The Mediterranean garden at Kew

The gardens are beautiful, SatG! I shudder to think how much work goes into them.
lol @ Flopsy .. just a bit different.

Here is the lake we were sat next to the other day. It's very remote and pristine and there is no-one else around for 50kms to spoil the peace.

I agree - the gardens are beautiful!

We saw this beauty around the sunflower garden:

Another lucky escape from the marauding hens!
This smaller-flowered cymbidium orchid has the cultivar name "Cindy Lou".

I agree - the gardens are beautiful!

Well I would , except thats where my first husband proposed! Ah well. It is still lovely, the Med Garden, I agree.

I am having a garden clearance done for me, half this week and half next week. In all my years I have never seen anyone work so hard and so fast. He will take away all the rubbish for me, then mow the lawn and cut the edges of the lawn.

Can you export him to the States?

Send him to me when you've finished with him will you please

Maybe ertrum and I can get a two-for-1 deal since we are practically neighbors

You can't have too many views of the South Downs



In Hampstead Garden Suburb the gardens are part of the planned design, plus many residents can either afford regular gardeners or spend half the time doing it themselves. Kew has always been the worldwide leader in gardens, plus the entry fees were hiked from pennies to pounds so now have virtually unlimited funds as the tourists will never stop visiting whatever they charge. It's a shame they had to do it that way as anyone local could go whenever they liked when it was a shilling, and now it's a rare pleasure.

I remember when it was a few old pence David.My first husband was a cheapskate, maybe that's why he proposed there.!

Changing of the Guard

This is a...

Has anyone else been experiencing problems with Photobucket over the last day or two? I can't access any of my albums apart from the default one. The varioUs parts of the page are appearing in the wrong places as well. I know it's not my computer as it's exactly the same on my laptop. Is it a coincidence that Facebook is all over the place as well I wonder?

edited to add:
I can get it to work if I use Firefox but it's very slow. Something somewhere isn't right!

No problem accessing it in either IE or Firefox...........

[whispers] Here we have a pair of the notorious Mountain Bikes in their natural habitat. Be very quiet... we don't want to disturb them or they may jump...

"Snowflake" enjoys a vigorous dustbath.

Lol, nice shot.

Martin, I saw something earlier today about Facebook changing their layout and no-one knowing where anything was on the new format, but nothing about Photobucket. I thought it was very slow yesterday, but havn't had access problems at all.

There was a power cut in the northwest USA/Canada the other day, lots of webservers went down. It might have something to do with that, or they're just load-balancing their servers and moving things around. I've had no problems but it's just luck which server bank your images are on. Try emptying your cache, then closing the browser and rebooting. That would clear any residual problems on your machine - sometimes trying to access something when it's down causes the "go away" blank screen to stick in your cache. Worth trying anyway.

Christina love the meerkats

Flopsy - Wow that is a beautiful portrait of the Llama.

From one Llama to another, this one is taken in Llama land in Machu Picchu a few years back.

Thanks for the advice Flopsy. It hasn't made any difference and, as I get the same problem on 2 separate computers, I'm convinced that it's something at Photobucket's end. I'll just have to use Firefox for it in future which isn't a problem. (I did get a message about some changes which I had to agree to before I could use it so maybe things have been altered? These things are sent to try us.)
Now, as for Facebook.....

I remember when Kew was about sixpence as well actually, but was still only about 5p (as it had become by then) when I first started going without my parents. Somehow they managed a pretty good show even then, so can't see how they've felt obliged to alienate the local regulars.

Having covered all the scenic and collectible material for miles around with the digital camera I was running short of ideas until the simple project of trying to just get a record of as many places as possible appeared. It now means I include everything I'd never have dared to take before, but do find wherever has memories and meaning for people counts regardless of my opinion of it. This is the A10 in Enfield, the main route to Cambridge.

Does a pile of sticks make a good photograph? Maybe not but it took a lot of effort to create this particular pile of sticks. I had to chop them off some rather tall Laurel bushes to start with. Then cut all the side stems off them and generally cut the branches up small enough to think about taking them to the Recycling Centre. I thought the effort at least worth a photograph.

The observant might pick out the one and only bit of wood that isn't Laurel. It's a small Oak branch. Don't know how that crept in there.

Very effective, Tellies!
Lovely Llama shots

Here's Jess in the rear view mirror