Category: My Garden

A Cornucopia of Colour

~ Ruth ~ 10 Comments

This time last year we didn’t even have a garden. We were still living in a first floor one bedroom flat in London with no outside space at all, wondering if we would ever get moved back to Inverness as we hoped. And now here we are the proud owners of a beautiful 1930s bunglow with a mature garden front and back, wondering how we ever got so lucky.

My new long-term life plan is to metamorphose into an old lady who potters about in the garden. Gardens need to be nurtured regularly, and that proactive love and attention inevitably takes time and effort but my aim in the next ten years or so before I retire is to create a garden that remains visually abundant yet is reasonably labour efficient to maintain.

It’s proving to be quite a steep learning curve. A combination of trial and error decisions conducted in a barrage of baby steps and a substantial application of patience. But I’m determined to get there in the end, because I’m finding a garden to be – as long as you apply a consistent level of care and commitment – the gift that keeps on giving, a cornucopia of colour from one end of the spectrum to the other.

These images were all taken in my garden yesterday – almost a full rainbow’s worth in one fell swoop, as long as you apply a little artistic licence with respect to the accuracy of colour banding 🙂

Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Baby

Flower of the Day

Fuzzy Background

~ Ruth ~ 6 Comments

I love the fuzzy background you get from a narrow depth of field – it tells you look, this is the bit of the image I want you to focus on, the rest is just setting and context. Sometimes it’s helpful to be able to see the bigger picture, to look at everything across the frame with equal concentration, but sometimes it’s just too much and distracts too much from the main subject.

Right now in life I feel like I need to focus in on the little bit of world right in front of me, and blur out all the rest into fuzzy obscurity. Not ignore it or pretend it’s not there, but just have it all sitting there blended softly into the background, allowing me to focus sharply on noticing and nurturing the immediate details of my everyday reality closer to home 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Zz