Plant identification

The mystery plant that I rescued in a half-dead condition from the street appears to be parsley after all, now that it has a bit more moisture to scent its leaves. I have repotted it together with my 'official' parsley (clearly a different variety), which proved to have remarkably little root compared to the much smaller but healthier tap-roots on the new plants( Read more... )

The second mystery tree seedling which was *not* the bonsai birch (my goodness, that has grown a lot since last year -- not a good thing, for bonsai!), and which I thought might possibly be dogwood because of its coloured juvenile shoots, is starting to look as if it might be a young plum tree. As always, I really cannot imagine how something the size of a plum stone, even from a wild plum which are only a couple of inches long, could *possibly* have found its way into a flower pot and germinated without my seeing it...!

And it also looks as if, only a few days after the first chilli flowers, we actually have the first tiny green chilli nub! The 'smaller' plant has now considerably outsized the original, possibly due to getting better compost in the repotting, and has more flowers on it...

The first blue Swan River daisies of the year appear to have come into flower -- in the wildflower trough, as a couple of scraggy little self-sown plants the existence of which I hadn't even suspected.

Onegin (1999)

This film was intensely frustrating because it was so nearly so very, very good... and then it has a massive black hole in the middle of it where a major character ought to be, in the shape of Liv Tyler. She looks exactly the same as she does in "The Lord of the Rings" and is just as wooden and out of place as Tatiana as she is as Arwen; ( Read more... )

There is nothing at all surprising in the fact that Onegin turns her down, although little of what we have seen of him so far leads us to expect him to do it so gently; what is incomprehensible is why he is suddenly declaring a mad passion for her after he meets her again at his cousin's ball six years later -- particularly given that recognising her face must surely bring back memories of those same painful events that he fled Russia to forget.

Because Fiennes himself is purely brilliant in his scenes with just about everyone else, from the Petersburg roués at the start of the film to his loyal valet and his uncle's rustics, to Tatiana and Olga's mother, and most vitally with Toby Stephens' enthusiastic, Schubert-loving Lensky. ( Read more... )