Tag: flowers

screened flowers

Late this morning, as I went to the kitchen to get a cup of tea, my eyes were caught by the glow of bright colors from the window. Theo had planted some seeds as part of a project in his pre-K class, and they grew into some marigold flowers. Most amazing to me is that John has been watering them, and they not only grew into plants, but are still alive these many weeks and even months later. This is especially remarkable because the only plants that have historically stayed alive in this house have originated in neglected vegetables.

In any case, it was not the survival of the plants that caught my attention, but the interesting patterns produced by the sunlight coming through the screen, casting shadows across the unexpectedly colorful dying leaves and shriveling blooms. I love the warped grid pattern that emerged on so many of the leaves and petals.

I went for my camera, as I knew the light and focus would be too tricky for my phone. I wanted to capture the glow of the plant, and the strikingly patterned leaves, so this was a job for manual focus.

Even with manual focus, it was tricky, but I enjoyed looking through the results.

poppies

Since I seem to be on a run of posting old photos of flowers (and flowers from my in-laws’ house, at that), I figured this would be a good day to post these photos of poppies.¹ The top photo with the close-up of a poppy bud, with its fuzziness glowing in the sunlight, is one of my favorites. These photos were taken in May of 2011.

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¹I only learned of the symbolism of poppies for Remembrance Day in recent years. Poppies seem to have a very complicated and often controversial coexistence with humans.

flower, bee, ants

Here’s another flower I came across when hunting for a rose to post on Friday This bright pink flower is another from my in-laws’ house, this time from out in the yard. More interesting to me than the flower, though, was the activity that was going on inside it: a shiny green bee and a bunch of tiny ants were hanging out, collecting pollen, or nectar, or whatever goodies the flower had to offer. (Maybe it was really free beer and pizza. I’m not a botanist, though, so I can’t be sure.)

dandelion and rose (friday foto finder: rose)

This week’s friday foto finder challenge was to find and share a photo for the theme of “rose.” This actually was more of a challenge than I expected. While I take many photos of flowers, either I don’t encounter roses often, or am less likely to be drawn to them to take pictures. I think it’s a little of each. Given my recent run on sharing leaf photos, in a perfect world I’d have constructed some roses out of maple leaves. But, alas, I was busy with other things, and our yard mostly has dried oak leaves, anyhow.

In any case, a moderate amount of digging through my photo library didn’t reveal any photos of roses that inspired me. But in my search for photos I’d tagged as flowers, I did come across many photos of dandelions. This particular one caught my eye: the dandelion is sitting on my mother-in-law’s floral patterned table cloth. Sitting, in fact, right next to the image of a rose. A rose-colored rose, even. So that’s about as close to rose as I’m going to get just now.

You can see a lot more of this particular little dandelion in a series of photos I posted a couple of years ago. I used a bellows in those, letting me get up really close and personal with the dandelion.

For more rosy photos, stop and smell the roses at the fff blog.

the other corpse plant

This afternoon, as I walked Phoebe down our road to a neighbor’s house for a playdate, a strange plant caught my eye on the roadside. Emerging from the brown fallen leaves were some bundles of waxy-looking stalks with what looked like bell-shaped flowers on top. They were almost totally white. I don’t just mean that the flowers were white. The whole plant was white: stems, leaves and flowers. All white.

I bent down to take a few photos with my trusty iPhone. After chatting with my neighbor about school supply lists and other exciting news, I completely forgot about the weird plant.

This evening, I remembered. A quick google search (for “white plant”) led me to the identification of the Monotropa uniflora, also known as Indian Pipe (they do look sort of pipe-like), ghost plant (they definitely look on the ghostly side) as well as corpse plant.

When I did a google search for “corpse plant,” however, I was greeted not by images of this guy, but by stories about the more famous, but similarly nicknamed, corpse flower. In case you missed hearing about it, the corpse flower is a giant flower that blooms only every few years, and not even on a regular schedule at that. Sometimes it will go a decade or more between blooms. But it is not its blooming timeline or even its massive size (8 feet tall!) for which the titan arum gets its fame, but from its smell: it is said to smell like a rotting corpse. The corpse flower was in the news quite a bit last month, as one living in the United States Botanic Garden Conservatory in Washington DC bloomed, bringing in over 130,000 visitors to sample the putrescent delights of this this olfactory oddity with their own nostrils. (Boston has one, too, apparently, but I have neither seen nor smelled it. I am tickled that it is named Morticia, though, and hope to visit her someday.)

Anyhow, this post is (mostly) not about that corpse flower, but the less famous, and much less smelly flowering corpse plant. While not nearly as dramatic, it is still a bit of a botanical oddity. This plant, you see, has no chlorophyll. As such, it is not able to produce its own food, but must live off of other plants. Specifically, it lives off certain trees and fungi. Unlike many fungi, which give something back to the host trees on which they live, the corpse plant only takes. It is parasitic. And I’m thinking kind of vampiric.

