March Favourites...

 March felt like a long month, and although the longer evenings are certainly an uplift, I only have a couple of cards that I really like enough to post here...My favourite is definitely the Tyvek one with the feathers, but the next one was a fun one to make. The theme was tickets, and I keep turning up train tickets from our second-last visit to Monet's garden in Giverny, so I decided to use one of those. Which turned into using both of them as I didn't consider that they were on thermal paper and would react when I tried some heat embossing. Just as well I had two...

Oswald has flown in to his new roost, so I can share him. Luckily I got the back of the cushion cover finished the day before I sprained my thumb - I haven't done any knitting since then, but hope to get back to it next week. With the weather suddenly turning cold again the latter half of this week, I've been glad of my toasty socks - it's an alpaca mix wool, and with the Aran stitch patterns, they are very cosy. 

Botanic Gardens

 We've had an amazing run of weather the last ten days or so - due to end this week. On the Saturday if the St. Patrick's Day long weekend we went up along the coast, but I have no pictures from that. I do have some from our trip to the Botanic Gardens yesterday - and if you have the appetite for more, the full gallery (approx 70 photos)  is HERE. 

Brief highlights follow. Unedited, due to lack of time.  Plenty of  Spring bulbs...the magnolia patch was fenced off so we weren't able to go into it, the one photo here is from the walled kitchen garden. It looks as if they had cut down several of the established magnolias and planted some new ones.

For the first time since Covid, we were able to go into the glasshouses - and I'd forgotten how quickly glasses  and camera lenses steam up! The strelitzia are in the glasshouse for South Africa and Australia. I liked the dead ones, which made me think of the vultures in The Jungle Book. 

This one was right up at the top of the Palm House - and reminded me of an elaborate fascinator

Enjoying the sun - and I had to look twice to be sure it wasn't another bronze sculpture like the one in the other lily pond. 

This was an intriguing narcissus, with alternate layers of coloured and white petals

And this one made us both think of one of those classic origami flower folds. 

Spring is Springing

 We finally had some bright sunshine weather, so I fitted a trip to Farmleigh in on Thursday morning. Unfortunately the walled gardens were just being closed for maintenance when I got there - if I'd known that I might have waited till today which was also a bright sunny day. But that's life.

My eye was caught straight away by a duck that didn't look like a mallard - and which did indeed turn out to be a shoveler. I have a feeling I might have seen them in the Zoo, which is also in the park, and we have definitely seen them in the bird reserve down in Newcastle, but it was the first time I'd seen one here. I think there was a female with it too - they are very similar in colouring to female mallards, so while I was there I just thought it was a mallard, but when I zoomed in on a couple of photos, I could see that it also had the distinctive long bill.

I also got lucky and was able to grab a few photos of a little wren.

Then we have some backlit magnolia buds and a couple of flowers, and a still life someone had created on one of the picnic tables, along with a glimpse into the walled garden through one of the gates.