The Lady, the Monkey and their love child?

The lady and the child are lying down because they are tired. And I would have to read the manual for the camera to rotate them 45 degrees. Just incline your head, like robins do.

The lady is wearing a big bonnet and full skirt, just like real ladies do.

See the following post for an explanation.

Journey to the north

Just to show that my close up photography has plenty of room to improve, here is my attempt at capturing digitally the famous monkey orchid of hereabouts.

It is really quite like a pink monkey, if you have a vivid imagination. There were loads of them, which is good as they are s'posed to be uncommon.

There were lady orchids too, and one that I thought was a military orchid (half-close your eyes and you see a soldier). However, blogger didn't want me to show these at present, so I will try again later. I read somewhere on the internet that possibly the "military" one is really a hybrid of the other two, the lady being the mummy, naturally.

Can you all see your ovaries? (Or the 28 steps).

I was tempted to look about the room with a stupid grin on my face when we were asked this question yesterday, but it simply wasn't the time or the place.

We were all serious students and, to be honest, botanical terms are rife with possible misinterpretations to such an extent that we would have spent the whole session smirking and nudging each other in the ribs to the exclusion of all else if we had succumbed to such schoolboy humour.

To let you into the secret, this was day one of my plant identification course. I had been looking forward to this since I booked last autumn. We are being taught how to use the big fat ID book: "The New Flora of the British Isles" by Clive Stace. The book is successor to Clapham and Tutin and Warburg, which I was scared by when I was a younger person than I am now. I think the trick to using this definitive key to the wild flowers of Britain is to have a very big botanical vocabulary, so I am busy expanding mine ready for the next lesson.

We have six three-hour lessons, one a month on Saturday mornings. There is a wide variety of students - surprisingly - I thought they would all be old ladies. Our homework is to practise "keying out" a plant and I had a go today on a pulmonaria, as I already knew what it was so I could check to see if I was going wrong.

Hey! Guess what! I actually got it right. I had to go through,I think, ooh at least 28 steps to arrive at Pulmonaria officinalis, and only needed to cheat a bit at the last couple of steps to name the sub-species. I've committed to memory, hopefully, some new botanical words including: glabrous, glaucous, pubescent, appressed, cyme, nutlet, included and exserted.

Botany books

(Two photos, with and without flash).

When I was primary school age I was very interested in wild flowers and knew lots of names and could recognise the common ones and I even kept a book of blank sheets onto which I stuck pressed specimens. Then I went off to my ladies' college (!) and got over it.

Hooray, the interest in botany has returned and I have got lots of reading to do. The Bill Bryson is there purely for alliteration and I doubt I'll have time for him. I started Francis Halle's In Praise of Plants and then took a detour into Botany for Gardeners by Brian Chapon when I couldn't quite believe that plants have two generations. I'm now a believer and back with Halle.

It is all very difficult and I have only got double integrated science o' level at grade C and D - so wish me luck. I am going on a course in the spring to improve my knowledge of all this and I shall tell you more when I can.