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This evening, I replaced the site banner with a new picture I took in my back yard. The old banner, below, was a crop of an orchid from my Atlanta Botanical Gardens pictures, which you can find in my Flickr collection.
The flower buds in the new banner image are close-ups of some pink Kalanchoe that I planted in pots and placed on the steps leading to my back yard. I’ve taken so many pictures, especially close-ups, of flowers and buds back there that I barely have time to look through them all. I cropped five for possible use as a new banner, and settled on the Kalanchoe because, if you look closely at the bloom that’s the focal point of the picture, it looks like there’s a tiny face in there … the face of a garden sprite, I have no doubt.
Two of the other candidates were these yellow and black ladybugs. Considering how small they are, the pictures came out quite sharp, showing decent detail of the black spots on their yellow wings, and even — in the second picture — the eyes and mouth. Well, I guess that’s what they are, anyway.
I like this picture quite a bit; I took it in March just as my Japanese Maple was putting out some new leaves. It seems evocative of spring, I think, especially with the slightly blurry nature of the leaf’s edges and the way it caught the sunlight. This wasn’t an accident, of course; it was total creativity. Totally….
This fine fellow appeared at the edge of my pond shortly after I moved into my house three years ago, and he’s been back every spring since. I’m not sure where he goes all winter long, and I was pretty lucky to get this shot that shows the detail as well as it does — especially the look in his eyes. You can’t really tell from the image, but his body is about the size of a man’s large fist.
He’s not easily intimidated by my presence, not even a little bit. Late last summer, he was resting so still in the ivy behind my pond that I thought he was dead and picked up a six-inch long stick to poke him with — you know, as a test. He flipped around, grabbed the stick out of my hand with his mouth — jumped with it still in his mouth, into the pond. I almost expected him to surface with the stick and throw it at me….
. I’m sorry to hear about plumbing problems at your house. I’m pretty sure that it is a quite distraction when you hope to be able to spend times on other interesting...