Sun 14/05/17

Yesterday afternoon I spotted a strange thing in the flowerbed at home; it looked like a scaly horn protruding from the soil. I didn’t have time to look at it properly, but today it became manifest as a tall, thin mushroom or toadstool, with the cap well over an inch from the ground. What I had seen yesterday was the cap resting just on the level of the soil, so in the last – what – 12 hours? It has grown an inch and a quarter. That is a pretty spectacular rate of growth.

And lastly we have the lily beetle – only a centimetre long and one of the UKs most gorgeous red beetles. Unfortunately their repellent little grubs cover themselves with their own excrement for protection and munch away at your prized lily collection. The fact that they morph into one of the garden’s most spectacular denizens is no excuse. On finding one, the correct course of action is to gasp in awe, take a decent number of photos, give glory to the creator in the firmament above for His great and wondrous works, then tread on it.