Loafing
If Young Steve down in London can plonk flower pictures at the top of his blogposts then so can I. The blooms shown above are American prairie flowers. I believe that this one belongs to the silphium family. The picture was taken this very morning as I was strolling through Sheffield Botanical Gardens . It's a lovely nineteen acre city park, containing plants and trees from all over the world. It enjoys the practical support of a squadron of local volunteers and is a popular green oasis for dozens of skittish American grey squirrels. Opened in the 1830s, our Botanical Gardens once housed a menagerie. The park also had a bearpit but living bears are no longer displayed there. Instead, there's just a rusty mild steel bear called Robert, created by David Mayne and installed in 2005 in memory of the poor creatures that were once chained there. In spite of facial similarities there is absolutely no connection between our Robert The Bear and Robert Slatten or Robert Brague - two n...