Wildflowers & windows

WELL WELL, the sun has visited us for a brief glimpse and so we grabbed the chance to hang out washing, walk a little and cut holes in the side of the truck!
Summer here is in full wild bloom. Everywhere there are yellow buttercupped fields, white cow-parsley'd waysides, and the tall gentle warm-whispering mauve grasses are hiding all manner of little flowers and scuttling things.
That orange flower down there on the left is growing by a curling stone that sits at our front door. Back in the days when the winters here were more wintry, the villagers would go up to the frozen reservoir and whizz these stones across the ice.

I have never seen so many buttercups in one place. Do you remember holding them under your chin as a child to see if your skin glowed yellow telling that you liked butter?
I've just weaseled out some other little superstitions surrounding buttercups ...

• The common name 'buttercup' was derived from the yellow color of the flower. It was also believed that the richness of butter's yellow color was the result of the number of buttercups in the pasture; however, this was only a myth since tall buttercup is so bitter that cattle avoid eating it.
  
  
• According to superstition, holding a tall buttercup flower against one's neck on the night of a full moon, or simply smelling the flower, causes insanity, hence the folk name 'crazyweed'.
  
  
• Flowers tend to track the daily movement of the sun in the sky.
  
  
• Beggars used to blister their skin purposefully with buttercup juice to arouse the sympathy of passersby.
  
  
• Fishermen of the 1800's poured buttercup tea on the ground to bring worms to the surface.

Tui took me on a wee short-sleeved walk around behind the village to where he'd been busying away on the latest and excitingest addition to our wheeled home: The Kitchen Window!


And now the starter motor is fixed, we can think about venturing out.
I'm still hard at work on my new secret creation ... all will be revealed soon.
Wishing you all a happy sunny buttercupped weekend.