Grave error

Made our first visit to Wisley of the year on Friday - having been deterred by the continuing closure of Fairoak Lane, a key element of our our normal route. Blog search claims that we had not been since last August, a long time indeed.

Started off in the café, the décor person of which had clearly been studying the form in the trendy places around the Tate Modern, with the contribution from Wisley being the addition of a lot of pot plants to the mix. Rock cake looked a bit dodgy, as if the mix had been a little too wet, but tasted fine. Tea rather strong.

Outside, it was the day of the hellebores, which were looking very well. All different colours, with variety provided by some large euphorbias, the flowers of which were not that unlike those of the helebores, the petals of both being rather leaf like, with tendencies towards green. There were also some cyclamen, daffodils and other spring bulbs, but not in full flood. Also some full on red camelias.

A notice at the entrance had warned us that much of the big hot house would be shut, but in practice most of it was open. The star attraction of the day was a display of trial plantings of hippeastrums, very showy flowers indeed, although they did not photograph particularly well. A sign explained that many people got into a muddle between amaryllis and hippeastrum, calling specimens of the latter the former. Wikipedia explains that the former are South African while the latter are South American and that it is the latter which are widely grown as the winter flowering house plants wrongly called amaryllis. Otherwise, reminded once again of the extraordinary profusion of the world of plants.

There were also a few flashy butterflies left over from their exhibition. One of which had very striking electric blue patches on the upper surface of its wings. Producing the blue was clearly too much of a strain on the metabolism of this small animal to make it blue all over.

The two alpine houses were doing well, as usual, with the saxifrages and primulas earning an honourable mention. We were also reminded that the rock was tufa from Wales - not an area I associate with volcanoes at all. I consult wikipedia this morning to find that one sort of tufa is an odd sort of limestone (a relation of the travertine sometimes used by Henry Moore) but another is indeed volcanic. On balance I go with limestone, with UEA talking of 'deposits [in Wales] thought to represent carbonate precipitation during the late-glacial interstadial'. What sort the tufo of greco di tufo, of which I am fond, Italian despite appearances?