I assume the visual pun is deliberate. Is that Minnie Mouse, or her male counterpart? I think Minnie. Either way, the first mouse to appear on here in 12+ years…. kinda. Taken through the window of one or other of Hebden Bridge’s innumerable cafés, I forget which one this is exactly. Perhaps it would have been nice to have not had the reflections, but it is what it is.
The efforts of all those highly transient squash (or possibly pumpkin) flowers earlier in the year have resulted in precisely one pumpkin (or possibly squash) growing in house or garden. And here it is. Whether it will be big enough to carve faces in come the end of this fresh month — we will just have to wait and see…
This is a follow-up shot to last Monday’s shot. As we have more flowers on the squash/pumpkin/potential producer of large orange fruit, but a lack of insects buzzing around inside our house in the brief hours of flowering, we’ve been doing our own pollination, with cotton buds. It’s a good thing my hay fever has gone down over the years — though the weather was so revolting today that I doubt there was any of this stuff doing the rounds outside. If you don’t believe a whole country’s weather can turn from Mediterranean to Arctic in three days, you’ve never been here in June.
This squash plant is growing on the window sill of our room. Now I’m no expert on botany, and it is true that one rarely gets the chance to observe flowers in such controlled conditions. But I have never seen a plant that blooms in such an ephemeral way. This flower had not opened at all last night: here is what it looked like at 8.30am. But it was already withering. By 11am it was visibly drooping and by not later than 4pm it had shrivelled away to the state of the one visible behind it — which had done all this two days ago.
I hope it got what it wanted out of its few hours of glory, anyway. You have to hope that evolution still knows how to build things that are fit for purpose.
Being 42 