Tag: field mouse

“Where’s Mouse?”

While watching for an opportunity to photograph the field mouse yesterday, Jackie made a few more pictures.

Seated beneath the wisteria she could see the Dragon Bed with its pelargoniums, geraniums, foxglove, and ivy; her favourite garden view; a baby blackbird, not yet having acquired fear; and a greenfinch screeching from the Weeping Birch.

She did produce another image of the mouse, the leaf on which it stands providing scale. “Where’s Mouse?”. Enlargement and the clue that appears on the gallery should aid location.

Today we were able to take it easy because the temperature had dropped by a good 10 degrees and intermittent light rain fell throughout the day.

I finished reading a posthumously published collection of stories by Virginia Wolf bearing the title “A Haunted House” (1944). My Penguin Modern Classics edition of 1973 bears a foreword by Leonard Woolf explaining that his wife had not made final revisions to some of the tales included in the slender volume.

The works offer snippets of her imaginative creative genius; her splendid descriptive skill; her flowing language lacking superfluity; and, perhaps surprisingly, her love of life. She is insightful of people and a loving observer of nature. She enjoys playing with words and their use. There is a richness of simile and metaphor. Some of the stories demand a little work from the reader and often ultimately leave us thinking.

This evening, as is customary, we dined on a second sitting of Hordle Chinese Take Away’s excellent fare. Jackie drank Becks and I drank more of the Carles.

The Prime Suspect

Jackie spent much of the morning watering the garden and tying up roses. After lunch I joined her and dead-headed roses and Welsh poppies while she continued.

When the heat drove us in for a rest, the Head Gardener watched Gardeners’ World and I scanned another 21 pages from

H.E. Bates’s “Down The River” illustrated by Agnes Miller Parker.

Later I took a few photographs and joined in a another watering session.

Here are a few images from upstairs, featuring the blooms of the Cordyline Australis; the eucalyptus; the yellow Bottle Brush plant; and the red Chilean lantern tree receiving attention from Jackie.

Even this last mentioned small tree was wilting in the heat. The two-toned pink peony can be glimpsed just above left of centre in the first image.

For several days now Jackie has discovered pure white eggs, of a size too large to have been laid by our garden birds, either secreted among the flowers beds or lying on the lawn. Yesterday evening she noticed one on the grass bearing a small hole through which she discerned yellow yolk and clear viscous albumen. She left it intact.

This morning this is what it looked like. Our neighbours on the corner beside the pub keep ducks. Clearly someone is nicking their eggs, depositing them in our garden, and enjoying a meal later. To our mind the prime suspect must be a fox, but we haven’t seen one. Maybe Russell Crow.

Certainly not this tiny mouse that Jackie watched feeding on borage seeds.

Mr Chan at Hordle Chinese Take Away opened up again today. That fare, is therefore what we ate for dinner. Jackie drank Hoegaarden and drank more of the Carles.