spent

i spent 14 hours on a photo shoot today. of my own house. and i am EXHAUSTED. so, all i got for you today is dried campanula that i shot a few days ago. the irony is that i have a house full of freshly foraged wildflowers. but i never had a minute all day to make a STILL photo. even so, even this tossed-off photo of dried campanula is interesting–look at how those stems branch so consistently. when you see them in the field, they all look so wonky and individual. but lined up they aren’t at all.

dried campanula

creativity on demand

the local t.v. crew was here this morning filming. this in not the first time i have been filmed. it is the fourth. each time, we forage, we talk about STILL, and then there comes a moment when the producer says..”let’s see you make a photo.” UGH. i hate designing on demand. too much pressure. my mind shuts down. typically i play for 10 or 20 minutes; i try spills, i try patterns, i try line-ups, i push, i tear, i pile…i rarely sit down and know exactly what i am going to make. so when the videographer says “now start arranging” i freeze. anyway, this is what i made today. on demand. under pressure. and, low and behold, i rather like it. i think the arrangement dignifies this lowly roadside weed. now i am going to go put my feet up on the deck and have a glass of wine. i feel i have earned it.

ohhh by the way, according to wiki:

Knapweed was rated in the top five for most nectar production (nectar per unit cover per year) in a UK plants survey. It also placed second as a producer of nectar sugar per floral unit, among the meadow perennials, in another study in Britain.

amazing. now that i know that, knapweed just became one of my favorite weeds.

knapweed flowers (Centaurea nigra)

same, same, but different

i have a local television crew at my house today, filming a short (3 minute) feature of me doing my STILL thing–foraging, arranging, photographing. so, i am keeping it easy on myself, and posting yesterday’s milkweed in a different composition. not particularly beautiful. but definitely interesting. remember my STILL mantra? “make it beautiful, or interesting, unless you can do both.”

milkweed flowerheads

flowers in three phases

milkweed flowers in three states of maturity. large leaves typically obscure milkweed flowers, so i had never realized before today that the pink flowers turn a kind of dull yellow as they age. you can see the latex dot where i removed a leaf so we could appreciate the flowers better. there is milkweed blooming everywhere right now, but everyone is telling me that they are not seeing many butterflies this year. it has got me concerned. life without butterflies would be more than this naturalist could handle.

milkweed flowers (Asclepias syriaca)

a beautiful mess

the delphiniums i posted almost two weeks ago dropped the last of their petals onto my kitchen floor this weekend. and what a beautiful mess they left behind. more and more, i love the spent debris of flowers, after they have started to die back, more than the peak form of the flowers themselves. the swirls of purples and blues in this photo have me captivated in a way similar to how a Monet painting can. i am enthralled.

spent delphinium flowers