I have little doubt that folk around the world will be chewing their fingers in eagerness to know how our amazing rhubarby thing is getting on!

The answer is, I reckon, . . . quite well!

. . . given that the earlier photograph was taken a mere twenty-one days ago! I suddenly realized that there is no clue about scale in this shot so it could be ‘read’ as being a few inches wide. I therefore ran out with a measuring stick and found that the thing is about 1.5m wide as of Sunday evening! This is, of course, only the beginning. It will become dramatically wider and then the flowers will start. Much taller than me these get. Never fear, I may be persuaded to record further progress!

On a gentler note . . . in fact quite extraordinarily gentle, it seems to me . . . the exquisite Fritillary is still alone in the garden but has delightfully emerged as twins.

Just a couple more shots of corners of the domain.

I must admit that this exquisite view of the stream that flows through our place is just a bit misleading, in that it is rather ‘exquisitely’ composed to imply that is chuckles and meanders its way like this for yards if not miles and again the scale is deceptive. Having admitted to this I feel wonderfully blessed to have it running as it does through our garden and it DOES chuckle ecstatically!

Finally, an oriental corner . . . with that tree I photographed last year in extravagant blossom again.

In this little pond, there have been, for a number of years, two increasingly splendid goldfish. This winter we really thought they had been taken away by the heron, the stoat or whatever (a fate that befell their 10 little chums in the early years), but, BEHOLD, we have seen them both gliding about pretending to be very grand koi!