Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
This picture of sweet violets was taken with my iPhone: it’s a blessing to be able to have it with me for moments like these. The heart shaped leaves are scrolled up, perhaps to funnel rain water down to the roots and the scented flowers are tiny but radiant. This is a quintessential cottage garden flower for me and I love to see posies made with them. Continue reading “Viola Odorata: Sweet Violets”
The weekly photo challenge asks us to photograph something from three different angles. You’ll not be too surprised to learn that I only managed two shots of this wicker installation at the Chorley Flower Show (yes, you read that correctly) before my eye drifted off to the flowers in the background. Continue reading “Weekly Photo Challenge: wicker family”
It’s tempting to assume other living things experience the world pretty much as we do. While resizing this picture, I was thinking how much fun butterflies must have in a flower meadow – swinging on flowers while they sip a little nectar, perhaps comparing flavours and seeking out the ones they like best, then fluttering off to the next field… Continue reading “Butterfly sipping nectar: is this just a cold transaction?”
During our visit to Grasmere yesterday, clouds lay low over rolling hills, but the greyness just added atmosphere to the water, hills, woods, dry stone walls, ferns and wildflowers along our way.
We’d stopped off here to walk around the lake: my idea of exercise! Our route took us past houses, lakeside businesses, farmland and woods before swinging down to the path around the shore. Continue reading “Grasmere: an uplifting walk round the poet’s lake”
Perspective and a macro setting turns these small violets into giants, compared to the tiny chickweed flowers at their feet. I find it really hard to see violets as lawn weeds, even the more common purple ones. For me any patch of grass, natural or cultivated, is made more beautiful by wild violets.
I’m not usually quite so charitable about chickweed, though I can appreciate its delicate beauty in this setting. I know that’s unfair – after all:
A weed is any plant having to deal with an unhappy human.
J C Raulston
The wildflowers were the winners (by a short head) in yesterday’s poll, so here they are! These pictures were taken during a snatched visit to The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. I thoroughly recommend a visit: allow at least half a day if you want to see everything. Continue reading “The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Austin, TX”
Bluebells. For me, they’re a sign of home. My tiny garden is so full of the sturdy, Spanish ones that I can’t plant anything else without digging a few up, no matter how careful I try to be.
We stumbled upon these ones growing wild on Darwen moor, not far from Sunnyhurst Woods, on our way to the Jubilee Tower last spring. A field of bluebells is enough to stop even the most experienced of ramblers in their tracks. It makes me happy to think that this year’s flowers aren’t far away now. Continue reading “Weekly photo challenge: bluebell blur”
