A beautiful little spider sits in the middle of its web.
Suspended
13
Category Archives: garden
By evening’s light
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807)
All of these images were taken in my garden yesterday evening.
Robber fly
This fine fellow is machimus atricapillus, the Robber Fly. He perches waiting for a hapless and punier insect to fly by and then darts out – game over. He is not fussy in his choice of perch, even making use of handy humans, but he does not bite people. Here, he is enjoying a spot of evening sun in my garden.
Gasteruption jaculator
This bizarre creature is gasteruption jaculator. Whoever named it should be banned forthwith from all future namings. I am grateful to afrenchgarden for the I.D. I was wrongly was calling it a sand digger wasp. I have never seen one in my garden before this year. Yesterday I noticed one feeding on fennel pollen but was unable to get a decent shot before it flew away. So, today, I returned to the fennel plant at the same time of day and, low and behold, there it was. And I was delighted to be able to capture it in flight!
It is an elegant creature with its long spike looking not unlike a cigarette holder from the 1920s (or is that just me?). I am assuming this is the female. Her consort, a much smaller beast without cigarette holder, is below. (It’s a lousy shot, I know, but illustrative.)
For an earlier post on other wasps found in my garden, see here.
The weekend summer arrived
This weekend, summer finally arrived in our little corner of the British Isles. And with it came the butterflies. This Comma (polygonia c-album) just loved the verbena bonariensis in my garden.
I played around with the image in Photoshop. Well, why not?
It was a tatty fellow, even for a Comma, with a notch out of its rear right wing, but that didn’t seem too much of a handicap.
The honey bees were enjoying the verbena too. Nice to see some more about today. They have not enjoyed our very wet and cold weather.
How did you enjoy the weekend? I hope yours was as good as mine. 🙂
Candy-striped leafhopper
This curious little critter is a rhododendron leafhopper (graphocephala fennahi) nymph. I snapped several shots of it in my garden today. It has excellent eyesight and flipped to the underside of its leaf every time I approached. I liked the softness of this shallow depth of field capture.
This is what it will look like later in the summer, when it is full-grown. The adults can fly short distances and make tricky subjects for the camera as they are very flighty and see me coming far too quickly. Although they do little damage to the rhododendron host themselves, outbreaks of a type of rhododendron mould have been connected with infestations of these pretty little critters. But I have to say, they have happily co-existed with my rhododendrons for the ten years we have been here and I consider them a colourful and welcome addition to my garden.
Tough love works
I have had this agapanthus (African Lily) plant in the same pot for about fifteen years. I never feed it. I rarely water it. And every year it puts on a show, content with the neglect, giving me more flowers every time.
I like the way the flowers emerge, stretching out after being crammed in their papery buds.
And then there they are, more buds! As if they are teasing, withholding their beauty for one more moment.
Finally, one flower opens, china blue, like the sky on a sunny day (I dimly remember those!)
And, when the flowers are done, fat black seeds hang encased in silvery pods, happy to self seed without my having to lift a finger.
But, I wonder if you can guess the biggest reason for liking my faithful pot of African Lilies:
Serendipitous bumble bee
One of my faults as a photographer is my workflow management. I snap away, loving the moment, upload a host of shots, pick the best one of the day and leave the rest to languish, neglected on my hard drive. But sometimes I happen across a rejected shot and find I like it. Perhaps such happy accidents make the chaos worthwhile. Anyway, this afternoon I happened across this forgotten shot from the Spring, and I was glad.
Do you live, like me, in a state of photographic disorder, or are your files neatly honed, indexed, and double backed up?
Mayfield Lavender
I enjoyed a brief trip this morning, in the company of friends, to photograph the lavender at Banstead. The heavens soon opened but, for a few minutes, it was perfect.
A recycled habitat
A recycled forest in the heart of Montreal’s Eaton Centre.
Last summer, while in Montreal on holiday, we visited the Eaton Centre and came across an art installation made from recycled waste materials from the shopping centre. Called Fragile, it was the work of Roadsworth and Brian Armstrong. Given access to the Centre’s recycling bins over eight months, the artists transformed the retail centre into an ecosystem.
Cardboard trees with soda can leaves.
Bubble wrap salmon leap up a plastic bottle stream.
Cardboard lily pad with plastic bottle and coat hanger frog.
Coat hanger dragonflies with cellophane wings.
Strolling through the recycled garden.
“When you present something playfully, or even satirically, you create a space where people can drop their defences. When you manage to do this, you can reach them at a level at which they’ll be receptive to what you have to say.”
— Peter Gibson (a.k.a. Roadsworth)
Focused Moments 