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Earlier this year, just before the leaves came out on the eighty foot high Sweetgum tree in our yard, my husband cut it down. Any doubts we may have had about removing it as an ornamental disappeared when we saw how easily the branches snapped, and how the tree was starting to rot from the inside out. Setting the logs aside as I helped to lower them, I noticed these shapes produced by the dying core.
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While tidying the garden today I picked this up, and for a split second I wondered how a dead leaf could be so soft and powdery…and fluttering! If my camera would cooperate I could have taken a great macro because the moth let me get as close as I wanted. So pretty!
My old Canon AE1 would snap pictures no matter how close I got to something, but even on ‘manual’ the Canon EOS 20D will only allow me to get about 4 inches away before the shutter refuses to close. I miss my old fashioned (1980) Canon sometimes, and even the new Canon AE1s cannot compare to it. I don’t miss developing though, and the other restrictions.
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Arbutus trees, first thumbnail, only grow in the Pacific Northwest, here on Salt Spring Island, B.C. and in parts of China, nowhere else in the world. They are popular carve-your-name-in-the-trunk trees because the bark heals into a soft well-defined scar. A few trees on the island have been abused like this. Still, they couldn’t take the beautiful away! Groups of three and four Fluted Swallowtails spiraled in and out of the sunlight as I walked down the mountain road on Salt Spring Island. Fortunately one briefly settled on a fir tree.
Lepidoptera Papilioninae – In Andrew Brown Park, Coppell, Texas there were 20-30 Swallowtails fluttering in a small patch of wild vetch. The butterflies were nowhere else in the park except this one spot. I was mesmerized watching the flashes of black and metallic blue against the green and violet plants.
