Botanics

 Here are a few photos from Saturday. I didn't want to include sculptures, because I hope to be back to see the full exhibition, but I've added a couple of close-ups of the steampunk dragonfly, and one of someone resting mid-installation. There was the most horrendous squeaking and creaking sound, which turned out to be two people pulling this up the hill on a little trolley. 

It was actually quite interesting being there on a set-up day. I had seen one sculpture, and then when we went to the grass garden at the end, there was one very similar. In fact, it turned out to be the same one - when I asked, the artist said he had been asked to move it because it had a couple of spikes, so it was being relocated to a position where children would be less likely to hurt themselves. We met another couple installing "Butterfly Tree" at the foot of the herbaceous border - he was painstakingly rubbing gilding into the rim of a circle.

The flower beds were all full of bees and insects of all sorts. Not on this first one, which C said looked like an origami flower, and I take his point. I have some pink California poppies this year myself: I'd been disappointed that they were so much smaller than the traditional yellow ones, but then I saw that these ones were also much smaller. And not nearly as vivid a pink as in the seed catalogue. We have some good sunflowers ourselves this year - also attracting the bees. 

No photos because I was in the middle of cooking at the time, but on Sunday we took all the compost out of the compost bin so that we could dismantle it and put it together again - over the years it has started to come apart a bit at the corners. The birds like it like that, I quite often see blackbirds perched near it and reaching in for some insects on tap, as it were. The compost, as usual, was a lovely rich loam and absolutely full of worms. A robin thought it was Christmas, his birthday and every other holiday rolled into one and helped himself several times, a bit like an all-you-can-eat buffet. We now have the two more damaged sides turned to the two walls, and it looks almost as good as new again, and I have several containers of compost kept out to mulch the beds with.