Bellissima!  One single Deadly Nightshade bloom – 27th August 2018.

Because I whisper to my ‘Belladonna Babe’ daily – it’s no surprise to me that she’s grown slender and taller over the long, hot Summer that was——the intensity of the heat reminiscent of ‘The Go-Between’, the novel by L.P. Hartley, that inspired me to nurture a beautiful specimen of my own. He powerfully wrote…

“It wasn’t a plant, in my sense of the word, it was a shrub, almost a tree, and as tall as I was. It looked the picture of evil and also the picture of health, it was so glossy and strong and juicy-looking: I could almost see the sap rising to nourish it. It seemed to have found the place in all the world that suited it best.

I knew that every part of it was poisonous, I knew too that it was beautiful, for did not my mother’s botany book say so?

I stood on the threshold not daring to go in, staring at the button-bright berries and the dull, purplish, hairy bell-shaped flowers reaching out towards me.  I felt that the plant could poison me, even if I didn’t touch it, and that if I didn’t eat it, it would eat me, it looked so hungry, in spite of all the nourishment it was getting. 

As if I had been caught out looking at something I wasn’t meant to see I tiptoed away, wondering whether Mrs. Maudsley would think me interfering if I told her about it.  But I didn’t tell her, I couldn’t bear to think of those lusty limbs withering on a rubbish heap or crackling in a fire; all that beauty destroyed.  Besides I wanted to look at it again.  

Atropa belladonna.” 

Equally unsurprising——in light of all that I tell my ‘Belladonna Babe’ – she has taken to wearing a beautiful bell-shaped bonnet for the new season; a puce and lime-green number with a fascinator for a centrepiece.

This is our fashion shoot – to show off her beautiful bonnet from ‘Nature’s Own Design’…