winter garden

it has occurred to me that i should plant a garden whose sole purpose is to give me a selection of winter subjects for STILL. a winter garden where each plant is considered for its winter photogenic qualities. it’s not a bad idea, and it wouldn’t be hard for me to come up with the plants that should be included. the problem is, we just get a little too much snow here. our winter gardens, no matter how well curated, are buried under 2-3 feet of snow for most of january, february, and march. this year, the snow is melting early, and i am starting to see last year’s stems sleepily poking up out of the receding snow. today i found this gem. i couldn’t have been happier if i planted it myself.

wild sunflower stem in winter

faceplant

it’s unusually warm here in the north. i have been on earth for 55 years and spring has never arrived in minnesota in march. but there is this little part of me that is choosing to believe in the impossible. i will believe it until the usual march blizzard arrives, and my spring mood will faceplant a little bit like this poor tulip.

parrot tulip

horsetail at the tail end of winter

since today is sort of a bonus day, a free extra day in the year, i decided to post this “extra” photo. i took the photo on my iphone this week while on my daily walk. it’s an interesting photo. and it almost meets my STILL blog standards, with the white snow providing the right backdrop, the horsetail serving as a worthy subject, and the composition just a little bit arresting in an interesting way. where it falls short is in sheer image quality, lighting, and pixel resolution. on a normal february day, i might not have posted these curious winter stems. but today, on february 29, i’m just going to take the leap.

winter horsetail (Equisetum)

p.s. i have shared this before…but i still find it so interesting i am going to share it again. from wiki:

“Equisetum is a “living fossil”, the only living genus of the entire class Equisetopsida, which for over 100 million years was much more diverse and dominated the understory of late Paleozoic forests.”

it’s all in the details

part of what still blog has been about since its beginning is a kind of magnification of attention. meaning you can look at a forest floor out the passenger window from a rural highway and see one thing. you can walk a forest trail and see something else. you can step off the trail and pick your way through the woods to see something quite a bit more detailed, and then you can just stand in one place, looking around in a radius from your two still feet, and start to see individual leaves, pine cones, fallen berries, scraps of bark, broken twigs, seed pods, and evergreen needles. still blog is about that kind of stillness. and so is today’s post.

bits and pieces of found nature

sometimes it’s the texture

i’m always scanning my environment for a worthy STILL blog subject, and often what jumps out at me is color, or perhaps shape or form. sometimes contrast catches my eye–like the one curved cattail stem in an endless bed of straight-backed sentries. sometimes what grabs my attention is not a single thing, but a collection of things that tell a story–like all the bits of red standing out recently on our snowy backdrop. and, every now and then, it is simply texture that grabs me—ribbed, nubbed, dimpled, dented, toothed.  today was a texture day.