Garden Centres and their Shops

On Saturday Jo and I went to the nurseries on the top Chester road. We began at Burton nurseries which has a retail shopping mall in it. There is a brilliant rock, mineral and crystal shop there. We spent ages choosing a present for a friend, some stones for Jo, a Mother’s day present for Jo, and a bracelet for me. I thought I might be able to magnetise the bracelet (haemetite) as it is supposed to be good for pain relief. I’m not sure whether the one I bought is pure haemetite (which cannot be magnetised) or is actually ferrite (which most alleged haemetite jewellery is – and can be magnetised) but it looks OK and only cost £4.60 – less than a packet of pain killers!


If you have £3,000 to spare you can get this pair of amethyst geodes.


Then we went into Gordale and had a coffee and a cake before choosing lots of Dahlias and other late flowering corms and bulbs and getting some vegetable and sweet pea seeds.


After that we went to the pet shop in the water garden centre. We were after a very uninspiring cat litter scoop but they were too expensive. I’m sure the local pet shop will have one at half the price. I don’t mind spending money but I do object to wasting it. The pet shop did provide a brilliant number of marine fish and corals to be photographed and I spent ages doing so before we looked at tanks and I dreamed about the idea of owning an aquaria again.




Unfortunately many of the fish were not labelled but some I recognised or could identify from the Internet.


Gold Stripe Maroon Clownfish


Green-spotted Mandarin Goby


Copper-banded Butterfly Fish


Clown Anglerfish


Dogface Pufferfish

Thursday 17th April 2008

 

I had another go at photographing the fish today. Still not brilliant but a bit better than the previous attempts.



I have a lot of Grape Hyacinth scattered around the garden in little clumps but I tend to find they blend too easily into their surroundings. When they have finished flowering I think I shall move them all to a raised bed somewhere and mass them together. When I took a close look at this one to photograph it I found one of the little bells had a tiny beetle in it.



I cut up the last of the willow twigs today. The long green shoots have gone in the Council’s garden rubbish bin and the woodier twigs have gone for kindling for the fire. One of the twigs had a large clump of empty egg cases on it. Probably moth or sawfly eggs.


Plenty of flowers are now coming out as the month progresses and the Yellow Archangel has joined those in the wild flower section.