linen roses

i don’t know what combination of light, lens, focal length, and raw materials created this effect, but these roses look to me like little rolled up wads of linen bandages. i wonder what injury would necessitate a tea rose bandage. perhaps the compound fracture of a forearm hair. a torn thumbnail tip. a bleeding eyebrow pore. i hope i die of whatever it is they will need to treat with rose bandages. they can just leave the used ones scattered around my hospital bed.

dried white tea roses

gathering nature

my favorite way to collect nature for this blog is by taking a walk somewhere near woods, prairie, or water, and preferably all three. someplace where i am more or less likely to come across a feather, a seed pod, a beetle chewed leaf, a skeleton, a flower, a graphic or dramatic stem, an interesting stone, a fungus, a butterfly wing. but nature does not always mean picturesque nature, and sometimes nature finds itself inside, not outside, the perimeter of my four walls and that doesn’t make it any less nature, or any less worthy of still blog. in fact, i may just love these dessicated daddy long legs (mostly found caught in spider webs or curled up in corners of my basement) as much as the showiest summer lily, or the most intact wood duck feather.  they are perfectly expressive, dramatically graphic, a coherent collective, and a whimsical group of unique individuals all at the same time. sorry it had to happen this way guys. but you are perfect in your strange troubling awkward beauty.

daddy long-legs spiders

greens

after 5 plus years of being a loving but very bad chicken farmer, it had been a few years of chicken-free existence until last week when we chicken-sat for some friends. i reverted right back to the chicken owner mindset. everything remotely edible, especially if it is a leaf, gets set aside for the girls to snack on, and all those greens make for happy charges, as well as eggs full of omega-3s. this strawberry plant was not eaten by a chicken, but rather by a beetle. but it reminded me of that enormous segment of ruminants and herbivores, who, unlike us humans, can’t wait to go eat their greens.

beetle eaten wild strawberry leaves in august

ready set …

…here we go. the middle of the hottest day of summer, and these leaves are saying, “you can’t fool us. we know how many hours of sunlight we’re feeling. you can pretend it’s still summer, but we’re getting ready to go.”

american smoketree leaves in mid-august (Cotinus obovatus)

priceless or thereabouts

i was googling hag stone just now, because i couldn’t remember if it was spelled hag stone or hagstone (looks like both ways).  anyway, i see that hag stones can be bought on etsy for $7 each. i guess that makes my little necklace here worth about $50. hmmm. if you want to buy this from me, you’re going to have to start at about 100 times that. at that point we can talk. but no guarantees.

hag stones