Fall colors making an appearance near The Beauty Spot, TN.
September
macrophotography
Garden Poppies
Playing around with evening light and the poppies growing in my garden.
(Also realizing it’s time for me to figure out how to clean the sensor on my camera.)
Garden Critters and Blooms
Flying Cloud Farm is only 6 miles from my apartment. They have community UPick flower fields, so I find myself there with my macro lens pretty often.
Here are some shots of my garden from earlier in the week. The tomatoes in the front bed are about two feet taller than I am right now and I think collectively they threaten to bring down the stakes. Next year I’ll opt for metal instead of wood.
My first dahlia bloomed! (!!!!!!!!)
Ammi and zinnias.
Not pictured below: the squash and the cucumbers that won’t stop growing.
Pictured below: very tasty pickles.
Garden critters – including a monarch caterpillar! There are at least 5 of them nestled in the milkweed and we’re all really excited about watching them pupate.
July Parkway Wandering
Rainy June Parkway
Congaree National Park
There is a national park in the middle of nowhere in the middle of South Carolina. Who knew. It’s a pretty cool place with a really neat history. The cypress trees were beautiful. Here are some pics from an afternoon moseying around.
Botanical Garden Blooms
Blooms from the South Carolina Botanical Gardens.
Blue Ridge Parkway in early May
Some pics from a damp evening on the BRP near Mt. Mitchell.
Appalachian Spring Wildflowers: Part 2
Mostly fiddlehead ferns (they’re so sweet and whimsical!), bellwort, chickweed, solomon’s seal, and dwarf crested iris.
Appalachian Spring Wildflowers: Part 1
Some photos from a few different walks in the woods in April. Jack-in-the-pulpit, more spring beauty, trillium, fleabane, more ragwort, dutchman’s breeches, tons of violets, and a beautiful swallowtail I encountered on the trail one evening.
Soft mornings
There is magic in quiet mornings. Mary Oliver sums it up in one of my favorite poems, ‘Softest of Mornings’. (Okay, every poem Mary Oliver ever wrote is my favorite…)
Softest of mornings, hello.
And what will you do today, I wonder,
to my heart?
And how much honey can the heart stand, I wonder,
before it must break?This is trivial, or nothing: a snail
climbing a trellis of leaves
and the blue trumpets of flowers.No doubt clocks are ticking loudly
all over the world.
I don’t hear them. The snail’s pale horns
extend and wave this way and that
as her fingers-body shuffles forward, leaving behind
the silvery path of her slime.Oh, softest of mornings, how shall I break this?
How shall I move away from the snail, and the flowers?
How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?
Up Popped the Crocus
I was walking through a residential neighborhood in West Asheville earlier in the week when I spotted dozens of crocus on the edge of the lawn ahead. I spent a good 30 minutes sitting there on the sidewalk admiring them. : )
It’s amazing the difference a week can make. I did a few neighborhood walks during some time off last week, and here are some other pops of color I saw.
A post from weeks and weeks ago included a pic of a mantid egg sac. It’s still there among the horsetail grass! I looked it up and learned that this mantid sack has probably been there since around the first frost of the season last year. It will hatch sometime after spring begins. I am going to go back and relocate this sweet thing to my daughter’s grandmother’s garden. There will be plenty of things for the nymphs to eat when they emerge and I want to be there with my macro lens to document their growing up. I love mantids. Females that eat their male counterpart are bad ass in my book. ♀
just bees and things and flowers 