:: the calendula and the bombus ::

I wandered out with a whim and a fancy to forage for a whole swag of gorgeous calendula to colour-up the inside of the house...out into the fast-falling Southerly-driven drops of wet, cold rain...

...and look what treasure I came back with - the memory captured in a photo of this fat, furry little fellow sheltering right under one of said lusciously-vermillion blooms encrusted with shining rain drop jewels...that's my kind of happy! Yum! Thank you Nature!

:: camellia ii ::

Arent' you just continually amazed by the sheer beauty and wonder of nature when spying out very pretty blooms like this camellia? I am!

:: rosmarinus officinalis ::

Rosemary or 'dew of the sea' after the Latin for dew 'ros' and sea 'marinus', is one of the herbs I have grown for the longest time.  There will be a photo of me somewhere hefting a sledge hammer into the concrete outside the kitchen at my parents' home in order to get a place to grow my herbs, when I was about 16 and newly interested in food and the connection to my health. I did actually break up an area of about 2 sqm in a right-angled triangular space and had a lovely assortment of things growing including rosemary, which I planted first and lemon verbena, I seem to remember...

...in our garden today I have the prostrate version growing in a couple of places, slowly making a dense cover along the path to the letterbox with the Chillean guava or NZ cranberry bushes. As the garden is so bare and 'spent', it is one of a few things daring to still bloom - thank you Rosemary!

:: aloe ferox ::

Something we inherited and which Miss P immediately gravitated about...this fairly magnificent specimen of tree aloe...

...from South Africa this 'cape', 'red', 'tap' or 'bitter' aloe is used in the making of medicinal purgative bitters and also the gel, which isn't bitter, is used in some cosmetics...

ferociously spiky and bold - it stands about 1.5m tall and almost as wide as sentinel next to the gate - watch out if you enter our place ;-) !!

Once a year it flowers on a spike of three or four or five that perch up above the foliage...in this rusty orange - so beautiful...

...today it was a drippy, drippy wet kind of day with fat droplets forming and hanging about languidly for most of it...

...I enjoyed these flowers with droplets reminding me of Christmas tree baubles!

:: rosa xxiii ::

Although I didn't manage to persuade anyone to partake in a game of Scrabble, it has been a beautiful day with many blessings, love and lots of delicious treats...currently sipping ginger water, partly as a digestive - oops!

:: primula ii ::

I'm not sure if I have the right name for this delicately-coloured flower, which I know of as a polyanthus?  I believe it is also sometimes called primrose. Wikipedia tells me it is a primula cultivar.

The name primula comes from the Latin primus, which means first - because these are the flowers that are among the first to bring in Spring...

...today we spied these in a lovely planting outside Willowbank Wildlife Reserve with clusters of richly-coloured snapdragons...

:: viola ::

More Winter sunshine colour - happy days!

Plus a lovely visit from family this weekend and birthday celebrations to boot! 

Happy Friday!

:: calendula ii ::

golden glow of calendula

:: narcissus v ::

From a day ago when I was walking Miss O around the block...when the sunshine was dancing about behind the clouds of steam from the factories in the industrial zone near us...was fun trying to snap a picture of this very cheerful clump of erlicheer in one of those in-between moments...

:: golden winter solstice wishes ::

Some things I like to do on the Winter Solstice each year to mark the shortest day, longest night, the coming return of longer days, the new growing season and Matariki here in New Zealand...

...plant garlic...64 garlic cloves planted...4 different varieties and big thank you to Mr A for his digging and raking to make the bed bigger...

...enjoy the colour yellow...admire yellow flowers - today it was the yellow calendula, although I did not have my camera out at that time...

...eat golden food...this is tonight's saffron-infused, cinnamon, cardamon and star anise Indian sago pudding, slow-cooked with almond milk and coconut sugar...mmmm....and we're going to savour some gingery warmth in the sweet potato, parsnip and pumpkin dhal beforehand...

...light candles and darken the house to emphasise the deep dark...

