We saw lots of wildlife in Corfu. Yikes, it's now July, and I'm still posting for May! I suppose it's another advantage of going a little earlier in the year before it gets too hot and dry. C was delighted because we saw several live snakes, as opposed to all the dead ones we saw on a previous visit. I couldn't see what the big deal was with the snakes - the tortoises and lizards were far more interesting to me. It was just a shame that when we saw a tortoise making very rapid progress along the road, my memory card was so full that I couldn't take any video footage. We saw at least three different types of lizard - one was in a dark shaded area and the one photo I was able to grab didn't turn out. The little green one was near Sidari, and we saw dozens of them basking in the sun, not paying the slightest attention to all the tourists walking around them. The other one was in the grounds of the little monastery at the top of Mount Pantokrator - the highest mountain on the island (this is a relative term, it's only 906m / 2,972 ft high).

A bird in the bush...

...tree.
I think all my grey wagtail photos so far have been either on the walls along the Liffey or down on the mud flats at low tide.
So it was a rare treat to catch a couple of shots of one perched in a tree this morning.

Last July shows very thin pickings to choose a header photo from. I nearly had to skip back a year to 2011 to find anything, but I found this photo of a young mallard sitting on the canal bank.