Snowdrops

First of all a few words about a very stressful day yesterday. It was a beautiful, but misty day as you can see underneath. I lost Rueben during our dog walk in the afternoon, as all of a sudden someone in the field next to where we were walking shot a gun. Way too close! I won't give you my opinion of this sort of behaviour but it would include several expletives and ****!!!!

I jumped but Rueben ran, straight into the forest. I waited and called but no sign of him. I went home to take Troi back and get John to help me hunt him down. The less said about our search the better but if you ever contemplate walking into an evergreen forest, thickly planted, still covered in snow and without paths, my advice is: DON'T!!! I nearly killed myself in the process. No joke this, what I did was with hindsight truely dangerous and I did not even have my mobile with me!! That's adrenaline rush for you, and I'm still suffering the after effects today.

Eventually John went back home and found Rueben cowering in the chicken run. We have no clue how he managed to get in there but he must have jumped several fences in the process. He has fully recovered but the same cannot be said for us. Today I'm still shivering with shock and in order to calm me down, John took me off to visit the snowdrops in an open garden nearly, called Drumelzier Place.

Despite the fact that this garden, like ours, was under feet of snow during much of the winter, their snowdrops were jaw-dropping. There were just so many of them, like a white carpet under the huge trees. So beautiful together

but also as individual clumps. We bought 12 clumps to plant in our garden.

The other beautiful aspect of this garden is that the river Tweed flows right alongside it. The Tweed is a stunning river (great for salmon fishing if you're into that kind of thing, I'm not!), set amidst gorgeous countryside in the Scottish Borders.

You can see why to me February is a brown month

but you can also see how the promise of spring beauty is already visible!

Before we went home I just had to take one final picture ( as seen at the top of this blogpost) and I think I was the best one of the day.