...have a fire...outside in the cold...and hopefully look up and see stars...although the weather has decided upon cloud and spits of rain here this evening...fire currently being built despite that :-)

...and get a really long sleep in to really feel into all that darkness...

...what do you do at the Solstice to mark this turning point in your year?

:: lobularia maritima ii ::

The way this little alyssum plant is bursting up from the crack in the path is a bit like my day today...thriving despite all the difficulty...
...and nothing major - just stupendous things like juggling too many items in my hands impossibly and trying to open the door to find the keys jammed up as well...
...putting on layers to go out into the garden and all three layers twisting and bunching at odds and then when I took the top two off to sort it out - those two tangled into each other!! THAT stuff...certainly made me slow down and take deep breaths many times today LOL!

:: calendula officinalis ::

Today's post calls for a few calendula because on a cloudy (nearly all day) Winter's day a dose of vibrant vermilion just feels good!

:: myosotis ::

From the Greek for 'mouse's ear', because the leaf of the forget-me-not looks a little like one.

Listening to '80's music on the music mix streaming service we use, not our usual...weird listening to echoes of the past...but kinda fun taking odd little trips down memory lane!

:: winter posy ::

the sparsity of the garden...when foliage becomes a thing!

:: leucanthemum vulgare ::

While the etymology of  the word leucanthemum is from the Ancient Greek Leukos (white) and anthos (flower)the symbolic meaning of this common daisy is patience, which today I learnt alot about, personally! Funny!

I've known of it as either the common daisy or dog daisy and I discovered it is also called the ox-eye daisy or moon daisy.

Photo credit goes to Miss P, who loves a beautiful sunset as much as I :-)

:: achillea millefolium ii ::

A weed to most of us, just grabbing its own little bit of real estate on the road side, this common yarrow is transformed into something wondrous with the amber glow of sunset washing over it...yum!

:: echium candicans ::

golden sunset colours perfectly infused the world with beautiful warmth, even though the air temperature was plunging glacially while Miss P captured some of it for posterity...

...like this stunning echium, bayside on our way home this afternoon...

:: primula vulgaris ::

...not blue, not purple-blue, even, but PURPLE - is the colour of these small Winter wonders tucked away all Summer and Autumn...

...below two pears espalliered outside the sleepout is an efficient under-planting of comfrey plus these delightful little primroses or polyanthus...

...during the warmer months the comfrey sprouts explosively up and over their heads, shading them from the heat of Summer...

...and once all the fanfare of the comfrey dies down as it does after being harvested for the last time around the end of May, then it is time for these little beauties to shine and they do all through Winter and into Spring...until...yes, you've got it - comfrey time again! 

...but back to the colour - what the heck is wrong with my camera - I've tried all that I can think of and it is truly clear in this photo - as I say - these flowers are PURPLE, not the blue depicted by this photo. The camera appears to be taking captures that are on the very cool side - and it bothers me when I care about colour as I do...any suggestions? It is an Olympus XZ-1...

...

:: brassica oleracea ::

yesterday I was having a discussion about what colour 'chatreuse' actually is - these striking heads of romanesco broccoli are indeed that verdant colour...

...while the romanesco broccoli (or Roman Cauliflower, Romanesque Cauliflower or Broccolo Romanesco, as it is also called) does not appear to be a flower in the traditional flowers-in-vases-sense, it is in fact an edible flower bud! Cool!

...as well, it is visually interesting in that its form is a series of ever-decreasing spirals that terminate in tiny peak buds, the logarithmic spirals following the pattern of fractals - sacred geometry of nature on the kitchen bench...

..and, no, I did not grow this fine specimen here - it was from our visit to the Opawa Farmer's Market this morning - wish I was growing such beauties - one day...!

:: rosa xxiii ::

Turns out I seem to have quite a love for roses...this is another look at the 'rock'n'roll' rose, which was a birthday rose for Miss P last year...

...seems amazing to me that these roses which all look bedraggled, starving and skeletal are still pumping out the odd flower...

...and by odd, I don't just mean that there is one here and one there...I mean they are starting to look very odd, too!

