we live on a heavily wooded acre, so a pile of downed limbs is always accumulating under the screen porch. when the pile gets big enough, we spend an afternoon cutting kindling for the winter. the pile includes branches from venerable 100 year old oaks, from drama queen birches, from richly colored cherries, and from tiresome invasives like buckthorn. above is one such bundle with eight different woods. i can identify mountain ash and cherrry, but that’s all. how about you?
kindling bundle
saint paul, minnesota
my fifteen year old just got her driver’s permit. today while coming home from soccer practice i asked her to pull over sharply, in a construction zone, and put on her hazards, so i could jump out of the car and grab a few stems. she couldn’t remember learning that move in driver’s ed.
these wild sunflowers are growing on six foot high plants, each with multiple flowers, in large colonies on many of our roadsides right now. a glorious celebration of high summer. i don’t know why a double armed galaxy shape suggested itself to me, but my husband saw it and started giggling about poor humanity, trapped, according to douglas adams, “far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.”
wild sunflower
along snelling avenue, saint paul, minnesota
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i love the image and the analogy
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i decided to work with cattails today because i thought the dark brown flowers against the green stems would be so appealing. little did i know that the crooked alfalfa cowlicks sticking up from the tops of their heads would steal the show.
cattails from my backyard
turtle lake, saint paul, minnesota
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Catching up on your blog after a time away for my mum’s 90th. It’s a joy, as usual, to see the entries. But I realized today that the font is darker and I can read it so much better. Thank you!
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Stunning! However, cattails means summer is nearing its end. Still love them though.
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Came to visit because of MSL article. Congratulations and your blog and photography are stunning.
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Fan-tastic!
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i checked the minnesota dnr website today to make sure i could legally pick a water lily. my husband thought they might be a protected species. it turns out you can. but i still promised him this would be the one and and only one i would ever pick for STILL blog. given our local environment here in lake country, i felt STILL blog was missing something important without water lilies.
white water lily and lily pads
lake valentine, saint paul, minnesota
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Perfectly beautiful, exquisite in fact. Do you get little froggies on those lily pads I wonder? And dragonflies hovering above?
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i have a beautiful sanded slice of one similar to the yellow one in the middle and mine is sumac :)