Maureen's hydrangea

This is Maureen, who lives around the corner.

This is her hydrangea bush, which her father planted 45 years ago.

The picture doesn't do it justice. The hydrangea colors here are amazing. Some surreal blues, vibrant pinks, maroon, you name it.

Maureen's house, and Trudy's pictured yesterday, are both called semi-detached. It's a bungalow that shares a common wall with another bungalow. That reduces land use and energy use. It's why villages are compact and end abruptly, with miles of fields filling the space between one village and another. No strip malls. No subdivisions. No sprawl. If you ever fly over the British Isles, you will see this clearly.

I much prefer it to the large houses that sit on large lots in the U.S., all of which have to be mowed and watered. If there were a way to measure energy use per capita in the U.S. vs. N.I., the wide gap would partly be explained by the more efficient way people travel here (very few traffic lights, smaller cars, shorter commutes), the small yards, the smaller houses that share a wall, and the propensity to walk whenever possible, as opposed to hopping in the car.