Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
Becky at The Life Of B is hosting a new challenge throughout January with the topic of light, or any word ending in light. The main picture has to be square. I don’t find it easy to crop square, unless the picture was originally taken that way (relatively few are), but it’s good to be challenged.
So why this picture? Well, the roses are the lightest shade of pink; the flowers seem like tiny satellite* dishes, catching and reflecting sunlight, and I’m claiming they make a delightful sight.
My end of year post is not about which posts were the most popular in 2019 or the most fun to write or the pictures I’m most proud to have taken. It’s about the pictures I’m sick of seeing languishing in photo files waiting for the ‘right’ post. Continue reading “Pictures That Never Quite Made It – Till Now!”
Geranium ‘Summer Skies’ is a clump forming perennial that is hardy in the UK. The flowers are pastel coloured doubles with yellow centres . Tiny central petals form a distinctive, open bowl shape. You’ll see the base colour described as sky blue (sky-blue pink is, for once, more accurate); the colour tends to deepen as the flowers age. Dissected foliage and branching stems complete the picture.
The overall effect is ethereal – if fairies were cavorting in and around geraniums, these would be the ones they’d choose. Continue reading “Hardy Double Geranium pratense ‘Summer Skies’”
Seeing some of the posts in my Reader, I’ve been suffering snow envy… just a little, much as I’d like any seasonal snow cover to be. To try to assuage these feelings, I’m sharing this scene from one of our visits to Dunham Massey’s winter garden near Manchester, while it had a smattering of snow. Continue reading “Tree Snag and Lichen”
If you’re like me, you can never see a gourd without a snatch of verse flickering in and out of focus in the recesses of your mind – this one:
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never ceaseKeats, from To Autumn
Now even the bees have been forced to admit that Autumn is a memory, and nights are longer, a great way to give a gourd new life is to turn it into a winter nightlight.
The ones pictured here are part of Thompson Farms of Raleigh, Mississippi’s collection of crafted gourd novelties that include tree decorations, mandalas, baskets and thunder gourds as well as luminaries. Continue reading “Gourd Luminaries By Thompson Farms”
Susan Rushton 