What is it?

Being a bit of a collector of natural curios I have a number of pine cones on my mantle piece. One day I heard a cracking sound as one of the cones was opening in the warmth and, on closer inspection, I found that a whole layer of scales had split off, the result is what you see.

Today has been a hedge cutting day. There is a wild flower field at the property and it has approximately 300 metres of hedge to trim. The customer does not like getting the local farmer to smash it to pieces with the flail on his tractor so I do it with my hedge trimmer over a number of days.

There are a number of wild cherry trees in the hedge and we spent quite a while working out which ones to remove to look natural, I think we've got it right but can't really tell until there are leaves on them.

After work I got timing slightly wrong and collected the tired commuter half way home not at the station so tomorrow I must try harder!