Tag: nature

The Big 5 – What is your favourite Flower ?

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wildflowers

a very tiny and rather unexpected gift

Across the Bored was going to go on a long-winded tirade against the evils of idiotic emails and how many people don’t actually read what we write in response but it seemed a tiresome and rather awful way to protract our annoyance: we’ll save that sort of thing for our Facebook page where we are sure to find a suitably snide cartoon to match our crankiness. Now that that is over with it is on to more pleasant pastures with this fortnight’s theme…

We were pleasantly surprised to find the two tiny blooms, smaller than a thumbnail, placed next to our keyboard the other day – in our own garden small green shoots are just beginning to poke out of the soil and it will be awhile before anything spectacular blossoms with any kind of gusto. In the “wilder” bits of our urban environment things seem to be progressing much quicker, it is as if without any gardener’s expectations they pop out at will, calling to us from the blasted brown grass and crackly hedgerows like miniature floral sirens. There is no way to domesticate these beauties, they are of the moment for once picked they quickly fade. Like much else that we seek to immortalize, we took a picture, or rather many pictures, and later placed the sadly shrivelling blooms between the pages of an agenda. One guesses that there is a single stem or bounteous bouquet for every, or no, occasion and this fortnight’s Big 5 Challenge would inquire:

“What is your favourite Flower” – Irises exotic, roses by the score, daffodils, sweet tendrils, petunias by the door, sweet peas, lilies or birds of paradise, grand or wild, fragrant or mild, a pot of something nice …

We would love to know what flora strikes your fancy.

For all those who are new readers to Across the Bored, here are some guidelines for the challenge: HOW DOES THIS WORK?

  1.  I will post some commentary such as the above on one of the five Ws (WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN or WHY and sometimes HOW) and then ask you to respond on the same.
  2. Your point of view on the current week’s challenge can take any form: a reply in the comment box, in a new post with a quote, a motto or saying, an essay, poem or opinion of yours or attributed to someone else, a piece of music, a song, a video, a work of art, photograph, graffiti, drawing or scribble – but it has to be about the topic!
  3. Challenge yourself to dig deep for an answer.
  4. The Challenge will be open for 14 days (there will be a reminder post at the 7 day mark) after which I will post another.
  5. ENJOY, have FUN and TELL your friends and fellow bloggers.

SO – Create your Big 5 Challenge post

  1. Then add a link to your blog in my comment box.
  2. To make it easy for others to check out your post, title your blog post “The Big 5 Challenge” and add the same as a tag.
  3. If you would like your reader to see what others are presenting for the same challenge, add a link to the “Big 5” challenge on your own blog.
  4. Feel free to pick up your badge on The Big 5 Challenge page.
  5. Remember to Follow to get your weekly (hopefully) reminders.

Two Cents Tuesday Challenge: Grateful – Week 2

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watches for grateful

it’s all relative

Thanks goodness there is finally a reprieve from the longest winter ever with the delivery of the first thunder and lightening storm of the season. We usually moan about heavy rain and how it adds that extra bit of fun to the logistics of getting out and about but April showers are actually a blessing in disguise for city dwellers. One day of unseasonably warm weather reduced the last of the nasty frozen black detritus on our front lawn to a mix of gravel and unmentionables, relieving us of the temptation to go at it with a pick-axe and revealed in the flower beds where our procrastinating green thumb had turned brown late last fall. Most unkempt and while there is not much to be done about that but get out the shears and gardening gloves and hack down the offending mess, it remains a blatant reminder that we will be spending some time en plein air and off the keyboard. Then the rains came…

Mother Nature must feel much the way we do – that everything is looking a bit sad and worn around the corners, dusty, fingerprint-tagged, dog-nose snuffly window smeared and in need of a good scrub. The outdoor inundations wash away the mess of the passing seasons on a grand scale, too bad it’s not as easy in our little nest. The Two Cents Tuesday Challenge theme this fortnight, therefore, is – Grateful – for the excuse to stay indoors and pass a few hours putting things in order.

Last week we asked “Are you grateful”? – For socialized medicine, healing rotator cuffs, a like on your post or tribulations tough, family, friends, the children next door, muddy paws of loved dogs that muck up the floor …

We would love to see your vision.

For all those who are new readers to Across the Bored, some great entries and the guidelines for this fortnight’s challenge can be found here. Need more info or want to browse past themes? Have a look at HOW DOES THIS WORK.

iPhoneography Monday: Nature

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waitingthe postman never rings twice

It is in his nature to wait patiently, anticipating, ready for the daily flip-out directed at the man in blue who unluckily has our house on his route…

Shot with the iPhone 5 with the iSight camera, no edits for iPhoneography Monday: Nature.

Have a look at Frames & Focus, Lens and Pens by Sally and Watching Photo Reels to see the originators of this challenge and their interpretation of the theme.  You may also join the challenge by clicking here.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Changing Seasons

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toad

Off to find a place to sleep… and perchance to dream

“We love to think in winter, as we walk over the snowy pastures, of those happy dreamers that lie under the sod, of dormice and all that race of dormant creatures, which have such a superfluity of life enveloped in thick folds of fur, impervious to cold. Alas, the poet too is in one sense a sort of dormouse gone into winter quarters of deep and serene thoughts, insensible to surrounding circumstances; his words are the relation of his oldest and finest memory, a wisdom drawn from the remotest experience. Other men lead a starved existence, meanwhile, like hawks, that would fain keep on the wing, and trust to pick up a sparrow now and then.”
Henry David Thoreau– A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

Find out how others see the passing of the solstices at the Weekly Photo Challenge: Changing Seasons.

F is also for Friday: Landscapes of Memory

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Unseasonably warm, it was more of a grey day than most but the weather warns that this will be the last of it for awhile.  Light rain still falls and with each drop we wonder why it feels more like March than it should in the short weeks leading up to the winter holiday  – where is the first snow, the one that makes us run to the window and just stop, in silence, to look out.  City or country, it is always magical.

In another lifetime and at about this same time of year, it was a tradition to look for a Christmas tree in the bush before the snow became too deep, mark it and then return with a sharp axe once the house was ready to receive it.  On one such mission accomplished, the walk back was a quiet one when the scene above unfolded before us.  There was no choice but to just stop – and watch as the light along the horizon slowly changed and the clouds rolled through blue, mauve and apricot.  The moment marked a lifelong predilection for big sky landscapes, a quality of light and softness that makes one sigh or draw breath and hold it in as if to capture a part of this beauty for ourselves.

On New Year’s Eve decades later, a hushed midnight stroll down the main street of a small town found us awestruck once again.  There in the window of a gallery was our very private memory, every detail captured as if the artist had been there with us.  Morning couldn’t come soon enough.

This is what art is all about – having it grab your heart and wring from it something so deep that there are no words.

Here are a few 21st century landscape painters whose work speaks for itself:

Douglas Edwards
Renato Mucillo
Frank Corso
Ed Roxburgh