Flowers. And music.

It's been an uneventful week, partly because I've spent a long time on the computer trying to find a suitable holiday house for all the family to go during one specific week in August. The main problem is that I didn't start nearly early enough to find one house that will house 12 people, somewhere that we want to go and that's fairly accessible from various places; but a further problem is that the Edinburgh family are very allergic to dogs - even if the dogs aren't actually in the house, but had been present fairly recently. Reasonably enough, people with dogs like to rent holiday accommodation and, sadly (for us) most holiday houses allow them to do so. So this cuts out a good nine-tenths of the possibilities. 

Eventually we managed to find two cottages in Northumberland. They're not next to one another but they're not far apart, so we settled for them. One of them is a no-pet house, though the other isn't. It's the best we could do and I hope it'll be fine. 

On Friday, however, we decided to award ourselves a day off and went down to the Border country to visit Dawyck Botanic Gardens. We were there in the autumn, for the wonderful colours, and I thought this would be the time of year to see the rhododendrons and azaleas in flower. On the way down we became caught in a sheep jam, which was quite entertaining. 

Interestingly, we'd got it wrong, since most of the rhododendrons and azaleas weren't out yet - though a few were. Since Dawyck is south of here, we assumed that the season would be more advanced, but maybe because it's on higher ground (850 feet above sea level as against Edinburgh's coastal position), it seemed to be less so. 

I

Still, those that were flowering were very pretty. 

We also reacquainted ourselves with the wonderful lichen that drapes itself over the trees in the clear upland air. 

There are some wonderfully enormous trees. Can you spot Mr L standing at the foot of this one? He's wearing navy for camouflage but you may see his white hair and beard. 

Today we went to Edinburgh's Botanics, where there were lots of blooms. 

There's a moral there somewhere...

Yesterday was the concert of one of my choirs, so I spent some time going over the music to make sure I was confident with the tricky bits. We sang Rheinberger's Ave Regina and Stabat Mater and Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs, which are set to George Herbert's wonderful poems. I didn't know any of this music before - indeed I'd never heard of Rheinberger, and he's fantastic. We also sang the Verdi Requiem - much better known but also splendid. 

In another couple of weeks it's my other choir's concert - the Mozart Requiem - lovely again - and Mendelssohn's Psalm 42. I'm sitting here listening to the seventh movement of the latter, which I felt I didn't know well enough. Letting it filter into the brain while doing something else works to some extent, but doesn't help with fitting the German words into the notes, so I shall go and do that now.