Other People's Flowers

It isn't that I could ever possibly grow bored with the flowers in my garden. But after a while the photographs start to look terribly familiar. The reasonable solution is simply to plant more new and different flowers (while continuing to water and treasure the old.) Instead, or perhaps as a prelude, I walked around my neighborhood and photographed other people's flowers.

Forget-me-nots - completely charming little blue flowers

A fantastically strange cactus plant.

Oxalis, also known as wood sorrel, not buttercups

Spring snowflake, I just learned, and now you know too

Bearded iris. It's definitely in my plans to plant some of these.
Have a look at Macro Monday, courtesy of Lisa's Chaos at lisaschaos.com/macro-monday-dewey-web

Can This Be Winter?

When I said it was a beautiful day at Arlington Garden, this is what I'm talking about. It's nowhere near spring, and yet a hundred different things are blooming. Fruit of the prickly pear cactus.


These seed pods are on one of Yoko Ono's wishing trees. I don't have any idea what became of the wishes, but the trees live on at Arlington Garden. I remember a time when I thought Yoko Ono was not a real artist, but was an opportunistic selfish woman who broke up the Beatles and took John for herself. With more mature eyes, I can see how perfect Yoko was for John; how they exemplified the very best of love, nurturing what was truest and most beautiful in one another. That's a good wish.

After Rain

Nothing sparkles quite like a freshly washed garden.

Life Continues

Seen on a leaf of the pumpkin vine: a pair of gulf fritillaries, ensuring another generation.

Color and Texture

A fall leaf
A spectacular cabbage, and

A remarkable pattern seen on the dead part of an oak tree

Bug Collection

I've always liked bugs. I never ever pinned a bug to board. A few times I've kept them alive in jars, but mostly now I just like to watch them go about their business in the garden.

This is the larva of a gulf fritillary feeding on the passion vine on my back fence.

A monarch, a prince of a caterpillar, munching milkweed along with a little milkweed aphid.

A large milkweed bug; they feed on the seeds of the milkweed.

A beautiful praying mantis girl on a double delight rose. Color untouched.

One of the heirloom roses. You can imagine how big the flower is to support two huge green bugs who are able to ignore one another.
It's Macro Monday here and at Lisa's Chaos.

My Pumpkin Patch

Ask me about my pumpkins. Here's a baby picture.


Where pumpkins come from. My favorite.

And these should give you a sense of the scale.


Me and my pumpkins.

Now and then

Found in my garden

A seven-legged male green lynx spider on the Tahitian Sunset rose

A pear blossom from several weeks ago. Poignant, because none of the pears set, and the whole tree is having a bit of a struggle now. It's tough out there, sometimes, for spiders, for trees, for all of us.

They're for Macro Monday, but I can't seem to add hyperlinks these days.

Macro Miscellany

A young conifer beetle on a passion fruit

A mushroom on the lawn of Eliot Middle School

Roses, Double Delight

Fly on rose. They pollinate flowers too and have some beautiful colors, yet they lack the cachet of butterflies.

Cobb's Grounds

I think this painting might be my best plein air watercolor painting. I think it captures the depth and light changes that attached me to this scene. And it looks kind of competent, rather than pale and tentative or overworked. This was my second painting visit this summer to the Cobb Estate in Altadena.



I photographed some jimson weed, to channel Georgia O'Keefe, and/or give you a give you a sense of the benign eeriness of the place. I also pocketed a heart-shaped rock and took it home. For luck and love and my large collection.

Urban Oasis

Saturday I painted at Vista Hermosa Park near downtown Los Angeles. These are photographs I took there. The painting I made will follow in a day or so.

Vista Hermosa Park is a little like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. In the 1990s, construction got underway on a huge and badly needed new high School and mixed use development in a somewhat tired and blighted part of the city. It was called the Belmont Learning Center. Part way into the building, environmental reports caught up. It turned out that there was serious contamination of the ground owing to oil drilling that went on there in the past. There was also a big old earthquake fault. Not optimal for a school. For years the project stood incomplete. Trees grew up through buildings two stories high. Eventually a smaller high school was built, named for long-time Congressman Edward Roybal. Another new school was built close by at the location of the school district offices. The rest of the land was covered with community soccer fields and a nature park. The park is maintained by Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. Although it's on a steep slope, you couldn't really call it mountains, and it isn't really Santa Monica either. But they do a nice job. It's a marvel to see how much nature recovers and thrives.

Macros submitted for Lisa's Chaos Macro Monday. Wild rose hips, a fruit beetle, a wild rose, and a spider on a spent sage blossom.

Two roses and a weed

More intimate peeks at my backyard. For Macro Monday.

Flora and fauna of home

It's still Monday here

I'm sharing my roses with many katydid nymphs. There are plenty to go around. These look very similar to the grown katydids. The smaller ones look very different and it took me literally years to figure out that they were the same insects.
These katydids haven't yet grown their wings, so they aren't making noise. I can't quite remember how they sound. I listened to sound clips, and they were a little different from the katydids around here. The call is supposed to sound like "katy did," which is where they got the name. I don't really hear that. It is a more complex song than the chirp of the crickets though. A three beat measure.

I've included this because the colors go so well with the picture above. I've also been pretty excited ever since I learned what a scarlet pimpernel is. This lovely little weed. What an odd name for a hero. Damned elusive pimpernel (I quote.) There are more wonderful macros here.

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