Water features

I took a friend to RHS Harlow Carr Gardens this week to enjoy the spring flowers, before next week's forecast bad weather, which may well spoil them. They are doing a huge amount of redevelopment there and some of the newly landscaped and planted areas are beginning to fill up with foliage and colour, which is good to see. The pool and rockery near the entrance has heathers and some rather lovely grape hyacinths that were bigger than the usual variety and had interesting duo-tone pale blue and navy blue flower heads. 

The streamside has been cleaned up and replanted... and perhaps widened a little, I think. The gardens have suffered some flooding in recent winters so I think they've been trying to improve the drainage, all the time working out how best to accommodate the rapid climate change that is affecting our gardens and farms. 

I found some more information about the new bridge over the lake and my thought that it looked like a barcode, when I first saw it in the winter (HERE), is not far from the truth. It's actually a representation of the DNA strand found in the Arabidopsis thaliana or Thale Cress plant, the first plant to have its genome fully sequenced. 

Finally, NOT a water feature but I was amused at this squirrel, quite a young one by the looks of it. It obviously subscribed to the line of thought that goes 'if I stay quite still no-one can see me'... except that we could see it, clinging for dear life to a tree trunk. The adults always run round to the opposite side of the tree out of sight and then scamper up. This one was frozen to the spot. It was safer than it knew, sweet little critter.