H IS FOR....

...HEATHER

Probably not a very exciting topic for many who visit my blog.  But we don't have any around here and I grew up quite near to the Yorkshire Moors.  So when my husband  brought this very beautiful plant home one day recently, I was thrilled.

There are even daffodils to contrast the color.  In fact, I placed the pot in the center of a Christmas table decoration that had held roses and other flowers two months ago.  The daffodils I bought from the store.  Sadly if we want a taste of dear old England and Wales (and Scotland too)... we have to buy it  The puzzling thing is that I don't think the heather should be blooming at this time of the year.  Yorkshire heather blooms in July and August.  But I'm not complaining.  I'll take it whenever I can and whenever it is blooming.  I'm posting two pictures of the heather  because I wanted to include the daffodils, but this next one really shows its color well.

Perhaps you're wondering why we have our flowers out on the patio table instead of indoors, 'though heather is not an indoor plant.  There are two reasons:  first, because in our mild climate they thrive longer outside. Even with our weather we have the heat on in the house during the winter months; second because I have allergies and better to enjoy the flowers outside than sneeze in the house.  Our kitchen/dining room table is right by the large patio windows and looks out onto the patio. So we enjoy the plants and flowers as long as possible.

H IS FOR HAIL

What?....hail...?  So uninteresting.  Yes, but not for us.  We never see snow except sometimes on the nearby mountains.  Maybe once a year we get frost.  But hail?  I think I have only seen hail four or five times since we moved here 39 years ago.  It comes when a cold 'storm' blows down from the northwest and swirls into our coast line clashing with the warmth that is usually ours, dumping snow on the lower mountains nearby and bringing us squirrelly  winds, that bring down palm branches and sometimes trees with shallow root systems.  To us it is exciting but it has two drawbacks.  Other places in the States are being buried under snow and being frozen  by extreme cold temperatures.  The other problem is that, as I have observed but don't have any meteorological proof for, these storms pass over us in a day and make their way in a curve north-eastwards, picking up power as they go and spawning horrible tornadoes across the central states as they did last week.

Look at these photos:

A few handfuls of hail brings excitement to us and devastation elsewhere.  Nearly 40 people killed last week.  Now they are predicting another feisty storm for us in a day or two.  Will my amateur predictions be confirmed -- more tornadoes to follow?  We shall see.

ABC Wednesday is a project started by Mrs. Nesbitt and is now in its ninth round.  If you click on this link HERE you will be able to visit some of her more than 100 participants and read their interpretations of the letter H.