beauty underfoot

So this is what happens when you take the Nikon into the garden: you realize even the enslaved plants are...well... plants. Just like the wilder ones.  There are similarities. The corn, for instance, reminds me of grass. 

The same dangly bits. 

And I'm struck by a fractal: the little green and red...leafy bits enclosing the not-yet-exploded flowers (scales? sepals?) Whatever they're called, they're mini-me versions of the husks you strip off an ear of corn. The shape of the unopened flower is the same as that of the ultimate, eventual, ear. 

At this point, I am so clueless about corn that I'm not even sure what I'm looking at. It's a few flowers, I get that - although come to think of it, are the stamens inside these bell-shaped tubes? Are there male and female flowers...on the same plant? different plants? Dunno. Generally speaking, I think that's just a few eventual kernels I'm looking at (assuming they're fertilized), and that the whole long thing itself (most of it out of frame) is the whole ear of corn. I dunno. 

It feels kinda good to be clueless. It means there's some more discovering to do - always a good thing. 

Here's another one - ear? - it's on the same stalk as the more horizontally-oriented one from the picture above. Which makes me think it is, in fact, an ear. I DO know there are multiple ears on a stalk; I've seen that. This is so like plantain (a common lawn weed; where we park our cars is loaded with it) it makes me wonder how closely related they are.

Whoever first domesticated/bred plants really figured some shit out. 

Now here's something adorable, from the other end of the garden bed:

Wee baby peppers.

Lots of them.

Is that not the cutest? I'm kinda fascinated by the striations in the wall of the pepper; they kind of echo the veins in the (sepals?) (the hugging bits). More fractally stuff. I know they'll fade; I don't recall ever seeing a bell pepper with little speckled lines...

Meanwhile, Kevin planted a couple of echinaceas at my request, so's I could have ready access to hallucinogens. 

Oh yeah, baby.

Ah, not even opened up yet. Let's go backwards in time, shall we...

Maybe I should get out in the garden more often. 

coming full circle

A year ago, my husband gave me this camera and my life is forever changed. Instead of believing that cameras present a distraction from experiencing life, I have found that I slow down and see better with a camera in my hands – at least when it comes to the natural world.

This was one of the first pictures I took – coneflower (Echinacea purpurea).
My general life philosophy, particularly over the last couple of years, is to get away from having a general life philosophy. I’m much better than I ever used to be at just letting things unfold. This is not how I used to be: I used to have a mission statement. A grand plan – my own particular spin on saving the planet, basically.  Now? Not so much. Have I given up?
<shrug>
I’m not so interested in attaching an interpretation to the issue.
A Reiki master and teacher named Pamela Miles, whose blog I occasionally delve into for battery recharging, puts it this way:

Which is harder: trying to make up for not feeling special enough, or disciplining yourself to be still long enough to let the experience of special emerge from within you?

Today was a day to get re-grounded. I really needed it: my self-nurturing tank got depleted this week. Part of it was the adjustment to returning to work (I just started a part-time job, after a two year sabbatical). Part of it was that my beautiful sweetpea husband got food poisoning (or so we speculate) Tuesday night, and was out of commission until basically this morning. And part of it was the tragedy that rocked our community this week – the store manager of the Brattleboro Food Co-op was shot and killed, at the Co-op, apparently by a co-worker.
I went into the Co-op today to restock on supplies, and while a videotape wouldn’t show anything out of the ordinary, by the time I was through and getting back into the car, I felt as though I’d been crying for hours. I am either blessed, or cursed, with something I call “tuning fork empathy resonance syndrome”. You could call it poor boundaries, you could call it overactive mirror neurons. Basically, I pick up on other people’s moods and absorb them unconsciously, and it takes me a while sometimes to sort out whose feelings I’m feeling: my own, or other people’s.
The best way to handle it today involved a large container of coffee ice cream and a half batch of chocolate heroin sauce. And now, in poetic irony, I see I have come full circle, because the the blog post in which I share the recipe for this brain damage inducing concoction is dated almost exactly a year ago…and it’s kicked off with that same photo of Echinacea.

feast your eyes

I visited a friend today. Here’s some stuff in her garden.
Morning Glories: it was late afternoon, and they were done opening up for the day.

Waiting for tomorrow to unfold


Late to the party – or, woman in an evening gown?


Done for the day
Unknown species

top down


diving in


side view

Echinacea splendor




a three-bee special




in conclusion:

let the mind blowing begin

We went over to my dad’s house to chop down a shrub that had decided it really wanted to be four, ten-inch diameter 30-foot tall trees. On the way we swung by our friends’ house to borrow their chainsaw. One thing led to another and hanging out commenced. P & J have the beginnings of some excellent plantings going on. Normally I restrict my photographs to Our Wild Flower Friends, but I couldn’t resist.
As they say in Wyoming, “hold my beer and watch this shit”.
First up, some kind of Mexican something something. I forget what these are called.


Like the black-eyed susans, the flowers open up from the outside and work their way to the center.

See?


Take a breath, we’re going to do some day lilies next.






Let’s take a breath and have some delphinium:




And now, a Random Lawn Weed I thought was self-heal, until I looked at the flower. Now I’m not so sure.


Ready for some pansies?

\



And now for some hallucinogenic echinacea:

this first one’s blurry, but the colors so thrill me that I have to share it…


Damn, Universe, Nice Work!
Let’s go back to day lilies for a moment:



This beetle was eating the petal. Not sure what that is on its back.


Preacher, looking far more noble than he probably deserves. He is a sweet soul.
Our time with the chainsaw was profitable. The goal was to free up the view of the Green Mountains from the living room window, as the shrub tree had grown so quickly over the past couple of years that it about completely obscured the view. But there were some added benefits: