For Sarah, with love and healing hugs!
Tag Archives: flowers
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: What’s in a Garden?
My last Challenge post on the subject of Garden was three years ago. You can see that post HERE. So how do I answer Ann-Christine’s question in a new way? What IS actually in a garden? Please see HER POST for some examples around the globe.
Wikipedia says: “A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the display, cultivation, or enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature, as an ideal setting for social or solitary human life.”
I am taking care of a friend’s house, pets, and garden for a few days. Her garden is quite whimsical and full of unusual things. Here’s a gallery of shots I took today:
In the Wheel of the Year, we are just past Lammas or Lughnasadh, the first of the harvest festivals. This is the midway point between the Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. Invasive Himalayan blackberries are ripening everywhere along the roadsides and creeks. Neighbors are harvesting zucchinis and other veggies in abundance. The blackberries take no planning at all, but the other crops require diligence and sweat equity to nurture them through the dry summer months when pests of all kinds threaten the possible returns. I send my gratitude to the growers who provide an abundance of beautiful produce to the markets here.
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Floral
Flowers speak a language of sentiment and memory, fragrant with associations of all kinds. Think of the vast variety of colors and names of flowers and imagine all the stories woven by combinations of these. There are historical records of assigning meaning to certain flowers – from Shakespeare to the Old Farmer’s Almanac and beyond. I have my own stories with these recent photos that I took.
Bleeding hearts will always remind me of my oldest daughter. They bloomed beside her first home in Wisconsin, and she has tattoos featuring their symbolic shape. When I see this row of bleeding hearts, I think of a parade of sensitive souls backing each other up. They could be my daughter and her friends.
I didn’t realize I captured a raindrop on the edge of this rose as I snapped this picture this morning. Now that I see it in close-up, I think of a brave droplet scaling an orange Everest. Orange roses signify “enthusiasm”, according to one list. Maybe this flower’s message to me is “don’t let it rain on your parade”!
Looking deeply into the center of a bearded iris is like diving in a coral reef. The vibrant color and fanciful shapes create a magic world.
The following four shots exist to preserve the Mother’s Day peonies I received from my oldest daughter. I took them over a few days’ time. In my mind, Danny Kaye is singing about The Peony Bush there in his garden. I am struck at how their petal pattern resembles an artichoke’s leaves and surprised at how they seem to explode over time, compact spheres opening and fading like graceful grenades.
A flower is so fascinating up close, a world in itself. But what if there was a whole landscape of flowers as far as your eye could see? I have seen wildflowers (lupines, shooting stars, spring beauty, trout lilies) covering hillsides, and they have taken my breath away, like the sudden and ephemeral serendipity of a rainbow. I feel a bit differently when I see flowers as crops. It’s more manufacturing than magic, to my mind.
I can’t help feeling incredibly lucky to live on a planet with flowers. There is beauty to behold just bursting forth from the dirt underfoot! What an amazing gift.
Thank you, Sofia, for hosting a Flower Fest here this week! Click HERE to see her challenge post.
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Flower Favorites and their stories
Unlike our host this week, Ann-Christine of Leya (sounds like a princess’ name, and indeed she is Lens-Artist royalty!), I do not grow flowers or keep a garden. However, I have loved and cherished them and have stories of how they have made happiness bloom in my life.
My first favorite flower is the Lilac. There was a row of lilac bushes that belonged to our next-door neighbor that sat on the dividing line of our properties. When they bloomed for two short weeks in early summer in Illinois, their fragrance intoxicated me. I wanted to cut the bunches and bring them to my room so that I could smell them as I went to sleep. I was soon instructed by my mother that first, they weren’t mine, and second, they would quickly drop their blossoms and become a mess to clean up inside. I vowed that when I grew up, I would have my own lilac bushes and surround myself with their lovely perfume. I missed lilacs while living in California, but my husband planted dwarf lilacs for Mother’s Day at our house when we moved back to Illinois. Then he took me to the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in Michigan, where they have a Lilac Festival each year, and he bought me a small bottle of lilac essence, which I dabbed on my skin with sheer delight until it was all gone.
Fringed Gentian was a legend on the restored prairies of land protected by the Cedar Lakes Conservation Foundation of Wisconsin, where I worked for five years. I had never heard of this early Fall flower before or seen it until I was in my 50s. One September day, my friend Jerry (on the Board of the Foundation and their main trail steward) called me up and told me to grab my camera – the Gentians were up! I was absolutely enthralled by their tightly twisted blooms that opened to four fringed petals of blue perfection.
The Rose speaks of love silently
In a language known only to the heart
My late husband, Jim, loved roses. He gave me lots of them. He gave me the crystal plaque with the above inscription when I was in High School. It sits in the curio cabinet I inherited from his mother. Next to it is an acrylic-coated and gold-tipped rose, a souvenir from the weekend we spent together at a couples’ resort, a mini-vacation from our four kids. I love roses with the deep scent of raspberries; the soft, furry sweetness of their aroma is a heaven of blissful indulgence. They speak of romance and exclusive preference, to me. They will always remind me of Jim. I have moved into houses where rose bushes were left behind in the garden. The blooms were always a gift, not something I felt I had earned. I suppose that’s totally appropriate for a love flower, and why it is so very special.
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Garden
Tom Paxton wrote the song “Whose Garden Was This?” for the first Earth Day in 1970. John Denver released an album that same year, named for the song, which he covered.
Whose garden was this? It must have been lovely
Did it have flowers? I’ve seen pictures of flowers
And I’d love to have smelled one
Tell me again, I need to know
The forests had trees, the meadows were green
The oceans were blue, and birds really flew
Can you swear that was true?
