Plants | charlie easterfield

I was at a garden centre yesterday with my dear friend Bridget, and we drooled over trellis’s draped with Jasmine….80 euro a pop! We sadly turned from them, the scent lingering around us, and we made more modest purchases.
I thought of the Jasmine outside my front door, that I had been aware of somewhat neglecting to trim and water, so this morning I decided to feed and water it…and was assailed by that glorious sweet scent! On looking up I saw a tangle of newly opened flowers that I hadn’t even noticed.

Having burnt-out my back when building my house, I took an aversion to balancing up ladders, but having got up there I found the Jasmine was twined around the party lights I’d forgotten were there. Grubby, covered in cobwebs, a sorry state.

Diversion to switch them on…all but the last 2 ft lit up! Jeez, it must be nearly seven years since my last party…time to plan another one!

Unravelling the twining strands was a pernickity job, but so pleasing when you’re surrounded by that heady scent!

Tied up over the door that opens, ready to come down the side on the right…

And on the other side, strung to grow horizontally.

A shot of Multi Blue Clematis, for Bridget…Not a true portrayal of the colour, but I don’t like tweaking colours in Photoshop.

Also for Bridget, Sambucca and Clematis ‘The President’….the photo doesn’t show the electric, vibrant colours together.

The President Obama bit: ( a personal rant…)

Who is this inflamatory Obama we’re hearing, ….starting up another Cold War?

Is he needing new bases to send soldiers to, when they withdraw from Afghanistan?

Giving self-interested reasons (David Cameron’s if not his own), as to why Scotland should stay in Britain….like, the patronising reasons are REALLY going to persuade Scottish voters….(Take your tongue out of your cheek, Charl!).

I promised cobwebs….this is my Website.

Allium Christophii seed heads….one bulb will produce a new and larger head every year…..I don’t mind cobwebs, because spiders catch flys….but I really ought to clean up the ones over the cooker!

And a last blast of my love affair with colour, the light above my stairs, inside an old bird cage.

And so to bed.

This post had a rake more text…but it became increasingly like a Victorian slum…..words like grotty piles of broken bricks in dark alleyways, leading nowhere. Detours into derelict buildings with glimpses through broken glass…barefoot ideas vanishing around tenement corners; so I’ve kept the Fleeting Beauty, and a bit about Photography, the Losing my Marbles bit doesn’t bear a rewrite!

My all-time favourite cartoonist…Michael Leunig.

Some mornings I wake far too early, and the head nips pathologically….somedays I can silently ‘sing’ myself back to sleep, but on ‘bad head nip’ days I just have to get up and get on with summat…(funny how the “summat” is never yesterday’s washing up! ). So, some sorting of my favourite plant photographs.

My favourite flower, the Himalayan Poppy.

Tissue paper thin petals, short lived, but so beautiful!

Perhaps equally beautiful, the incredibly architectural Michauxia Tchihatcheffii…a biennial that I haven’t been able to find seeds of, for a year or two.

From the swelling bud to the profusion of bursting open flowers, and then the seed pod, it’s an amazingly sculptured plant.

Then there’s the wonderful Stipa Barbata Silberfeder…(must mean silver feather, eh?!) As the seeds mature on their long awns (?), the awns get hairs and go all curly…the breeze makes pure calligraphy and choreography of them…there’s a wee stretch of stalk between the seed and the awl, which is corkscrew in form. As the awn floats down, the spiralling movement “bores” the seed into the earth…magic design! I’ve grown a lot from seed, planted out this year as 2 year olds, so I’m excited to see how they’ll look en masse, in July or August.

S.B. 22 curled round Agapanthus DSCF4096

The hairy awns coiled round an Agapanthus.

Whilst trawling through the hundreds of photographs I have in my computer, to find the Michauxia photo’s from 2012, I was thinking about how digital photography has many advantages, and some drawbacks….

I feel nostalgic when I remember learning black and white photography in 1969; there were 24 or 36 pictures to a film roll, and film was precious so we didn’t snap away with abandon. We couldn’t check whether we had “caught” what we wanted to, so we learnt to really LOOK, to frame the image…did we want the background in focus or out? Should we take it from a higher or lower angle, or change the lens?….it was slow, and needed concentration.Then came the different mysterious realms of the Darkroom….First, in complete darkness, you loaded the film from it’s cartridge into the developing tank..then turned the light back on , nervous to see that it was loaded properly. We developed the negatives, hung them to dry, and, finally, you had the delights of the printing room….with it’s warm, red glow…a womb with a view? !
Decisions to be made: Exposure time, then Developer, watching the image magically appear, into the Stop, into the Fixer, Patience, Patience…… then Dry…..more Patience. And maybe, just sometimes, you had a photograph that you loved.
Now we shoot off loads of shots, make adjustments in Photoshop…..(although I’m quite purist about how much I tweak photos), and I have so many photos that many never get seen….

A last couple of photos, the glorious Magnolias, Stellata and Soulangier.

And a beautiful, white Eremurus…

On to the Losing My Marbles bit!

…………they’ve gone. They might roll back….

As a Liverpudlian poet wrote way back,

“After a whole moon-walking night, succesful re-entry into earth’s orbit is each tomorrow’s ‘maybe’ “.

	Dennis Berry on A post for Orphans, Obsessives…
	charlie on A post for Orphans, Obsessives…
	charlieeasterfield on A post for Orphans, Obsessives…
	Dennis Berry on A post for Orphans, Obsessives…
	charlieeasterfield on The Supermoon, Social Media, G…

charlie easterfield

Heart, Hearth, Earth, Art.

Tag Archives: Plants

Jasmine, Scents, Cobwebs and President Obama.

Fleeting Beauty, Photography, and Losing my Marbles..