I love my red smoke bush. It doesn’t flower, but it always produces wonderful branches with these fabulous red leaves that can glow every auburn colour there is.
This year, like previous recent years, the branches curl round in on themselves to create wonderful red circles.
When it was a lot younger, the branches used to reach sky-high, and I remember after one summer drought the stressed leaves showed glorious patterns that inspired my graphic design business at that time.
I’m fascinated by the structure as well as the beauty of flowers, and often their shapes remind me of different things.
Sea holly, thistle and a poppy that’s lost its petals represent exploding stars, and this daisy and hollyhocks are steadily spherical like a sun.
Are you stimulated into imagination when you look at flowers?
The glorious rays of the sun has to be reflected in spring flowers, and no more so than in these examples.
Forsythia is full flower dominates the hedges, the dandelion faces our celestial star full on, and the gorse glows out from prickly dark green.
Such an intense colour truly shows what wealth we have in nature.
At the beginning of the week we experienced a phenomenon we had almost forgotten what it was like.
The sun came out – for a total of two and a half days.
And with it plant-life sighed in relief and started to progress towards spring, like this dandelion, who without the sun wouldn’t bother opening up.
But now we’ve descended back into grey and rain, with even more snow up in the north. It looks like those halcyon days were merely a taster, just to boost our spirits a little, but in case we were starting to get spoiled, it’s been taken away again.
Oh well, the wait continues.
Watching nature while walking 