Buddleja, Bible Study and Batman

Well we are now into day two of our A - Z challenge and I continue to search fruitlessly for any coherent theme other than what I have been doing, or stuff that just happens to cross my mind.   Fortunately for me yesterday was a day full of Bs, there were indeed even a few bees.

We are currently enjoying a funny old spring which seems only natural after a funny old winter.   Although very, very wet the winter was also very mild, in consequence a lot of plants are a little further advanced than might otherwise be expected.   March and April are usually good months to get a lot of my spring pruning done, but I find I keep looking at plants and thinking "I should have done this a month ago"  

Yesterday was one of those occasions, I was in the garden of a new customer, mostly concerned about pruning, she has a very large climbing rose in desperate need of extensive restorative pruning but is too nervous of letting me do as much as really needs doing.   With this plant I had to pretty much content myself with trimming back to laterals and cutting out dead wood, but further down her garden there is a monster Buddleja Davidii (this is the standard "Butterfly Bush") in order to keep a reasonable size, shape, and to produce lots of heavy dense flower clusters a good hard prune in spring is just what these need.   It was a real joy to be able to give this plant exactly what it needed, I cut it back to no more than three foot high at any point, removed all dead wood and crossing branches and opened up the centre of the bush a little.   I don't know when this Budleja was last pruned but some of the pieces I cut out must have been at least twelve foot long!

I look forward to seeing him covered in flowers and butterflies later in the summer.

Regular readers will know that my faith is an important part of who, and what I am.   One of the ways that this manifests itself is every other Tuesday I host and lead a Church Home Group.   We meet for mutual support, fellowship and Bible study.   This being Lent we are actually meeting every Tuesday and following a course looking at the fruit of the Spirit, last night we were thinking about Kindness and Goodness.   Sounds simple, but inevitably it still took us a good couple of hours to come to the conclusion that in order to display the fruit of the spirit we need to be in step with the Spirit and welcome Him into our lives.   I always enjoy these evenings as I find that talking about things helps me to know what I do believe, and sometimes to challenge myself and my believes.   Hosting the meetings also means that I am forced to clear up and vacuum the place every now and then.

Although it happened a couple of days ago on the 28th March it was only yesterday that I heard on the Radio that Lorenzo Semple Jr. the writer and creator  Batman had died.   I should clarify, Semple did not write the original comic book Batman, nor was he responsible for any of the recent crop of films, no what he created was the wonderful, camp TV series of the sixties, complete with the KPOW banners coming up in fight scenes.  

For those of us who are a "Certain Age" Adam West will always be Batman, and he spoke Semple's lines. (For my money West also had the best ever Batmobile)

Amongst many other worthy productions, such as Papillon, Semple was also responsible for the Flash Gordon screen play, another triumph of camp, this also means that his words are on the best selling album in the UK ~ Queens Greatest Hits!