The Three Hombres …
The Three Hombres … A post here wouldn’t be complete without pictures.
Some of the latest visitors to the garden, a trio of beetles on the pink Crucifix Orchid. They aren’t found anywhere else in the garden, that I can reach.
It just shows, there is a place and time for everything. In the garden, or the field, there are tides of things, living and dead, the coming and the going of the forms of life.
Within the tides there are eddies and currents, splashes and sprays. It’s a wonderful thing, not knowing what’s coming on the next wave.
Out of the mystery she flows …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click those pictures for a closer look
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Gypsy Spider …
She’s back … At the beginning of September this year I went out into the garden to have a look around, it was near enough 1.00am. There hadn’t been much to shoot and it occurred to me to take the camera with me, not unusual that.
And there she was, the first place I looked, sitting in meditative pose atop a small daisy bud. A tiny ghost spider, bright against the dark of the night.
Since then she has come and gone across the garden, from daisy to butterfly bush to sunflower, chia, coneflower and round again. Through torrential rain, baking sun and howling winds …
Every time I see her she has grown, and every now and then I come across pockets of young crab spiders, some hers I suspect. Some numbers dead in a tray under one of the bee hotels.
Currently she is resident on the yellow butterfly bush, one leg missing and bolder than ever – age and experience showing. She lets me get very close now without much sign of alarm or resistance.
I trust she lives a while longer, fulfilling her purpose of nature’s intelligent instinctive desire, albeit unconsciously, and we will meet again in the garden.
All the good is in the garden, or the garden is all the good, an other time and place … inside.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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What A Feast …
… the garden is. In more ways than one, I know.
To the senses a delight, of colour and form, scent and texture. Then just a little closer and …
… nature knows no pity, no sentimentality, just survival and reproduction. Only the fittest, the fastest, the craftiest endure.
And the wild formless intelligence behind it cannot be denied, while no thing, no body, lasts longer than its time.
I had a dream … that turned out to be a nightmare.
Now I don’t dream any more.
And the dream goes on.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Noble Visitors …
It’s another record year, never been 2015 before, as far as we are aware.
And in the garden it’s been another record, but who’s counting … I can’t help noticing the increase in variety and numbers of insect visitors, especially now the butterfly bushes are flowering and a few years work with the soil is bearing fruit.
It is said the Stag is a noble beast – I remember that from somewhere. Maybe it comes from the old English kings practise of hunting them, they had to be noble for kings to hunt them …
But really, kings are just ordinary men dressed up. Every body is of noble blood, all god – whatever that is – made. And the antlered beetle is no exception.
All god made things, and all things god made. To exclude one is to invite conflict to the mind.
Try maintaining a prejudice, a psychological position, without some conflict appearing.
As within, so without. And nothing is absolute, both ways …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Raiders On The Tom’s …
They’re back, the dreaded fruit fly – dreaded by some because they destroy the harvest. I see them as a photo opportunity, since I don’t expect so am not disappointed.
I have a few tomato plants at different locations in the garden and at just one site something has been taking big bites out of some growing fruit and opening the way for so many others to feast.
This years garden is burgeoning beyond bounds. Plants overgrowing others to their apparent detriment. I just do a little pruning, dead-heading, and trust it works out for the best. The insects are loving it.
And oddly – not for me but against the usual thinking, I see the insects as a good sign, all is well in my garden. Because that’s nature and my garden is me ‘out there’. As within so …
I find if I let what must be alone ‘enough’, inside and out, it doesn’t take more than its share of the available space and things are in balance, not too much or too little of anything.
Equilibrium, who could ask for more?
I know, I know …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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She …
She lies in wait, unmoving … threads on the blue to tell and trap or trip.
Capture … seen first from below, or upside down.
From above … after a little manipulation, careful not to alarm her.
A bountiful day … for the spider queen.
The discarded husk, falls from the blue, form without much life, emptied of nourishment.
… waits by the flower for her love, a need of food to sustain her, in this time of reproduction, instinctively – without self-conscious calculation.
The blue flower embroidered with her silk, the better to do her job of capture and eat, to feed the young, potential in her.
Red Nasturtium papers the walls of her minds eye, bees and flies the action in her unoccupied space.
Perpetual nature, incomplete in mortal form, knowledge to the seeing eye.
Thank you for the perfect little things.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Golden Head
The big bods are arriving to the garden now, about 5” long this one, and there is plenty to eat this year so no need to evict them to the neighbours, yet. :-)
A Locust I believe, perched on the veranda, cautious but unafraid. She backed up from the lens so I manoeuvred her and eventually got some nice background in the frame – employing behaviour that appears undesirable to the inexperienced.
But no need to push it. At the angle she was and with what I had with me at the time there were only a few shots available. The upper body/thorax and head portrait is most expressive, for a Locust, and I thought the foot especially interesting.
Armoured, both for gripping and striking. Those sprung legs are strong enough to propel the heavy beast into the air, and those spurs are capable of penetrating and damaging the strongest of attackers.
It’s wild out there …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Spring Time
Plants in the garden are reaching for the sky, and in every other direction. Small creatures are reaching for the plants, from every direction. And spring has only just begun.
Ride that falling leaf and see the earth … from one perspective anyway.
It’s time for the new.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Our Leonine Nature
Water, one of life’s simple pleasures. The sense, or essence, of it …
Bees, what would we do without them. I have heard people use feather dusters in some places where the bees have died out, to pollinate the crop.
These are a healthy lot too, looking strong and well groomed. Lion-like with their big manes – is what they remind me of.
That they are feral, gone wild in a local forest, might be significant to their health. Having nobody exploiting them.
No doubt they have their difficulties but they can always be seen to take clean water from near the flow.
Never doubting their common purpose or function, as bees.
Being free of our questionable chemistry.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Nature's Place 
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