We found fields of blueish purple plants while we were out this weekend and my friend (who grew up knewing all the wild flowers) was convinced she knew it but couldn't put a name to it.  So I picked one - there were fields full of them so I don't feel too guilty - and we checked it at home in her ye olde flower book.

The book helpfully divides flowers by colour so a bit of browsing in the blue section brought up borage - very pretty.  We didn't eat it though, maybe

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This evening I went with a couple of friends to the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition 2007 which is, according to my friend Lena, the highlight of the geek-calendar. 
http://www.summerscience.org.uk 

It's open until the 5th of July but the first and second nights (ie tonight and tomorrow it opens late, until 9pm) - there are 20+ exhibits featuring anything from the science / technology world

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Yesterday at ten to two in the morning I arrived home from an overnighter in Orkney, staying at the Ayre hotel.  At this time of year the sun doesn't fully set and so I was able to go for an evening stroll at 11pm and the sky looked pretty light.  It never got darker than twilight even in the small hours - I kept waking up just to look outside.  It reminded me of the line in that song in the Wicker Man "would you have a wondrous sight?  The midday sun at midnight

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Apparently it's not a very big place - I missed the exact dimensions - but plants abound here. While there are apparently around 1,400 native 'higher' plants in the UK, Popoluca has 2,700 and is a tropical montane cloud forest (are there lovelier words in the English language?) and a semi-dry oak forest. Sadly this doesn't really mean anything to me as I don't have enough knowledge to discriminate among the different types of forest but it all sounds lovely.

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"Every old person that dies is like a library burned down"

I've got mixed feelings about blogs - there's a nice Private Eye cartoon of someone "updating his blog" and can be seen at his screen typing "me, me, me, me, me" but even though it's a bit of a vanity project I thought I'd weigh in with 'what I did recently'.

As some people may know, I have a passing interest in the use of plants in medicines - more of a dilettante

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