Strangers In The Night

I was having a problem getting my wee cat to come in tonight and I was puzzled as to what was keeping her attention, when I suddenly noticed a hedgehog standing in the middle of the food dish finishing off what was left of the cat's food.
As soon as the hedgehog got wind of me it skuttled off across the grass with the wee cat following carefully behind it.
I've got two cats. They are both feral but the wee one is tame and usually comes in at night while her sister preferes to bunk up in the greenhouse.
Both cats have taken up watch on top of the coal bunkers for the night, presumably to catch sight of the strange intruder.
It's been quite a few years since we had hedgehogs in the garden and if I didn't have to get up early tomorrow I'd have sat quietly on the coal bunker myself for a while to see if there was more than one.

Camellia

Years ago my old pal Ian told me to put all my used tea bags round the root of the Camellia to encourage the flowers. I didn't know it then, but apparently, according to my brother, the Camellia is related to the tea plant. This isn't a particularly good photo but it was very windy today. The wall is great though. The wisteria grew next to the Camellia but now there is just a bare patch of wall and it wouldn't be so bad if the patch of wall was as nice as this bit but some years ago my dad let the neighbours build a garage not withstanding the fact that it involved knocking down half of this beautiful hundred year old wall.
Anyway the tea bags seem to work and it's lovely to see this splash of colour at a time when most of the garden is still bare.
The magnolia is just in bud. I'm told it's a bit late but then that might be a good thing since there's not too much danger of a frost now.

Wisteria

Not last Summer but the summer before, a friend and I were sitting in the garden enjoying a blether when she suddenly said, "What's happened to the Wisteria? I turned around to realize there was a gap in the wall where the Wisteria should have been.
When I went to investiagte, there was the dead stump in the ground. My Mother had cut it down.
Something happened inside me that I don't know how to describe.
The Wisteria had meant so much to my mother. She had planted it and tended to it and waited patiently for over seven years for it to flower. It was her pride and joy and I knew that she would never have cut it down if she had had any idea of what she was doing. For years I'd come to accept my mothers radical pruning efforts as an attempt to maintain control of a large garden that she felt was out of control. I'd focused most of my efforts on protecting the magnolia tree and on pruning it back before she would have any reason to feel overwhelmed by it.
When I asked her if she had any idea what might have happened to the wisteria she didn't seem to have any rememberance of it or any notion of what a wisteria even looked like.

Here We Are Again!

All in all it was a fairly quiet winter here in Kirkinch. We had the usual bust pipes, blocked drains and a bit of snow but nothing out of the ordinary. The phone was out of order for nearly three weeks and that forced me to get a mobile. I haven't had one since the early days of mobile technology when they were the size of a small handbag. I hated them then and I was determined never to get one but I've succumbed like everyone else and now I can text like a young thing.

The high light of this winter was as you can see a vist from the Tayside Fire Brigade. I'd just come home from a busy day out and put a match to the fire I'd already set in the morning. When I went to put the car away it occured to me that there was a hell of a lot of smoke coming out of the chimney and when I went in to look up the lum, sure enough it was blazing like a furnace. The Fire Brigade were here in minutes and not only did they put the fire out, they swept up the hearth and left everything spotless.