I can’t recall exactly where this photograph was taken, except it was one of those lovely large houses with lovely large gardens somewhere in Kent, and it was a sunny day in 2015 and we were just mooching about enjoying the view. The breeze was doing nice things to the surface of the water, with the flowers of the water lilies looking very tastefully scattered. Click!
Also known as umbrella pines or parasol pines, the proper name for these iconic Roman trees is Pinus pinea, photographed here in 2018, and looking like streamers of greenish smoke or low-lying clouds. Amazing things.
Taken back in the early Summer of 2020, an astonishing expanse of oxeye daisies in an otherwise overlooked field, where both the light and the breeze produced lovely, impressionistic effects. A magical space.
Taken at the height of summer in our garden in 2022, a blast of colour for these first few days of boring old February. What have we got here? Salvias, rudbeckias and heleniums mostly. Boom!
More old-school 35mm flower photographs from the early 2000s or thereabouts, celebrating the gorgeous blues, pinks and purples of centaureas, and here, served two ways: the first being an image of the field cornflower, Centaurea cyanus, and the second, Centaurea montana, or perennial cornflower. Both press my buttons and produce an impatience in my January bones for a lovely blast of heat.
A welcome reminder of what is to come as we trudge through January… As with many of these horticultural photographs, taken back in the day on 35mm, I have no record of the when or where of their original provenance. If pushed, I’d say these images of a flowering dogwood were likely taken at the arboretum at Mount Ephraim, Faversham in late Spring c. 2007/8. You can’t appreciate it from these close-up images, but when this tree does its thing, it’s smothered in these showy bracts, making for a demure, yet rather spectacular sight.
These photographs of the glorious foliage of a Staghorn sumac tree were taken in the garden belonging to my late grandmother at some point in the mid-2000s – can’t remember when exactly, though I remember actually taking the pictures themselves; walking down the flight of enclosed concrete steps that led down from Grandma’s first floor flat and out into the garden at the back, where this tree opened out from a small central bed like a festive umbrella.
This photograph was taken just minutes before we opened our garden to the public as part of last year’s National Garden Scheme shindig; the view here is of our little patch of seating space outside the kitchen, not usually as packed out with plants as this, but not far off.
A final set of studies produced in response to The Kick-About No.42 – more Clematis tangutica seed heads entombed in a hemisphere of ice, but producing some pleasingly painterly impressions and lots and lots of swirl.
The seed heads of Clematis tangutica ‘My Angel’ are extraordinary silvered whirligigs. The plant itself is a bit of a thug, quite at odds with its name, scrambling greedily for many metres in our small garden. Right now, from our bathroom window, I can see the seed heads sitting across the fence like a thick fall of snow. I thought they’d make perfectly aquatic-like specimens for the deep freeze treatment, so I picked a few handfuls and popped them in the freezer overnight. The resulting winteryness of some of the resulting photographs, snapped in response to The Kick-About No.42, probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise (given all the ice!), but in some there is the feel of blizzards and powdered snow; in others, there are shoals of silvery sea-creatures.
Red's Kingdom 