change of heart

i picked a long cucumber vine that had started to pull its way across the tops of some prairie grass in our back yard, reminding myself once again that with a black background i could photograph white flowers. and the white flowers were spectacular. delicate and dainty heads of them sitting upright on stalks every foot or so along the vine. i can’t wait to lay these out and take their photos, i thought to myself. i’ve wanted to photograph them for years. and then i saw this perfect springform conical tendril. and all thoughts of white flowers were banished for the rest of the day.

cucumber vine tendril

can’t get over you

we have had exactly two clematises over 25 years of marriage. there have been other plants and flowers and trees that have spent part of every single year with me, and yet i think of clematis as one of my favorite flowers. i don’t know if it’s just that beautiful, or if i met it young enough that i will always think of it as mine, somehow.

clematis

minneapolis, minnesota

a feather a day for six years

i probably see one feather on average for every walk i take. if that were true, and i had walked every day since the start of STILL blog, i would have amassed about 2000 feathers so far, which is not enough to completely feather any but the smallest songbirds. i would have to keep finding a feather a day for another 10-15 years in order to feather a raptor, and about another 60 years to clothe a swan. the wonder is not that i find a feather almost every day, but that we are not awash in them.

collection of found feathers

what a black background does well

i was reminded the other day that one of the reasons i wanted to switch to a black background for a while was so i could more easily, and with better results, photograph all the white things in nature that i previously found so difficult to document. i was subsequently reminded that i have a really kick-ass bone collection in a series of lucite boxes in my basement. and they’re white.

collection of found bones

compoundly pinnate

something beyond my understanding appeals to me about pinnate leaves. it has to be more than just symmetry. when i think that ferns grew alongside dinosaurs, i wonder if our species has just spent enough time looking at feathery fronds that  the pleasure of it got baked into our genes, like feeling a little bit attached to the daily episodes of the sun’s rising and falling, to start and end our days.

sumac leaves

saint paul, minnesota