12th July: Ten Things of Thankful

Things for which I give thanks this week…

1.- The slow-growing Allium flower has now reached it’s final size and fully coloured up…

2.- Talking of slow-growing plants that require patience – we have had this Yucca? for at least 15 years and this is the first time it has flowered – clearly worth waiting for…

When is a weed not a weed?

3.- We live on a backstreet and a bloke from the council comes around with a weed killer spray at least once a year, but this is not really enough to keep the weeds at bay and perhaps also, with this year’s weather, the weeds have flourished but some of them are too pretty to be considered weeds and so the answer to the riddle is “When they are garden escapes!”

This one I think is Lavateria
No idea what this one is but I award it “Weed of the Week!”
This one is surely a garden escape – some kind of Campanula?

4.- This weed may have struck terror into the hearts of those of you who garden, even in a photograph, or brought on apoplexy, and you may feel that it is inappropriate to allow it anywhere near a gratitude, but i have a sneaking admiration for Equisetum, or Mare’s Tail since in the Carboniferous period, it grew to the size and form of rainforest trees and composes much of the coal that formed then…

5.- This plant is growing in a garden, indeed has been deliberately planted by a neighbour, but it grows wild – hence a weed and so is the opposite of a garden escape lol…

I think it is a Mullein if not a Great Mullein?

6.- Grateful for Municipal plantings…

Who doesn’t like Lavender…

7.- This butterfly was, I’m sure, grateful for this (weed) Thistle, of some kind…

Not bad for a phone camera…

8.- I awoke to the rising sun reflecting in a tiny beam from the neighbouring houses and striking the net curtains in my bedroom, which have a rather nice pattern of birds, leaves and bird-cages and the sunlight has melded the curtains with the garden plants seen beyond…

9.- My grandson and his girlfriend have just moved into their own flat in London, he is a Doctor and she is P.A. to Jenna Ortega (Wednesday) so they have been able to afford somewhere in London which is quite a feat in this day and age. They have long desired a large painting of mine of a box of fish in a shop doorway in Naxos and so I have given it to them as a house-warming present. it leaves a large hole in the painting array in my bedroom but I’m sure I will fill it… I used to paint so infrequently (still do really) that I hung onto paintings as if to remind me that I still could, but I am learning to let go now…

10.- The Poetry Postcard Festival has begun and somehow, I hav been put on TWO lists and I can hardly withdraw from one so I now have 62 cards and poems to send before the end of August. Good job I have picked a simpler theme of printed cards this year…

Another Cyanotype print – this one near Kettlewell nearby in the Yorkshire Dales. The effect is rather as if the photograph is taken in moonlight…
A random music like which popped up on my Spotify playlist and which I am grateful to a friend for introducing me to…

Have a great week y’all – hope it is neither too hot, too wet or too windy where you are…

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