Assassin? …
Thought to be … Bug for sure.
Company for Katie’s Assassin – click to see.
Bugs in the garden, sucking the life out of the butterfly bushes. If I let them … Can’t let a couple bugs ruin it for so many others.
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They are photogenic when caught at the right angle. Good models that don’t frighten easily. Is she posing for us?
A pair, left to their own designs they would kill off the butterfly bush buds before they flower, and kill the bush.
Elegant creatures, unselfconsciously so. I think they are growing versions of Kate’s assassin from last post.
© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look … and click again.
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Birthday Girl …
Another kind of assassin bug. Found wandering the butterfly bush, and Katie captured it like a pro.
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For the birthday girl … my love. … No two flowers are ever the same, and never the same again.
One may be brighter than the other, in a way of colour.
The other more fragrant, at times, in a way of shadows.
Each passing in their way, the other, at times.
To-ing and fro-ing, as elements of weather.
And behind, the sunshine shines.
Always, all ways …
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Happy Birthday Katie. :-)
© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look … and click again.
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Skip The Lemon
Skipper butterfly sitting on an old lemon still standing after a long winter, gone well past mouldy, and still serving the garden’s mobile inhabitants.
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I am lucky to find anything at all in the garden, it seems. There seems so little of the small life forms about these days. Life is retreating with significance.
So when one alights in accessible location it is prudent to take advantage. Don’t know when the next opportunity will come. Acknowledging the good.
Skip, for skipper, on an old lemon turned to something else.
The old lemon has served various forms of life through the winter, at first as food and then as shelter, now as a platform for what may pass this way or rest in the sun.
Now it is spring proper and in spite of the worldwide failure of insect populations some, not many at all, are still showing up in the garden for respite from the surrounding desert.
A sign of the times, some forms of life are retreating as other forms advance. A global phenomenon now. Which is which not so important as the effect of either on the other forms, to some forms.
And then there is the space it all happens in. That sense of space in which everything settles into perspective, or disappears into nothing, whatever it may be or represent.
Time to skip the bitters. And listen to the silence.
© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look … and click again.
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Garden Angel
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It looked like the beginning of a storm, but it was just a wave.
Of butterflies … transformation writ small.
And no less significant.
© Mark Berkery … Click on the picture for a closer look … and click again.
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Bugged
Green shield bug surveying his domain. No trouble in sight … yet, in an ever changing world.
© Mark Berkery … Click on the picture for a closer look … and click again.
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Hello Darling
Every jumping spider is looking for love. If you look, you’ll see them in the undergrowth waving to their potential mate, and he chasing her down, if she will allow.
Or every spider is being spider, including the love in spider – there is love in all things, without the impediment of psychological divisions into me and mine and this and that, for and against …
Spider doesn’t suffer from the human condition, thanks be to … But neither can they make conscious love, nor love conscious.
© Mark Berkery … Click on the picture for a closer look … and click again.
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Bee Hotel …
This parasitic wasp was noticed sitting on the old Blue Banded Bee hotel, listening … for what may be.
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Listening … to what the surrounding structure and landscape was saying, the masked bee moved in.
Moving from entrance to entrance, each one separate as the BBB are a solitary bee, not hive minded – somewhat individual.
All can be seen to exercise caution, at least testing for recognition to ensure integrity to process – don’t want to finish another’s nest.
Others just testing for a suitable repository for her as yet unborn young. All things intelligent in their own ways, all things driven to reproduce.
The dark cool of the mud brick interior a suitable place for new life to begin its journey out.
… not any more. Made for the Blue Banded Bee a few years ago, this hotel, they only really used it for one.
Last year a few still nested there but this year none so far, but nothing good goes to waste.
This year a swarm? – don’t know if they can be called that as they are not a hive (mind) creature.
But this year the masked bee turned up in numbers, followed by the parasitic wasp.
I will watch as everything runs its course, inside and out … maybe get a few pictures.
© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look … and click again.
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Gardening
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If the ‘outer’ is the representation of the ‘inner’, as within so without, then gardening also has a greater reality than it appears in sense.
What could it be, this greater reality of gardening, becomes apparent in the endeavour to see, what it is.
What gets in the way of seeing, that has to be dug into, plucked, discarded and recycled?
And what of the flower, it’s greater reality, such beauty of colour and form?
Weeding works, what you water grows …
© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look … and click again.
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Ahoy Skipper
Skipper butterfly that is, sitting proud on the high point of a rotted then dried out lemon. A grand open view before it.
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Not often still enough for a few shots, but this time unperturbed by my giant shadowy presence before it.
The mentioned winter weevil, on the now dried out lemon, laying eggs into or below the skin, youngers still about.
From another angle, for perspective, or just for the entertainment. Amazing that these 1cm long creatures have unique lives.
Some kind of candy beetle, usually found munching a nearby leafy plant, but this time on that old dried mouldy lemon again.
And again, now how did a leaf eater get onto the mouldy old lemon. Somebody carried it perhaps … one of a garden’s mystery.
Tiny bees, not seen by day, much. Then found out of the way, clambering about a branch of the hot chilli bush at night.
Maybe it keeps them warm at night, who knows. But not this one, landed on my hand while shooting the above in the dark.
The first day this butterfly landed on this spot I went to get the camera but it was gone when I got back. Not so this time.
I got back and the skipper was still there, basking in the sun atop a dried out lemon that was used to attract tiny weevils during winter.
The garden is burgeoning, sunlight and greenery and flowers, and all the forms that live in and on.
A cacophony of comings and goings in the stillness of the space it all happens in.
© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look … and click again.
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