Meanwhile, Back in the Garden...

The Echinacea are starting to bloom; last week I watched them form their crowns, which really do look like crowns and kept telling myself to go and get the camera. But I kept drinking my coffee and watching the clouds roll by. And when I was finally in the garden with the camera I needed to find some that hadn’t open fully. They thrill me these plants, I love their structure, the way they open peeling back layers to reveal themselves, I love the gray / green of the leaves and the hairy bits around each petal. Then there is the amazing pattern of the cone, the golden section in all its perfection.

the centre, echinacea, 2014

tiny spiders web, echinacea,2014

the cone of spirals, echinacea, 2014

forming the crown, echinacea, 2014

At The Pond

Signs of winter are in fast retreat. Bits of dirty snow lying about, mostly close the the edge of the woods. The ice on the pond gets darker by the day and is pulling back from the edges. I can hardly wait to hear the peepers. The beech trees are beginning to shed their leaves, which have given me such pleasure all winter, as their color fades to transparent. The tall stocks of echinacea have lost most of their seed leaving behind the broken heads denuded of bristles.The pond ice is beginning to show cracks, traversing its width and length. More beautiful marks to watch.

At the pond, March 20

This One is for Matthew

When I was an art student I had a love affair with ortho film. It was a very high contrast black and white film. Then I moved on to photocopy machines where the image degraded with each copy until you got a very high contrast image rather like ortho. But in the last fifteen years or so photocopy machines have become so good that you can no longer get this effect, which is when I started to use the camera and computer. All this preamble leads me back to black and white and meeting Matthew Beale, a photographer, painter and friend whose photographic work continues to inspire me. Check out his web -site here, or his Blog here. I love how saturated the blacks are, maybe velvety is a better word. I always want to touch his photos.

And my love affair with echinacea continues. Every stage of this plants' life is a marvel. The emergence of the leaves to the forming of the flower head. The budding process with the formation of the crown to the withering away and exposing the bare seed head. A plant of great structure and beauty, it has wonderful medicinal purposes. Like so many I use it all winter to boost my immune system.

The Crown

I have been watching this grow for the past week and finally realized last night what it reminded me of; a crown. It's another view of echinacea. But something is bothering me, I am sure I have seen this image or a similar image before. Does any one have any ideas? My memory says it was a drawing so am off to persue some of my books. Maybe The Hortus Eystettensis. I have a very condensed; make that very, very, condensed version and have put it on my wish list. Maybe Taschen have brought out a facsimile. No, I just checked, off to buy a lottery ticket.

Crown of an echinacea

Echinacea

This is not what I started out to write about, but after spending the day ironing, so to speak, my encaustics, and looking out the window rather longingly at the garden, and noticing the change in the echinacea, and telling myself I better get some photos before the shapes were gone for another year; I finally did get some photos and I think you can see why I didn't dare wait another day. The pattern is incredible, can you see the S in the second photo?, so is the color, as the bud looks chartreuse and green to me and I know the petals will be a soft magenta and the crown will be a deep, dark almost black, and I think I should stop this sentence right now.

Echinacea

"S" pattern