Flowery nonsense

When people say there is no such thing as perfection, I can't help but think of images like this. I mentioned the 'p' word on a quilt group once and a woman wrote and told me to Google it because it's a sign of being mentally disturbed. Maybe it's true if you see things only in black and white, in terms of right and wrong. (Hand washing may be a sign of obsession or it could be a sign of cleanliness!) But if I looked at this rose and tried to find evidence of imperfection, I think I'd have more to be concerned about.





















My favourite stripey rose. Looking quite different to last year, as seen in the previous post.





















I've no doubt that it was from looking at nature and seeing how perfectly colours are blended - in feathers, bird's eggs, plants, fish scales etc., etc., - that shading became so important to me early on. (I could just as easily been inspired by patterning - I remember being bowled over when I saw a barn owl close up -but somehow shading made a bigger impact and still does.) It seems to me the height of arrogance to say we mustn't try to make our art perfect. As if it is a default setting, so easy to achieve, we must guard against it!

Anyway, that's enough ranting. These thoughts were brought on when I tried to upload these photos a couple of days ago and found the 'add image' button no longer worked. To cut a long story short, I can now post to the blog using Firefox instead of IE. It got me wondering if posting photos of my flowers was worth all the hassle! But then, I thought, why are flowers seen as frivolous and feminine?

If I hadn't started this blog and seen that flowers are a running theme, I wouldn't have realised how much I like them. Not just because they are 'pretty' but for their diversity, construction and shading. There are too many other subjects I like to draw to simply concentrate on flowers but they could provide a lifetime of inspiration and you'd still only capture a fraction of them. Pencil doesn't really do them justice but the photos will be good subjects for practising my watercolours.




















Mark and I went looking for a garden centre on Friday. We should have had visitors this weekend but plans fell through so as the new patio in the back garden is almost finished we used the hire car to stock up on larger plants. It took about 45 minutes to find it because of the bizarre road network. If Mark has trouble finding anything, there is no hope for me! Now we know why at one stage all the cars ahead of us took a short cut through a car park. If drivers need to do that, there is something wrong with the system. It's similar to Kuwait in that the network is like spokes on a wheel, radiating from the centre, but trying to get across the 'spokes' is almost impossible. And because planners want to keep you away from certain areas with one way systems, you end up clogging up roads you don't even want to be on! That Mini Cooper is looking less desirable now, it's so much easier by bus and tram!

Anyway, the photo above shows some of the plants in the front, waiting to be planted and also a topiary tree that Mark has had his eye on - a dolphin jumping through a hoop! He thinks it will look good on the patio by the pool!




















Something I've had my eye on are these larger lavenders. I think it may be called a French lavender, but it is bigger than the ones I've seen before and the shade of the buds is so deep it almost looks blue.




















I just love this shape and the long trailing bits.




















Another new fuchsia! A small hanging basket of pale delicate flowers, in contrast to






















this monster! I lugged this home a couple of weeks ago. It looked fairly big in it's plastic container but when I freed it, it was the biggest hanging plant I'd ever seen. It's about three, maybe four, feet high and wide! It's hanging outside the front door and will probably need shaping, but it has so many huge bursting buds I haven't the heart to do it just yet.