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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…
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Contrast
It is the last day of October today and according to the rules of my 12-month photo project I am supposed to publish 3 to 5 photos that I took throughout the month based on the theme of the month, which this time was CONTRAST. Up to now, I always posted five photos, today I have just the minimum, the three, but I’m happy to have them actually. My hubby has been enormously busy these weeks and to make it worse, I fell ill and stayed at home for more than two weeks which didn’t leave me with many options. Eventually I decided to use the last few days I had…
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Rudbeckia counterbalance
On Monday, a new school year started here which meant that last week I spent quite a few hours by shopping. Everything the school asked to get for lessons such as exercise books and pencils, watercolours and brushes, but also clothes and shoes as my 13 year old son is growing almost in front of my eyes these weeks. That clothes part was the most exhausting because although he is of average build, it was not easy to get trousers for him thanks to the current slim and skinny fashion. So much wasted time when looking for something suitable… One day when we came home from such shopping, I went…
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Botanical garden in Liberec
When I was planning trips for our holiday in the Jizera Mountains, the Botanical garden in Liberec was one of the places which caught my attention, especially for the architecture of its greenhouses and for its new „Water Lily Pavilion“. The garden greatly exceeded my expectations which is why I would like to present it to you. The Botanical garden in Liberec is the oldest botanical garden in the Czech Republic. It started its operation in 1895 and its purpose was primarily to provide green vegetation for the town. During both world wars its condition deteriorated, it served mostly as a market garden. At last in 1954, it was changed…
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May in our garden
Do you document regularly or at least here and there your garden, house, flat, I mean the environment you live in? I’m sure I don’t do it often enough… even though I find it interesting to compare the older photos with the current appearance, one quickly forgets. On Sunday I decided to grab my camera and capture some details in our garden and I would like to share some of the photos with you. Paeonia suffruticosa is a flower that has never disappointed me… So elegant. The rhododendron below is a small bush which we bought for just a few bucks in end of season sale in Tesco supermarket and frankly, we didn’t expect…
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Time of lilacs
I saw first lilacs burst into flower about two weeks ago and it seems that the lilac that we have in our garden follows the lead at last and starts to open its buds. I still have a few still-life photos featuring the lilac that I took last May so now it would be the right time to share them. These are just branches cut from the bush. I added some haze to the first photo to get a different feel and to create something not that straightforward, what a change. Lilac are the essence of May, aren’t they. They always confirm to me that winter is soon to be definitely over, their…
