liberation day for the cat

The black cat, having been allowed out yesterday afternoon, has rediscovered his taste for the outdoors, and nipped out past me this morning when I opened the doors to put the recycling out.  He consented to be taken back in again, but then took his own decision on whether he was fit to go outside by jumping out of the cloakroom window.  Fortunately he has stayed around the front garden so far, rather than disappearing off into the wood.  A friend told me the story of his daughter's cat, a British Blue, which broke its leg and had to have a thousand pounds worth of surgery followed by months of cage rest.  As soon as it was finally let out of the house it disappeared.

The white campanula is C. alliariifolia.  According to the RHS Encycopedia of Perennials, it hails from scrub and forest margins in Turkey and Central Asia.  The book says it is good for a wild garden.  Actually, most of our garden is fairly wild.

Grasshopper numbers are building up.  When I was at school we kept locusts in the biology lab, which I was never very keen on, partly due to disgust at their appearance and partly because I'd read about locust plagues in the American midwest in the pages of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Childhood prejudices die hard, and I don't like the grasshoppers as much as the spiders and beetles.  Still, they are a part of high summer and maybe not so common as they once were.  I was talking to somebody once about long grass, and mentioned the grasshoppers, and from her expression gathered that not everybody has them.

I'm still working on the front garden.  Another good plant for light soil and sun that's out now is Geranium 'Mavis Simpson', sometimes regarded as a named variety of G. x riversleainum.  It has soft pink flowers, and greyish foliage, and forms a sprawling, branching mat that keeps bearing new flowers at the ends of the branches, so has a long flowering season compared to the clump formers like G. phaeum, and a pleasant knack of weaving through other plants.  The encyclopedia warns that it is prone to winter losses, possibly due to fungal disease, but my plants seem to be lasting reasonably well.  The book also says it can be propagated by basal cuttings, and as I should like more plants and they are only intermittently available at work I ought to try that.

(The chicken pie last night wasn't bad.  The mushrooms could have done with frying for another minute before adding to the filling, and I think I was a little heavy handed with the mixed herbs, but the pastry was good.  It's a pity that the things I can cook well are mostly stuff like pastry, marmalade, and meringues, which are all bad for us).

Addendum  The young geraniums and violas in the back garden that were eaten to stumps by some pest have made new crops of leaves and seem fine about it.  I think that nature is clever, and that the caterpillar moves on to a new host before the fresh crop of leaves emerge, so plant gets a chance to recover.