Nature Notes

There have been things I was delighted  to see in the last few days. One was flame-flower, aka tropaleum speciosum, the small, scarlet relative of the nasturtium which tends to enliven old Scottish yew hedges and such: I had some, but when dear Tony thoroughly dug over the bit of bed it was in I assumed he had done for it. But it's a Scottish gardening maxim that once you've got the stuff you've got it for good, and lo, it has reappeared. I can't at all work out how it's attached to the ground but it's flowering like anything. Something which, by contrast is flowering for the first and probably last time is torch ginger. This is a relative of the culinary ginger, and lurks in the big pots in the greenhouse. For some years it has produced large and not particularly relevant leaves, but this year, we have had an unusual amount of sun which has been rewarded with wonderfully exotic pyramids of pale yellow flowers. Something I was much less pleased to see this evening, however, was a visiting bat in my study. I hadn't known there were any here, and given the draconian nature of bat protection legislation, I was not at all pleased. Also of course I wanted this particular bat to find its way to the great outdoors, which it did in a while. Miss Kit thought it was fascinating but I couldn't work up much enthusiasm myself.