After two days of  recreating this website and expurgating the trash files that had been hacked into it I can start the return to garden blogging.  The experience of having my sites invaded was a wake-up call to the security issues of maintaining a presence on the web.  Keep your software up to date, change passwords regularly, check the code content that lies behind your pages.  As it happens whoever had invaded was more interested in using my bandwidth and ip number than in disrupting my site.  Indeed their purpose was to use my site as a parking place for all sorts of references to quasi-commercial porn sites and such.  I believe that they came in from other pages on the website that used joomla software that I had not kept up to date.  Thank goodness for backups!

At about this time every year we have pink snow that results from the Kwanzan Cherry shedding it’s blossoms.

The annual pink snow under the Kwanzan Cherry

The density of blossom fall depends very much on weather conditions — the wind and rain determines how far from the tree the blossoms fall and how fast they come down.  As we were working outside I remarked to my partner in garden servitude that we needed a video to capture the effect of being ‘snowed up’ by pink blossoms.  Maybe next year.

Primula vulgaris in pink snow