Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
Tina has invited us to post pictures from 2022 that we’ve not so far shared. I have so many to choose from, but I’ve picked some out that, for me, have an evocative sense of place. I’ll let the pictures do the talking. Continue reading “Scenes and Curiosities from Mississippi, Mainly”
Regular readers may remember that I’ve mentioned a fairy path that tracks a leat draining the meadow above the southern edge of Sunnyhurst Wood in Darwen. Oak, chestnut, birch, beech, sycamore, ash, holly and elder are scattered among tall evergreens. Somewhere between a park and a wood, it is laced with main paths that run down to Sunnyhurst stream at the bottom of the valley. This isn’t one of them. Continue reading “On The Fairy Path”
Many of my favourites are cottage garden flowers, at their best when tumbled together. Some I like for their unusual colours, patterns or arrangement of petals… Continue reading “Favourite Flowers – And Why”
Early autumn is a great time to hunt for fungi, so I have spent some time searching for the most atmospheric of all, red and white spotted toadstools, in all the likely and less likely places I could think of near where I live. As often happens, when I was not searching, I glanced up and had the thrill of seeing twenty or thirty of them growing on a hillside in a narrow strip of mixed, light woodland on the edge of peaty moorland.
Toadstools are the fruiting bodies of underground mycelial networks. Happy to return to earth, they emerge only briefly after a rain, swelling rapidly to full size then rotting back after releasing spores from white gills on the undersides of their caps.
Continue reading “Poisonous Red and White Spotted Toadstools: Fly Agaric”
This week’s Lens-Artist’s challenge – to share scenes captured in more than one way – is very welcome. I routinely take several shots of anything that piques my interest and just as regularly am not sure which I prefer. It’s nice not to have to choose.
Take this clematis clad stone wall and doorway at Rousham Gardens. Â Is the scene more romantic when your eye isn’t being led away down the path (which would probably have been my choice) or do you prefer to wander? Continue reading “One Photo Two Ways”
Over the last few months I’ve been paying attention to lichens. The trouble is, the more closely you look, the more questions arise.
After a while the boundary between stone and lichen seems to blur. Are some of these decorative patterns the stone itself, or are they all lichens? Continue reading “Lichens on Stone Walls in Darwen, Lancashire”
Susan Rushton 