Here’s a collection of spring flowers photos I took that I neglected to post here. Some nice ones here. We’ve since painted the old barn (well, my mother-in-law did).
Tag: flowers
The rose tree is my favorite feature of my property. Last year I wrote about it, how old, old rose vines have climbed their way up a tree, perhaps a cherry or a dogwood, and in Spring the roses bloom and the whole tree is full of hot pink flowers, and the perfume they put off is thick in the air.
It’s natural Zen, something made that usually isn’t. Though it couldn’t be anything but what it is, the rose tree, two stories high, blooming with color and fragrance and peace.
There’s good, simple good in the world, simple beauties evolving over years, like a young rose vine that decades ago inched up a tree trunk and inched and bloomed and inched and bloomed for years, so many years before I moved to Long Island and got in the habit of looking forward to spring so I could empty my head under the rose tree. …
This year I’ve snapped more photos with a new camera. But click here to see the photos from last year.
These are last of my summer flower pics, and though I can’t say they are the best ones I took, I can say the actual moment when I took them was one of the best of the summer.
I credit the wind.
It was a warm summer day, late afternoon, and I had walked outside of my in-law’s house because I had noticed a set of flowers I hadn’t photographed yet, a bush full of flowing purple hibiscus.
Then, when I started taking photos a warm wind kicked up, ruffling the petals of the flower like cotton sheets hanging on a clothesline. It was so quiet outside that i could hear the wind scrubbing my hair. And though the air coursed around me like rapids split by a river boulder, it felt like I too was bending in the wind with the tissue-paper petals.
The joys of the moment. A still joy. A peaceful joy. A summer joy.
I’ll miss it, but the season will return. Now it’s time to dig into fall.
Enjoy the photos.
A little help here would be appreciated.
Judging by the smell of the following vine I’ve photographed, which climbs up the corner of my house, this is some kind of jasmine. It’s a pretty unmistakable fragrance.
However, though a few Internet searches have led me to believe this is some kind of star jasmine, there is one difference I just can’t overlook. Star jasmine flowers have five petals, while the one I photographed only has four.
In fact, I can’t find any four-petal jasmine flowers online. But, trust me, these little white flowers smell like jasmine.
So, if you happen to be, or know, a flower expert, I could use your help.
What is this?
Here’s another batch of photos that I’m quite happy with. It’s been one of my favorite activities to take photos of flora after, or sometimes during, a rain. In addition to the great colors of the flowers, twigs, branches or leaves, the droplets or irregular coating or mist add texture and often a sense of movement to the shots.
Some of the “wet” photos have ended up in earlier posts, such as the recent butterfly bush one and the one that featured collection I shot at Channing Daughters Winery several weeks ago.
However, the following are the bulk of what’s left of the nature-themed wet photos. I’ve also taken a series of soaked man-made items, but those photos I’ll save for later.
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This is one of my favorite plants, one I draw a lot of symbolism from.
The butterfly bush gets its name because its phallus-like clusters of fragrant flowers drive butterflies wild, and at all times one can find the bugs with the painted wings drinking from the blossoms. Unfortunately, it also is a bumblebee magnet, so whenever I move the lawn, one of the yellow-striped menaces dive bombs my scalp as I putt by on the tractor.
The bush on my yard is actually two bushes, one with white flowers and the other with purple. All summer long, a blossom grows, turns to seed and dies, leaving the carcass of the flower behind, and then another one grows out just above the dead one, and goes through the same cycle. It’s that effect which always gets me thinking. It’s like the bush makes a point of hanging on to its dead flower. It’s like us. Our memories, though they have lost the life they once had when they were happenin, hang off of us, reminding us of once-living past, but not necessarily getting in the way of the new blooms of our lives. We carry it all with us, the new and the old, the alive and the defunct, growing all the way.
I’ve been working on a poem to that effect. I’ll share it when I’m done.
Meanwhile, enjoy the photos. I shot both the white and purple blooms, and even included a shot of one of the dead appendages. I shot some of the photos just after a rain storm, and I love how the beads of water look on the flowers.
Enjoy.
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One of the first plants my wife and I planted at our home, lining the front porch, were short, young, big-leaved hosta plants. And though the first year they grew greener and wider, and then shriveled and detached from the earth in the late fall into winter, my wife assured me they’d come back next year.
They did, only, this time they bore flowers. These white little bells, with starburst tips, stood nearly three feet high.
Who knows what they will look like next year?
The photos came out well. I took them one dim afternoon, and you can see the porch blurred in the background.
Enjoy.
There was a time (a month, actually) where I posted on this blog every day. Sure, it took signing up with National Blog Posting Month to get me to do it, but I like to believe my life was also more cooperative then.
Now, that just isn’t so, and as a frost keeps threatening to make me finally fold up my short-sleeved shirts for the season, I find I still have a stack of summer photos I had intended to have posted by now. So, it’s time to get caught up.
I was initially waiting to post a lot of these with companion poems I am writing, but since my free time is so much less these days since I have an infant (something you shouldn’t consider a complaint from me – fatherhood is bliss), I’m going to post them. The poems will come, but I need to move on. I’ve already started taking fall photos.
I’ll start with a rather large gallery of assorted flowers taken in the summer. Some are wild, some are ornamental, some are vivid, and some are delicately muted – the panoply of summer in the Northeast.
I hope you enjoy them.
