The Mystery of the Missing Foxgloves

So my mother put a few plants in pots to go on the new patio:

And finally, it's finished - here's my Ancient Mother sitting on the Ancient Bench on the New Patio, and I feel obliged to point out yet again that she's eighty-four. (She asks me to point out that in all these pictures she's wearing her gardening clothes, hence the T-shirt bought on a French campsite nearly ten years ago).

I remember the bench arriving in the mid-sixties. It's made of some kind of tropical hardwood, in the days when owning tropical hardwood was held to be cool and not a method of destroying the Amazonian rainforest and hence the rest of the planet.

But, having stood outside in all weathers for many years, it was looking a bit the worse for wear so the Communist varnished it a few years ago with Exactly What it Says on the Tin varnish and, although a bit battered, it looks set to make it to the next millennium.

Our house is full of things like that. They're not quite what you would want, but you can't quite throw them away, because they are filled with memories and poignancy.

Anyway, before my mother started her patio-building exploits I moved all the plants in pots off the area and stowed them just a few feet away.

Now, one thing about my mother is that she's always doing things that she hopes will please me, which is really kind of her, and I think I don't always show that I appreciate it enough, but I do appreciate it.

My mother knows that foxgloves are one of my favourite flowers. Daffodils in the Spring, foxgloves in the Summer. There are lots of foxgloves in the garden and my mother, in the course of her usual gardening, gathered some of the seedlings up and put them in a pot to go on the new patio.

They were all growing nicely. I lifted the pot off the patio and put it to one side.

And when I came to put it back, there it wasn't.

We've never found it. Anyway, how can you lose a big pot of foxgloves? Stolen to order, I reckon, by an international ring of Foxglove Thieves. Probably the same lot who nicked John's Landrover over a year ago. I expect they stuffed it full of stolen flowers and drove it abroad.
I bet my pot of foxgloves is in Belgium by now, selling for hundreds on the black market. Bastards.

I'm very pleased with the patio, though. Thanks, Mum.