Flowers are a great comfort. They don’t make a noise, they don’t complain, you can come and go as you like because they don’t need you and, most of all, they give unstinting pleasure because they have intrinsic beauty.
Flowers are also a bridge between science and art. Many plants are used in the progress of medicine and yet we can simply just gaze on their fleeting, physical beauty for what it is and feel the emotions that well up from that experience. They inspire poetry, literature and painting. In the scientific world, they are made up of fractals. They probably hold the meaning of the universe in their petals … both simple and massively complex.
Flowers mirror human beings with their biodiversity. If only some human beings knew how to be silent at times … but with all the horror of 2016 on our planet I am uplifted by the mere existence of the resilience of flowers and of their perfumes.
‘To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’
(William Wordsworth – “Intimations of Mortality” 1807)
Springtime – Pheasant Eye
Deborah’s freesias
Paeony – a fragile beauty
Virginals
The enchantress
City spring flowers in Embankment Gardens 1
City spring flowers in Embankment Gardens 2
Printemps – birthday flowers – not quite in focus but it was my birthday!
Flowering planet
Monet to Matisse RA exhibition catalogue. I went to this exhibition three times … and took three different friends
Yellow flags – Barnes Pond
Home is a crack in the wall …
Early comma butterfly with bluebells – I hope it survived those fickle days of Spring …
An uncommon blue butterfly – Barnes
Couldn’t resist these Monet/Renoir colours! Summer by the towpath along the Thames …
Magical astrantia
Reed beds – Barnes
Leg o’ Mutton small reservoir by towpath, Barnes
Blue box outside Sonny’s restaurant
Sunflowers – I remember fields of them in France, all turning their faces the same way towards the sun – hence their name – Tournesol …
Complementary colours… wilder side of the geranium family …
Mallow in Barnes – cousin to the more exotic hibiscus. This stalwart shrub is over forty years old.
Wild grasses and horsetail. Horsetail is full of silica and brilliant for cleaning silver … and very primeval too.
Shy blue poppy – Meconopsis – grown in my garden …
A Barnes window box
Exotica grown by Tom Hart Dyke at Lullingstone castle in Kent
Summerhouse reflections …
Enveloped by roses – Malvern Hills
By the bank of the Thames …
Wild flowers at Barnes Pond
In a Cotswold village …
At Syon Park 1
At Syon Park 2
Elegant, paper thin, white lilies …
Clematis tangutica …
Leg o’ Mutton reservoir
A mysterious corner of the garden – trembling grasses and daisies …
Nasturtiums are very hardy and spread like wildfire – with vibrant colour…
Shades of Autumn …
Dried petals
“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.”
W. Shakespeare – “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”