walk up to dun na cuaiche, inveraray

The walk starts from near the parking lot of the castle and takes you across a bridge, through beautiful woodland, up to the summit of a nearby hill with lovely views of the town and the loch.

mist over the summit of the hill

tree harvesting / controlled logging

Turning into beautiful woodland...

below is my favorite photo... I was crouching on the ground to take it

Just as I got to the top, it started drizzling...

Then the drizzle stopped for a bit...


(PS: anyone who goes to scotland and does a bit of walking will at some point realize that the Scots know how to place their wooden benches... and will come away with a photo of "the most perfectly located bench." I remember seeing one from my brother's trip to scotland... and this photo from dun na cuaiche is mine :))

withered and fallen

blooming and withering flowers

the more i take photographs of withering flowers the more i discover how beautiful
they look as they wither and become frail...
(i'm not trying to be profound here about ageing more generally! just talking about flowers...)

am also finding it quite difficult to compose good photographs of withering flowers because they no longer seem to have any coherence to them...
but maybe this is also making me more observant of its subtle intricacies

Euonymus Fortunei 'Blondy' / Variegated Fortune's Spindle

Hebe (Veronica)

I think the lavender is pretty much dead. I really hope the hebe and blondy survive my care.

Lithops / Pebble plant / Living stone

The first plant to enter my house is this strange looking thing which came to me all the way from London, from Romi's windowsill (Romi's my housemate - she's sorta part-time housemate which is why you haven't yet seen her in my apartment or cooking experiment photos, but at some point I think she'll turn up - anyway I digress...so coming back to this plant...). It is called Lithops and according to wikipedia it is a genus of succulent plants native to southern Africa. "Lithos" means "stone" and "-ops" means "face" in ancient Greek, so Lithops means "stone-like." They are also known as "pebble plants" or "living stones" and the deal with their sexy looks is that they can blend in with surrounding rocks and thus not get eaten. Romi should be happy to see that I haven't killed her plant yet and it has in fact grown taller!

my drooping Spanish Lavender

I've had my lavender plant for less than two weeks and I think I might be already killing it. Most of the stalks are drooping and the flowers are also looking really sorry - maybe its just the end of the flowering season, who knows - I tried to figure out from the internet but everywhere it said lavenders flower in the Spring, the card that came with my plant says it flowers from July to September (and this is summer here), so I'm just confused. Anyway, I thought I would try and photograph its droopiness. Took quite a few photos, circling around the plant a lot, placing it in the sun, placing it in shade, etc, to figure out how to photograph it so that I can capture its droopiness but at the same time the plant doesn't look like it should already be in the garbage bin. I do hope it livens up a little after all this attention I'm giving it!

looking for nectar

colours and textures of the natural world