Chocolate raindrops

Not the greatest of days today. I should have gone out this morning while though dull, it was at least dry. I spent half the morning trying to fix the Hoover which had been emitting sparks from beneath, but after having taken out every screw I could find I got no nearer to finding the source of the problem, which I thought might have been a bad cable connection. Having put it all back together again, it didn't work at all! Maybe I should have used that as a Blip, but it didn't really seem all that exciting.

After lunch it rained, so while going outside to collect some wood for the stove - the gas boiler isn't working either - I looked for a botanical subject for my daily Blip and came up with this chocolate cosmos, Cosmos atrosanguineus, which is in a pot among all the other plants in pots, waiting for me to make a garden. It was raining and it was breezy, so it wasn't the easiest of subjects. but for what it's worth, here it is.

A native of Mexico and consequently not very hardy, it really does smell of chocolate, so if you enlarge the picture you may get a whiff! According to Wikipedia, which of course is always right, "it is extinct in the wild. The species was introduced into cultivation in 1902, where it survives as a single clone reproduced by vegetative propagation." Wow - a close call then!