A plant to remember by

Prunella grandiflora

I bought this plant at Cragside, a large house in Northumberland once the home of a famous engineer, Lord Armstrong.

We spent a while at Cragside on 17th August as we drove back south after a week in Fife with my daughters and their families.

Prunella grandiflora (Large Self-heal) likes moist conditions in partial shade and I've planted it next to our summerhouse where it will only receive late evening sunshine.

This one is a white-flowered cultivar and should be popular with bumblebees. I'm looking forward to seeing how well it grows.

It's good to collect plants from places I've been. The Self-heal will remind me of two visits to Cragside, one just recently and the first back in the mid 1980s.

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)

Duckweed collector

This rather odd photo uses flash at night to image duckweed on our indoor pond (an Affinity Pool).

Duckweed on our pond

The water fountains up through the grey pipe and shoots out into a thin, hemispherical sheet of  water.

Oddly, this water action seems to collect the duckweed inside the falling water. It's trapped there, it can't escape, but sometimes more duckweed gets sucked inside.

Duckweed normally floats on the water surface as a single layer. But with this collection action it soon becomes two, three or more layers deep inside the water envelope.

Duckweed is a flowering plant, surely one of the smallest possible such plants. It's not usually part of the life in our pond, but today I added some water lily plants to the mix and there was pondweed stuck to the lily roots.

Duckweed is another example of viriditas - see yesterday's post.

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)

Fish, flower, tree

It's our first day back from the holiday, and we did some jobs around the house and garden to catch up after our week away. So I took the photo at home too.

Goldfish, orchids and a weeping fig

In our conservatory we have a pond with goldfish in it, an orchid on the window ledge is in flower and we have a potted weeping fig standing on the floor.

It struck me that the grouping would make a good photo and two fish obliged by swimming into the field of view at just the right moment.

The orchid is a Phalaenopsis, a slow growing plant with rather dull leaves and large aerial roots that has amazing flowers a couple of times each year. Like most orchids it's easy to grow and the flowers last for many weeks.

The fish are common red goldfish. At least, they were sold as red goldfish but I think one is actually something else. It is larger, faster growing, and has changed from red when it was young to mostly silver now.

The weeping fig grows in warmer climates than ours, in places like the Canary Islands it forms medium size trees but in the UK it is an indoor pot plant. Ours is a silver variegated form, 'Starlight'.

It seems to me that these three juxtaposed in the photo have an oriental feel to them. The picture makes me think of Japan or China or Thailand.

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)

Organic growth

I've been battling the weeds in my garden. For a variety of reasons I fell way behind with this work and now I'm paying the price!

Weeds in my garden

The weeds in my garden are a wonderful example of organic growth, similar to the kind of growth I'd like to see for the church.

For a start it is spontaneous. I left this plot tidy at the end of the autumn, in March there were a few weeds, but now look at it!

In the cleared area at the front you can see a courgette plant that I just put in today. And in the background a massive array of weeds of all sorts. All I had to do to produce this massive growth of weeds was - nothing!

They all grew from tiny, insignificant seeds. Little specks of life wrapped up in hard shells, just waiting for warmth and rain and sunlight. When the conditions were right the seeds sprang into life and voila - weeds.

Not only that, each type of seed produced its own kind of weed. So if I want to see the church grow, I'm going to need an insignificant-looking seed of the right kind. Then I need to place it in the right place at the right time and it will grow, just like that. But it had better be the right seed, the right time and the right place.

What does this say to you about planting churches?

How will I know the right time and place?

Where will I find the right kind of seed?

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)