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Flower phantasy
When I come home in the evening and I am tired, I tend to open a browser and keep clicking on article titles that catch my attention, read a bit of this and a bit of that, and eventually I find myself looking at articles I am actually not interested in at all. And after an hour or two I switch the browser off, being usually angry about wasting so much precious time I could have used for much more useful, needed or creative activities. Do you know that story from your life as well? Here and there it may perhaps be helpful to relax this way and don’t want…
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Playful water lilies
Yesterday I was asked what definition I would assign to a “photograph” and after some pondering, I came up with this: A photograph is a rendering of reality that may be documentary but also emotional, abstract or even somewhat imaginary, yet still preserving the core of that reality. Well, but what is that core, you may ask, it sounds sort of vague. And I would say that it is the hard-to-grasp distinction between a photo and an image… and we would be at the beginning again. You know, some people say that photography excludes digital art. But digital art has many faces, right, and some of it may preserve the aspect of…
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Our rebuilt rock garden 2 years later
Two years ago my husband and I devoted lots of time and effort to rebuilding our neglected rock garden, you can read about the whole process in this post. I was quite surprised to see how quickly the seedlings that I used from the original rock plants settled and spread. Only the Sempervivum varieties – especially the smaller ones – seem to need more time to cover the space which I assigned them to. On the other hand, some of the other plants have already tried to occupy neighbouring areas… Here are a few photos of and from the rock garden. It looks rather flat in the pictures, in reality it…
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Rose inspiration
I have a small rose bush in my garden which burst into beautiful flowers this year. It made me feel inspired and willing to experiment with the photos where I captured it. You see, using textures in editing might have been fashionable a few years back, yet I believe that using a technique is not just a question of fashion, it is also a question of what you want to achieve and where you want to arrive. The texture I used and the photo I applied it to let me mold their expression to something that speaks to me. Although I am not generally a fan of bright colours and…
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Do you like lupins?
Lupins are in full bloom in our garden now and that is a joy to behold, I love them. But the truth is that if you didn’t restrict them, they would force out and displace other less expansive flowers. I’ve learnt that in gardening as well as in life one needs to remove even what is beautiful when it’s out of place and doesn’t add to achieving balance…
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Rock garden rebuilding
Wherever you dig in our garden, you most probably hit a stone. There are so many of them hidden beneath the surface that after each building work in the garden we get a new heap of stones of all sizes. What can you do with all of them? You can either use them or throw them away but you can’t simply dump them into a bin or somewhere, they are heavy and too many. No wonder then that one of our ideas for using the superfluous stones was to build a rock garden and place many of them there, so about 14 years ago my husband and I created our…
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Appeal of gardening
Is gardening an acquired taste or do you need to have particular genes to enjoy working in the garden? I loved my grandma’s garden since childhood but for our children (who actually are not kids any more), our garden represents just hard and repetitive work. Yes mom, the flowers are nice, the gooseberries are good, but don’t pressure us to waste our precious time by performing those tiresome and boring gardening activities… How could I make them understand? Perhaps YOU understand? OK, I won’t torture you by asking such questions, I’ll rather share some of the beauty I find worthy of the gardening effort. First, would you recognise the plants…
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Still-life sunflowers
When the left part of your brain is tired of all the thinking and planning and worrying, it might help to leave it to its own destiny and ask the right creative part to work miracles. The miracles may not be that awesome as you might wish them to be but they have their own rhythm, their own life. What about allowing them to pull you into their flow of vision and imagination? There are so many smaller and greater ways how to be creative. Last year my son wanted to plant sunflowers so we bought some seeds and waited whether they would grow. They did and they looked great…
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Pink inspired (again)
Here and there I buy a small bunch of flowers to decorate my kitchen for a few days and the other day I chose pink roses. They looked fresh and fragile and I loved them but just after two days their stems bent down and the flowers were fading almost in front of my eyes. Of course I felt disappointed but I grabbed them, grabbed my camera and spent an hour or two playing with them in my photographs. The disappointment transformed into creativity, what an unexpected development. Here is the result of that pink inspiration…
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Living Living Stones
Some time ago I told my family that I love succulents and would be happy to get some on the occasion of my birthdays and name days and soon after that I got a little pot from my son with a little succulent called “living stones”. The plant didn’t seem to thrive at first, its leaves were fading, so I decided the pot was way too small and replanted the succulent into a little bigger one. I think it helped but in the first place I had to learn that it is normal that the older leaves shrivel up and also that I need to respect the existence of winter…