I hope to go back another day with my real camera to get some clearer shots, but I don’t know how long these things bloom. Apparently they will dry out and turn black fairly soon. I find it remarkable that I had never seen them before, nor heard of them. From what I can tell, they are fairly rare. I suppose that it caught my eye due to my recently heightened roadside plant awareness–we are always keeping our eyes open to avoid stepping in a tangle of poison ivy (which is lush and green and sadly, not rare at all).

Spring renewal

First of all, thank you for your supportive words and thoughts on my post of a few days ago. Your comments, and the knowledge of your support, meant a lot to me. While the interceding days were far from what I would consider either restful or productive, I am feeling more like myself. I expect that it will take a long time to process the major events of the past few weeks. Perhaps I will have time to process some of my thoughts here, perhaps not.

In the meantime, I will do what I so often do: share a few unrelated photos.

Exactly a month ago, we welcomed the official start of Spring in the the northern hemisphere. However, in my own neck of the woods, Spring was heralded by snow. More snow. The crocuses I had seen beginning to emerge were buried. By the next day, the crocuses began to emerge through the snow. And within a few more days, the ground was (mostly) clear of snow, and the crocuses bloomed.

This photo was taken with my camera. For some reason, it has trouble with the particular hue of purple of the crocuses, and they appear bluer here than in real life. That sounds like a metaphor if ever there was one.

Here is a photo of those same crocuses, taken with my iPhone, looking more purple. (There is something wrong with the structure of that last sentence, but I have a headache, and can’t sort it out. Probably something to do with attachment ambiguity.)

I loved the sharp shadows cast by these little cobalt blue flowers in a neighbor’s yard. I do wish my iPhone had done better with the focus, here. My real camera could have done better with the focus set to manual, but I didn’t have it with me.

We have some very resilient periwinkle in our yard. It was here when we moved in. A few years ago, we had a landscape designer rework our front yard, and her plans included removing the periwinkle. I’m not sure exactly why, but I was happy to let her run with her vision. (I believe she was aiming to use native plants as much as possible, and vinca are not native to the US.) The periwinkle was removed and some new trees and shrubs were planted. Soon enough, though, the periwinkle came back up. But I was not unhappy to see it come back. I realized that I quite like its shiny green evergreen leaves, and its bright little purple flowers.

These are moss spore capsules, which shoot up in the spring, and will disappear soon.

More flowers, cheerful-looking narcissus, from the neighbor’s yard. (I was going to say they were cheerful, rather than cheerful-looking, but I don’t have any insight into their mood. For all I know, they could be quite grumpy.)

So, there you go. Cheery looking flowers.

marginal progress

The temperatures got quite warm yesterday afternoon, thankfully, and much of the snow on our driveway melted. When I checked for the crocuses again today, they were bravely poking up through the snow.

Crocuses at 8:30 a.m. 3 spikes have poked out of the snow. (Actually, there are more spikes off camera.)

As for me, I confess that today I’m feeling snowed under (though it’s not the snow that’s doing it). I ran up against a wall with an experiment I’m designing (which is not actually about running up against walls), and then decided to switch gears and work on a different work project (which is not about gears, or switching them). Only to find that I’d managed not to save the file I’d worked on the last time I worked on the project. And another file for a different project to boot. (There were no boots.) I spent a fair amount of time hunting for the files, before determining that I had to retrace my steps. (Though there was no actual stepping). I spent a fair amount of time swearing at myself. (You can bet that there was actual swearing.)

It did not feel like a productive day.

On the bright side, the crocuses are making some progress.

Crocuses at 5:30 p.m., from a slightly different angle. You can see a 4th purple spike just emerging in the middle of the 3.

late fall in the garden

These are some photos of the plants in my in-laws’ front garden from today. While spring and summer gardens are certainly pretty, I find the late fall withering to be more interesting.


This maple leaf interloper looks like it’s trying to fit in with the ivy.

Also, can I just say that I am really impressed with how well my iPhone camera does with these fairly macro shots? There was a lot going on in preparation for this trip, and I totally forgot to bring my camera.

quelques fleurs du Jardin des Plantes

I never ended up posting a lot of the photos I took on my trip to France and Germany in 2007, so I’m taking this daily posting as an excuse to share some of them.

These are from Le Jardin des Plantes (or “The Garden of Plants”), which is a large (and I do mean large) botanical garden in Paris, France.

The main garden path.
The main garden path.

Yellow flowers. White and orange flower.
orange Deep red flowers.
Purple flowers. White flowers.
Various colors of flowers. I have no idea what kind any of these are. Well, the red ones look sort of chrysanthemum-like to me, and the yellow ones look daisy-like.


Gray flower. (Okay, it’s a drain. But it’s flower-shaped, and I thought it was cool.)

The dragon.
There was also a big dragon, made out of recycled materials.

The claw of the dragon, showing the aluminum can scales.
Here’s a close-up of the claw of the dragon, showing its aluminum can scales.

Yes, the cans are what made me think of these photos, what with my preceding two can-related posts. I was going to post them yesterday, but was deflected from this path by the reflection theme. A reflection defection, as it were. Oddly enough, it was not the garden path that led me astray. I guess it was just something else shiny.