Welcome back to my blog! I hope you enjoyed the first puzzle; you can always contact me if you have questions or noticed a mistake.

Our second entry is a hitori puzzle, which roughly translates to “alone” from Japanese. Evelyn Batrie cultivates bellflowers of many different colors, and arranging them into flower beds brings her great joy; however, some flowers must be pruned so that the others have enough space to grow and bloom. Your job is to remove flowers from the grid until the following conditions are met:

• No row or column can have more than one flower of a given color.
• Empty plots of soil cannot be horizontally or vertically adjacent (but diagonal is allowed).
• The remaining flowers must be all connected to each other, either horizontally or vertically.

The pictures below depict a sample puzzle on a 5×5 grid, along with its solution. The brown squares represent empty plots of soil (i.e. grid cells in which flowers have been removed).

Now, can you help Evelyn arrange the flower bed below?

The solution will be released in the next blog post. Also, if you tried the puzzle from the last blog entry, here is its solution below. Did you get it right?