Whose river was this? You say it ran freely
Blue was its color, I’ve seen blue in some pictures
And I’d love to have been there
Tell me again, I need to know
The forests had trees, the meadows were green
The oceans were blue, and birds really flew
Can you swear that was true?
Those who imagine the Earth as a garden, as opposed to a wilderness, consider humans to be the primary architects of plant communities and responsible for their creation and maintenance. In this Anthropocene Era, human impact dominates the landscape, and the soil serves our needs – for food, for resources, for beauty, for creativity. It’s important to remember, though, that one of our needs is to have a healthy planet, one that will be resilient to our mistakes, our greed, our hubris. There is always a need for observation and humility, an imperative that we learn from autonomous ecosystems.
Whose garden was this? It must have been lovely
Did it have flowers? I’ve seen pictures of flowers
And I’d love to have smelled one..
Thank you to AMY for this week’s challenge theme, and Happy Mother’s Day tomorrow to all you blogging Moms (like me)!
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Colorful April
“April this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay
Round-lobed Hepatica 
This morning in April, here in Oregon, there is frost on the ground, but the sun is shining brightly. I’ve spotted daffodils and tulips and crocuses and forsythia and trillium and trout lily and Western blue flag iris in bloom already this month. The predominant color around here, though, is Spring Green. Fescue fields cover vast expanses of farmland nearby, where Icelandic sheep, domestic sheep, horses, goats, and donkeys graze.
On the first day of April, the trails around the marsh at Finley Wildlife Refuge open for the season. They are closed during the winter to protect the migrating birds who are resting and nesting. The skies are full of long skeins of flocks from November through March. When I ventured over there a few days ago, I noticed a small population of ducks and geese, and one heron. I had only my Samsung Galaxy phone with me, but I took a few photos nevertheless.
Oregon Trout Lily
“Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.” ― Barbara Kingsolver
I have to add my gratitude for the gifts of flowers that I have received this month as well, displayed on my dining room table. (again, taken with my phone) They certainly illustrate a return to joy in my life!
Thank you to Amy at The World Is A Book for inviting us to share the theme of her beautifully colorful post. May we all experience that April “hallelujah” and new joy in our lives!
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: A Change of Scenery
Spring Beauty
“The snow has not yet left the earth, but spring is already asking to enter your heart. If you have ever recovered from a serious illness, you will be familiar with the blessed state when you are in a delicious state of anticipation, and are liable to smile without any obvious reason. Evidently that is what nature is experiencing just now.” ―
The Vernal Equinox is here, announcing the first day of Spring! A change of scenery is about to unfold all around you, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere. What have you seen so far? Crocuses? Daffodils? Forsythia?
Have you sighted returning migratory birds like red-winged blackbirds, cranes, geese, robins? Have you witnessed any courtship rituals?
“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”
―
Have you started any Spring projects yet? Cleaning, planting, or otherwise loving a change of scenery into being?
“Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.”
―
It won’t be long now before the Earth shows on parade the joyful resilience of Life that we have come to know in the depths of our souls as HOPE.
“The earth laughs in flowers.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
It has certainly been a long, strange, and anxious year. I welcome a change of scenery from the dreary outlook of fear, manifest in so many ways on so many levels. There is much to be learned from the long, dark time that we’ve been through, much to be brought into the sunlight and witnessed with new eyes and a new resolve. 
May we all do the work of Spring in our lives and enjoy the change of scenery that New Life brings!
Many thanks to Beth of Wandering Dawgs for hosting this Lens-Artists challenge and welcoming a Change of Scenery into our week!
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Detail
Patti poses an interesting challenge this week: when the scope of a scene is visually overwhelming, choose to focus on a detail that hints at the grandeur of the whole.
For me, that sense of overwhelming wonder is always present when I am outside in Nature. I love the Earth. I work for a Conservation Foundation, and I am often dazzled by the beauty of the land while I am also stunned by the complexity of biological interactions and the enormity of the task of preserving ecosystems that are under constant threats of degradation. I believe that showing people the accessible beauty of the world around them can engender the kind of affection for Place that will motivate them to protect it, to safeguard it for the future.
Have you ever looked at a common plant up close? Or gazed into the intelligent eyes of an animal? There are details all around you capable of blowing your mind with the immense and intricate magnificence of Life. I invite you to become a Lover of Life — a Biophile, if you will.
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Nature
“Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.
First, all education is environmental education.” — David Orr, What Is Education For?
I actually met and spoke to David Orr at a conference near the Aldo Leopold Foundation Center in Baraboo, Wisconsin a few years ago. He is a fascinating speaker, a person who has clearly thought a great deal about how humans fit into the natural world.
Yesterday, I spent the morning volunteering in a homeschool class at a Nature Center. The children, aged 6-8, shared their journal entries during snack time. They each had spent time in a “Secret Place”, observing the natural world around them, drawing pictures, writing sentences using vocabulary words, and playing. I was so pleased to see this, and told them that they were following in the footsteps of Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau, Beatrix Potter and many, many others — very important thinkers and learners.
What do we need to learn from Nature? So much. I have a page on this blog called “Spiritual Lessons from Nature”. Click on the link just under the header if you’re curious about them.
Some things I’ve learned about Nature: it’s powerful and deserving of respect.
It’s complex and autonomous.
It’s vast and largely incomprehensible.
It’s older than anyone can imagine.
It’s more detailed than anyone can see.
Humans are just one small leaf on the great Tree of Life. That’s always good to remember.
Mayapple
Thanks to Patti for hosting this challenge and for sharing stunning photos of Fiji.
Flower of the Day – June 11
scillagrace 