Welcome back! If you haven’t already heard the news, the next book in the Detective Watts series will be released at the end of this month. Writing it was quite the task, but I pushed through the pain and managed to cross the finish line. Feel free to check it out if you’re interested; otherwise, let’s dive into another puzzle!

This month, I present you with another 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 (diagonal is allowed).
• The remaining flowers must all be connected in one group.

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 solve the puzzle below and help Evelyn arrange her flower bed?

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. Let’s hope you didn’t cause an explosion in the lab!