But by only giving a peek at the centre here, at least this bloom takes on the veil of 'interesting', rather than loosely-blown, washed-out and ragged at the edges...!

:: pansy iv ::

A sweet antique pansy tonight...an unusually warm and sunny day today with Northwesterly winds blowing a balmy 22 degrees at our place today.

:: camellia ::

Memories of Mervyn Adams Shoes shoe boxes from the seventies...it's camellia season again!

:: leucanthemum vulgare ::

Some days are just so sunshiny like this petalled disk of sunshine goodness that is the common daisy...

...and I delighted in finding some peeping out at me on the morning stop-start-stop-start kind of walk with the curious Miss Olive today...

...apart from that I was opportunistic in the garden, moving things around and tidying before we get really blasted with the weather again...

...something miraculous was finding a 1 litre plastic container with about 50 sweetpea seedlings all standing tall and proud, having accidentally germinated after ((me) accidentally) getting water in the bottom of the container...was a lovely moment to transplant them into pots to grow strong through the Winter in the greenhouse, especially since I thought I'd missed the boat on sweet peas this year!

...more miracles were self-sown vermillion calendula plants - all happily sitting in 'wrong' places, of course...so these I dug up and transplanted out to the relatively bare front garden, around the apple trees and along the fenceline, filling in gaps...

...and lastly, I would like to mention the erlicheer or daffodil bulbs I 'found' on top of the soil at the domain recently...they should make their presence known along the path into the front garden in a few weeks' time, so long as neither the local feline or avian populations dig them up for me first!

:: flower and a duck ::

today's photo was a malfunction of the operator...so here is a duck and my favourite felted flower brooch, instead! ;-)

:: althaea officinalis ii ::

Like this marshmallow, the garden is definitely wearing at the edges, winding its way right down into the still, quiet resting time that is Winter...

...after two weeks of very cold and wet weather, these past few days I've been able to redeem myself in the garden a little...

...like all things, I think I like to work in phases and had just left the garden to its own devices for a little bit long...and then it got REALLY WET and I couldn't do anything in the garden...but watch all the mess being created by NOT having done the Autumn jobs in a timely fashion...

...ah, well, the weeding has now been super fast and easy!

:: trifolium ii ::

with generous friends helping fix the roof of our sleepout today and yesterday we really did feel like "we were living in clover".

:: narcissus iv ::

An egg-yolky sunshiny beautiful Winter's day with lots of outside time...bliss!

:: verbena iii ::

Aha! got 'em! Well, as best as able to today...I stood between the sun and the verbena (?) flowers and the photo, while not fantastic, is way better.  Love how the near-to-opening buds are like little pentagonal cushions...

...and it was so sparkling bright again...sunshine in crystalline relief - another crispy cool frost morning...left it much later before walking Miss Olive...and even then I realised I'd worn flimsy socks - ice block toes - which became apparent the longer I stood chatting to a neighbour down the street...

...enquiring after the care of dahlias at this time of year, as I noticed him working his row of dahlias, I was delighted to meet an inhabitant of our street of 54 years! Isn't that amazing?  

He and his family were the first family to buy and move in down the road.  He was 21 then, in 1962 and today is his birthday, so he's 76 today! He very happily gave me the advice I needed and my day has indeed been much the happier for that little chat in his driveway. 

Plus I now know what to do with the dahlias! 

Bonus!

:: verbena family? ::

Taking pictures of flowers is such a large learning curve for me...here I had the exposure set at -2 and still this is a bright, bright shot of the unopened flower buds...

...the wee flowers are all 'blown out' (what I was really trying to photograph!)...

...ah well, there's tomorrow - and maybe I'll stand between the incredibly harsh morning sun and my delicate subjects?

I don't know what this plant is - thinking it is a shrub in the verbena family...any ideas?

:: nigella damascena ::

Just what I need today - a little bit of 'love-in-a-mist'...

...been a busy last few days and spying this on the way to feeding the hens (oh, and a definite boy, by the sound of it this morning!) was like a tonic for the heart and soul.