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Cathy Winsor

26th May

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I broke my wrist last week, which doesn’t mean I can no longer use a keyboard, but it is the cause of a certain malaise, when I do sit down and use it I tend to waste time surfing the internet for things like 'when will my wrist be back to normal' instead of working on my Ema. It’s only a hairline fracture but I think I must have torn ligaments or whatever holds a wrist together as it is still painful. It happened when I was refurbishing the Black Knight, our scrap metal sculpture. I was perched on a ladder lowering the 4m spear into its holder when it tipped sideways and I tried to hold on which was a mistake. So the past week has been devoted to learning how to do things with one arm, everything is possible, it just takes longer. TOH thought a mountain walk would be a good thing to give my wrist a rest and found a route with not too much ascent where there was no scrambling or steep bits to fall down. The wild flowers are all appearing and progress was slow as we stopped to take photos of any we hadn't yet recorded. The warm weather means dozens of new species are pushing their way through the soil now the snow has melted. The swathes of colour from the blue gentians, daffodils etc are stunning. I am trying to assemble a file of wild flowers with their French common names as well as the English and Latin ones. The French and English common names are totally unrelated, for example 'stinking hellebore' becomes 'le pied de griffon', I suppose in a way the different imagery used for the  is related the art section of Y180, but it won’t help me write 1000 words on Rego’s ‘Policeman’s daughter’.

The garden is looking its best, all the roses are flowering, the new trees coming into leaf and most exciting the flowering annuals for the wedding, (with the exception of the delphiniums which the cats seem to enjoy rolling on) are growing well, though having chosen a random planting scheme I am not entirely sure which are weeds and which are flowers. Sadly the excessive rainfall of last week means all the ripening cherries have burst, though they still taste delicious.

Our neighbours are having an Open Garden weekend, along with a craft market. I’ve been helping with the publicity so I hope they get a good turnout. I’ll go up with my unused vegetable seedlings and put them on someone’s stall, better than assigning them to the compost heap. My vegetable plot is now full, or will be when I get the chilli and aubergine plants in. It’s just as well I have a washable Velcro splint on my wrist, after a day’s gardening I need to wash it to remove the bits of compost.

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