Happy New Year!

An exuberant burst of wild flowers to wish you Happy New Year - pure as fresh snow, new as the year. May all your hopes and dreams come true or, perhaps more realistically for most of us, may patience and hard work bring just rewards.

Funnily enough, I'd been saving this photo for a time when it seemed right to look forward to Spring. It was growing on scrub in the garden in Provence, and all last year I tried to find out what exactly it was. No mention in my wild flower books. Nothing to match it on the internet. I was going to ask if anyone knew, but then - a few moments ago - I thought I'd just try again, and lo and behold Google images came up with a match. You may well know this lovely flower already; if not, I can now tell you that it's Star of Bethlehem. I'd heard of the plant, but never realised this was it.

It's officially classed as a weed, but even the entry in the Plant and Pest Digital Library (link here) admits it is pretty and suggests tolerance rather than destruction. We could all take something from that, not least in how we view bald classifications that consign us to think in empty black and white terms like good and bad, the expected and the unexpected, and even success and failure. In creative endeavour, the rewards so often come in the process rather than the end result judged by others.