Butterflies still up and running, all very big & exotic. Some of them see-through, in the sense that large chunks of their wings were clear see-through. Some of them the subject of the attention of serious cameras, not capable of making telephone calls - or put another way the attention of a visiting camera club. Mainly older people, both men and women.
Outside there was a chap sporting a Duffel coat, the same colour if not the same brand as the one I was wearing. We were able to indulge in a little Duffel coat chat before his wife turned up to (cheerfully) stop what she called our boasting about our coats. He seemed English enough but I don't think she was native.
There were a lot of rather smelly bushes about the place, about a cubic metre in size. It seemed rather wasteful to be generating all this expensive (and not very pleasant) smell at a time when there were no insects about, or at least very few. Evolution had got it wrong for once - or perhaps they were growing in the wrong climate. According to the shop appropriately named 'sarcococca confusa'. And according to wikipedia a Chinese member of the box family. The fact that there were a lot of them is probably mixed up with the fact that the plant was once awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's award for Distinguished Garden Merit (the DGM).
Also lots of daffodils, hellebores, cyclamen and crocuses. Some camelias. Also some large yellow witch hazels. Large enough to see the point of the things - with those in our garden being a bit puny. Either they grow slow or they don't like our clay.
And lots of outdoor sculpture, brightly painted sheet metal stuff modelling various insects, present to amuse the children who had come to see the butterflies. Hopefully it will soon be taken down. As well as finding it irritating, I guess that it was very expensive. Hundreds of pounds a pop.
The upper alpine house in good form, with lots of interest. Lower alpine house relatively dormant. But we failed to find any purple gentians, which had cropped up being grazed by goats in something BH had been reading. Possibly to do with the fact that they flower in the summer rather than the winter.
One semi-tweet in the form of a rather sick looking - obese - chaffinch and his wife. Semi on account of the obesity; you only get a full tweet for a healthy bird. There was also something very wrong about one of his feet.
PS 1: The sarcococca confusa was also an example of BH remembering things better than I. She still claimed to know the name this morning, while I would not have had a clue without looking at the picture. Claimed in the sense that knowledge was claimed but not tested - with my thinking here that when younger I often used to claim such knowledge when possibly, or even probably, I should not have. Hard to know without testing, a bit awkward in the context of a normal conversation.
PS 2: sculpture the work of Alison Catchlove, whose web site suggests that the stuff is more affordable than I had thought. See reference 2.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/butterflies-1.html.
Reference 2: http://www.alisoncatchlove.co.uk/.
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