It must be summer

 

Woman with Macro

I have no idea why my no-longer-new-but-maintaining-enigma-status-nicely camera has suddenly started granting me macro focus.  I knew macro had to be in there somewhere, but I have FAILED to find it in any sensible, oh, it's that little icon on this menu but WHY???, way, and then suddenly I prodded the right/wrong button one day while I was playing juggle-me-quick and it's now in macro mode.   Which means distance focus is presently disabled.  SIIIIIGH.  I really am going to have to do something drastic like stick the instruction CD in the slot, open it–eeek–and maybe nibble a little bit around its edges.  Maybe the easy introductory paragraphs, like how they haven't given you a wrist strap despite the fact that you need three hands to press the right sequence of buttons (when you know what they are) and this is when you're holding it in your teeth as your only strapless option–and are standing on hellhound leads which is really not a good idea.   Bronwen and I were discussing Learning to Use Your New Camera yesterday and the so-amusing little weirdnesses that you don't find out till it's too late.   This is a much better and option-mega-loaded camera than my previous little one . . .  but there are problems with cramming all the bells and whistles on something about the size of a deck of playing cards and keeping a grip on the thing while you try to access any of them is a BIG ONE.

Anyway.  While the macro is on the front line I thought I'd use it.  That's Louis IV, a known poor doer and prone to sudden death, who was one of my dumber ideas six years ago when I was (as I thought) cutting down from 500-plus roses to maybe twenty, having not yet plumbed my potential for ruthless use of garden space, or realised that a Third House was in my future.  But Louis has been burbling happily along in a now rapidly-disintegrating pot in what should be a less than salubrious position for a frail heroine, and produces about a dozen amazing daaaaark red roses every season.  And she smells divine.  You get a gust of it as you clamber up those frelling steps.  

I really must put her in a new pot this year.  I said that last year.

Lovely Louis

This is the stair by the side of the house, and that's Louis on the right in the disintegrating pot, and Nelly Moser on the wall on the left.

These stairs are not my favourite thing about the cottage. I used to think that pitons for everyday use were a silly affectation.

I did promise you pictures of Nelly Moser, the original lurid, over the top clematis.   The sad thing is that she may be original, but she isn't lurid, at least not on my wall.  She's growing in a pot (Robin's Cottage:  Where Everything Is in a Pot) and she's vigorous enough but I may not be feeding her her necessary Luridity Supplement.  Also, the catalogues are full of lurid clematises now and it takes more to shock the punters these days.

But I'm still very fond of her.  Fond enough to put up with the fact that she's a Group Two which means that you have to prune her but that you will do it wrong.   Those are pretty much the rules for pruning Group Two clematises:  Prune.  Be wrong.*

Nelly, you hot pink-purple striper you

Macro is good. Macro is fun.

* * *

* Oisin was on the phone while I was there this afternoon^ so while he was making arrangements to torture . . . I mean, to assist and support some aspiring student on his/her zealous way to musical something or other, I was reading a gardening article lying on his piano.^^  This hotshot gardener and garden designer who shall remain nameless was going on about this or that fabulous plant that only grows in southwestern Gili Motang and is dependent on being peed on by komodo dragons to thrive but we all want it in our gardens, and then let slip that he is clueless about the whole group thing with clematis.  I think he was trying for the common touch but all that happened with this reader is that I added his name to the long list of fancy professional Chelsea-attending gardeners I will not spend a squillion pounds on when I hire someone to tell me what the frell to do about Third House's plastic waterfall.  Gorblimey.  I hadn't realised there was a waterfall till I hired that bloke to rescue the pond last year and, lo, there was a waterfall waiting for someone to turn the pump on.  Ewww.  It came out of the same box as the duckie and chickie kitchen tiles of unlamented memory that some of you may remember.  A year later I'm still staring at it in incredulity.  I mean, I could get an electrician to sort out the motor–maybe–but I think it would look just as stupid with water running over it as it does without.

^ Note that he is now saying next week for a guest blog.  GAAAAH.

^^ It was that or reading some scholarly impenetrability+ about Glenn Gould and I am . . . so not a fan.  Of Glenn Gould or the Scholarly Impenetrability school of writing.

+ Well . . . I could have got my knitting out.  But I have this suspicion that Oisin would make my life hell if I did.