Never Ever

It appears that very little people know, that milk is harmful for hedgehogs, so I decided to make a note on it. It is the worst thing you can give to a hedgehog. Although they drink it so pleasantly! They seem not to have any ferments for it and feel very terrible after drinking it. They get terrible diarrhea for several days and often can die due to dehydration and weakness. So never ever give milk to hedgehogs!

Flower Children

As if beer and other good stuff wasn't enough, Silelis declares that it also loves flowers. Of course, not the dead flowers you can buy in the market or from the Indian guys who stroll through the bars. Silelis loves only living mountain flowers (to love city flowers is the same as to agree that lazy town pigeon is a bird, which is not longer true). Today we introduce one flower we have seen in the mountains (and were totally taken aback by it's beauty and loneliness), the black vanilla orchid (Nigritella nigra).

In the site alpineflowers.com we find the following information: "Black vanilla orchid has, as the name already suggests, a very strong vanilla scent. In German vernacular, it is also called "drop of blood" because it was once believed, that the plant's strong scent was the cause of nosebleeds." Very exciting indeed, and very unfortunate we did not check out the smell of the flower! Who would guess that a mountain flower can smell of vanilla?

But we are not the only ones fascinated by this orchid, Jean-François Charles has composed a piece of music called "Nigritella nigra", which you can find here.