Meadow Flowers and Serendipity

Lovely documentary about wild flowers and meadows called Bees, Butterflies and Blooms from Sarah Raven on BBC 2 last night. I tuned into it by chance but it was just the tonic for a cold, damp, wintry evening, ahead the snow outside at the moment. There were lots of shots of gorgeous meadow flowers and various good-hearted people campaigning to see a return to more environmentally friendly growing methods, so fields and commons end up looking more like this

It was day of co-incidences,  actually.  Earlier in the week, foolishly perhaps, I started clearing out my bookshelves and, aside from ending up with more books on the floor that in the shelf, I rediscovered a review copy of Sarah’s latest book about native flowers called, simply, Wild Flowers. It is a magnificent labour of love, with superb images and – this is not meant to be demeaning – makes for rather good bedtime reading  if you don’t mind a couple of hundred pages in hardback resting on your knees. There is something about the calm order of reference books such as this, as well as Larousse Gastonomique, various dictionaries for editing purposes and, heavens, OS maps,  that sends me off to sleep very happily indeed.

In a continuation of the serendipity/zeitgeist/talk-of-the-town theme, at work earlier today, soon after chatting about Nina Campbell and the eye-catching designs from St Jude’s (and particularly Angie Lewin), press releases from both their publicity operations plopped into my mailbox.  Prefer not to think about it too much.

[Top image taken from a tent during a wonderful camping weekend at Botelet Farm, in Cornwall; middle on my walk to work one day (typically, I was late); and bottom in the fields around Darwin's home, Down House, in Kent.]