Loafing

If Young Steve down in London can plonk flower pictures at the top of his blogposts then so can I. The blooms shown above are American prairie flowers. I believe that this one belongs to the silphium family. The picture was taken this very morning as I was strolling through Sheffield Botanical Gardens.

It's a lovely nineteen acre city park, containing plants and trees from all over the world. It enjoys the practical support of a squadron of local volunteers and is a popular green oasis for dozens of skittish American grey squirrels.

Opened in the 1830s, our Botanical Gardens once housed a menagerie. The park also had a bearpit but living bears are no longer displayed there. Instead, there's just a rusty mild steel bear called Robert, created by David Mayne and installed in 2005 in memory of the poor creatures that were once chained there. In spite of facial similarities there is absolutely no connection between our Robert The Bear and Robert Slatten or Robert Brague - two notorious US bloggers from South Carolina and Georgia respectively. Though they both like to hibernate in winter, neither of them are actual bears.

Below, The Botanical Gardens feature these fine Victorian glasshouses designed by Benjamin Broomhead Taylor...

The pesky squirrels are hard to photograph as they spring about but I tried to capture a few images of them today, including this one...

On the way home to start preparing tonight's beef stew, I decided to take a short detour via Wiseton Road. There, the former Methodist chapel was renamed Wiseton Court about fifty years ago after it had been remodelled to create several one bedroom apartments. Before our marriage, Shirley and I rented Flat One for eighteen months. It was our first home together and they were very happy days - loving and being loved. In the course of a lifetime, that kind of magic does not happen for everyone.