A little spruce tree three feet tall. Twenty five years later that little tree is thirty feet tall. It and the three other spruces I planted at the same time form an impenetrable wind break on the west side of the house. A giant twelve foot thick hedge that even the deer can’t get through. […]
Betty sets buds well after the first light freeze of winter. Two dozen, to be exact. But an early super freeze (in the teens Fahrenheit) caught her unaware. They’re pretty in an un-pretty sort of way. Not to worry though. This happens every year. She’ll be back in the spring. PP
The Betty Boop rose is off to a good start in 2024. My unabashedly favorite flower subject is also the easiest one to get to. It’s in my backyard. The Betty Boop adds blossoms almost continuously all summer and well into fall. It will even add blossoms after the first and second snow storms of […]
Behold The Betty Boop Rose Prolific. Beautiful. Resilient. Tough to the point of belligerent defiance. Like most roses, she carries weapons and knows how to use them. She resides in a corner of my back yard. She bears a remarkable resemblance to the Wild Meadow Rose that grows in and around the northern Black […]
I’ve been tramping through North American forests for 60 years and I haven’t seen these before. Referring to the little green antlers sticking up in the air. A bit of literature searching reveals these are quite common. Called Cladonia Ochrochlora , a common fruticose lichen. Cladonia, pronounced Clad-own-ee-ah, is a cool enough word in its […]
Not a real forest in the usual sense. But, just barely real enough that you can see these. I’ve been playing with adding textures to images off and on for years. My library of textures has grown beyond all reason. There’s a new album of images like this at markhoffmanphotography.com in the gallery called “Current […]
Thought for the day: The precarious human predicament owes its existence to thieves. Jewel thieves. Good ones. Except that “jewel” is misspelled. The word is joule. A term describing energy. That’s important to humans because we use joules all the time. We use them every second of every day our entire lives. Without them we’d […]
The natural world is still teaming with amazing life forms, though somewhat less so than it was, say, forty years ago. I’m thinking of such amazing adaptations as a simple leaf at the end of a tree branch splayed out in the sunlight, capturing the tiny blazingly fast photons hurled earthward from the violent sun, […]
Angular, was my first impression of this unusual plant. Wondering at the name, I backed up to get a better look at it. The flowering part of this plant does bear a striking resemblance to the head of a large water bird. Thus, its other name: Crane Flower. I digress. The plant was delivered to […]
There’s a new image gallery at http://photophart.com called, simply, 10000 Square Meters. Honestly, I’m amazed at the number of images that ended up there. They represent the exploration of a tiny patch of the Bighorn National Forest in central Wyoming. The Bighorn National Forest is millions of acres and gazillions of trees. It is big […]
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