Monday, November 29, 2010

Golden Lawn

Okay! So I (accidentally) lied…

A few blogs ago, I mentioned that my gardening stories had come to an end for this year. Winter is just around the corner and soon my yard will be filled with snow until next Spring.

Just today, I opened up my photo files to find inspiration for this week’s blog and I found some more pictures of my back garden! Ooops! It seems that I missed these… so I will share them with you, today.

It has been an interesting and colourful year for my back lawn and garden. I remember sharing a story about how my lawn changed from green to light-brown in a matter of three days - http://bitsandpeaces08.blogspot.com/2010/05/attack-of-maple-keys.html - when my Maple tree dumped about 2 million keys – LOL!

A very short while later my lawn changed from green to white - http://bitsandpeaces08.blogspot.com/2010/06/hail-nature-and-be-hailed.html - in a matter of minutes, when a Springtime hailstorm blew through parts of London.

Another day later, my lawn was green again, but a slightly different shade, as thousands of damaged leaves covered my yard and the back part of my roof.

This story is about how my back yard changed colour, once again - turning into a golden lawn, over the course of three days and nights. This story begins with a certain tree…

This is my neighbour’s glorious and beautiful White Pine tree! The White Pine is a very spiritual tree, for me, because of the experiences that I had in the Temagami region of Northern Ontario… many years ago. This year, I learned something very interesting about this species of tree – something I never realized before…

The White Pine – like a dog or a cat – likes to have an annual shed! It lasted for just a few days and in that time my entire backyard became covered in it’s golden needles.

I was completely shocked when I first saw the phenomena occurring. It was 5:30am and I took Koly outside for his morning run around the yard. Everything seemed normal. When I returned home from work, that evening, Koly and I both discovered an interesting change in the colour of our backyard.

The air was filled with thousands of golden needles, spilling out of the limbs of my neighbour’s tree. It was quite an elegant dance and I simply stared up in wonder!

The next day witnessed an even greater amount of golden confetti spread over my yard and by the third day my lawn was completely blanketed.

On this third day, the sun was shining a bit more brightly than on the previous days, and because of this I became inspired to get my camera out to capture this occurrence.

I crawled around on my hands and knees taking photos from the ground level, looking upwards at my Autumn flowers.

I took photos from some other flowers, looking downwards towards the blanket of gold.

Even my Juniper hedges were covered in thousands of golden needles.

Whenever I’ve shared blogs talking about how to take an interesting photograph, I always say that you have to get close to your subject…

… and think about the angles and shapes that will be in your photo. I really enjoy the textures, shapes and forms in this photograph – it creates a unique response in each person viewing it. For me, this photo touches my soul in an ancient and tribal sort of way. I’m not sure why, but that is the magic of photography… and our imaginations!

Jim

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