A beautiful little spider sits in the middle of its web.
Suspended
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Tag 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. 🙂
The golden lair
Evening light gilds a spider and its web.
The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, I (1733), l.217
All that glisters is not gold,
Often have you heard that told.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, II.vii
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.
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?
For so work the honey bees
For so work the honey bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts,
Where some like magistrates correct at home;
Others like merchants venture trade abroad;
Others like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds,
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold,
The civil citizens kneading up the honey,
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate,
The sad-ey’d justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.
William Shakespeare, Henry V, I.ii
Slow and steady
With perseverance the snail reached the ark.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his heaven –
All’s right with the world!
Robert Browning
Focused Moments 