A WALK ON MAY-DAY

May Days are celebrations of . . . May  . . . and Spring (ish) . . . and manual labour.
Roman Catholic Readers may also be aware it's the Feast of St Joseph the Worker. A pretty good collection of celebrations!

For most of the day I was at the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival. It was really, really sunny - but not too hot. (Perfect.) There were masses of people. (Good for the town.) But not so many one felt crowded. (Good for me!)

I bought a T-shirt with a plesiosaur skeleton on it. Took a look at fossils for sale in a tent. (Bought none. Very particularly I didn't buy the £2,000 crocodile head from Africa.) Drank a cup of coffee from a cafetiere and went to a lecture about pre-historic creatures of the Jurassic Coast.

Then content after a happy day - came home.

Sunny days at this time of year tend to end in misty evenings and it's an inadvertent tradition that I set out to take photographs for Loose and Leafy when it's dull, or rainy or otherwise not-a-good-moment for taking photographs. My last post was sprinkled with rain-drops. Ready for this one, light decided to fail early. (If you are unfamiliar with Dorset, you may find it hard to believe this is one of the hottest and sunniest parts of the UK!)

Well, anyway . . . out I went with my camera.

 Trombidium holosericeum do you think?
(Velvet Mite)

Now the picture at the top of the post . . . you may find it a surprise here. Perhaps, you may think, this would have been more appropriate on my other blog - Message in a Milk Bottle. But if you examine it carefully you will find something very specially interesting - apart from finding a plastic cherub lying on the path. This little doll was very small - barely more than an inch from top to toe - but it showed up bright and pink against the black of tar. Unmissable.

Now do you see why it belongs here? At the bottom edge of the photo, towards the left hand edge, unbeknownst to me at the time, a tiny red creature had walked into frame. The red is extraordinary but I don't know what it is. Anyone?

This next picture . . . I know it will get much blood boiling among readers. Even I, one usually more conscious of the photographic potential in things left lying around than its status as rubbish . . . even I don't like to see washing machines or tumble driers or whacking great bits of board in ditches. But it is fascinating, isn't it? That someone has gone to the trouble of trundling it to a place where cars don't go so they can tip it under a span of honeysuckle and hawthorn.

Next up on my walk . . . 

I tend to call all sorts of plants dandelions when they aren't. Here's one of them which might be . . . or might not be. I don't mean the groundsel (with the little yellow flower) but the one with the bigger leaves. You know how I'm fascinated by urban plants? This is not one, despite the path. Behind me is the sea. Ahead you can see the blur of Alexanders. This is an urban-wannabe.

Here's another thing you will have gathered over the years - that I get to like particular trees and photograph them over and over - even if, like this one - it's impossible to photograph them other than against the light. I've watched a bud from this tree morph into a summer leaf and into autumn. And its seeds ripen. Here we go again - yet more silhouettes on this friendly sycamore.

If you are a long-time reader, you will be familiar with these kind of posts. If you are new to Loose and Leafy, perhaps I should assure you I sometimes take photos of pretty flowers in bright sunlight. In summer there will be butterflies and hoverflies and . . . and . . . things like that. And come autumn there will be hips and haws and blackberries. 

And I've noticed, over time, that despite the ordinariness of what I show you here - I've never yet found anything rare - Loose and Leafy has an indefinable yet specific identity. I reckon if I were to take its name away from the header, and that you found yourself here by chance, you'd know in a trice you'd landed on the Loose and Leafy blog. (Don't you agree?)

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THE TIGER THAT ATE YOUR DAUGHTER

 A tiger which has just eaten your daughter may not be welcome in your street but, objectively, it's as beautiful as ever it was before it escaped its cage; its stripes are as striking, its coat as shiny and thick. You may feel differently about it now it has turned your family into a ready meal - but that's another matter.

Once an eye is tuned to disregarding the practical, ethical or conventional trappings of street plants, able, for a few moments, not to take into account that they crack tarmac but admire their strength, notice that a tree growing on the top of a building makes an interesting silhouette even though its roots are cracking the chimney and nudging slates from the roof so passers by are in danger of having their heads split open; even if some plants have to be pulled up and some trees taken down; once it's possible to separate what something looks like from what it's doing and whether it should be doing it, all sorts of other things leap into sight as objects of delight and scenes to be appreciated before they are changed.

Ruined castles were once homes but many people like to see them, none the less. Giant cooling towers which pump steam into the air, waste power and dominate the landscape can look impressive when viewed from a train. If we are able to disengage our thoughts about things like these in order to see them, then why not others? Why not grow an internal switch which can be flicked on and off so we can ask ourselves 'what does this look like?' 'what is it doing?' before we ask whether it should it be doing it and whether anything need be done about it?

This picture first shown on my other blog - Message in a Milk Bottle
Coca-Cola Can and Green Plant in Kerb

Much that litters the gutters, rattles and blows against plants already there, has been designed to entice shoppers. Some is the result of years and years of research. Someone has bothered to make it. Tins and bottles are bright and shiny and interestingly shaped. Paper and plastic bags blowing down the street can be like low flying kites until they are rained into sogginess and ready to be swept away. Dustbins and recycling trays can make an exciting percussion when they blow down the road. Even in the night, when they wake us, they can be like drums calling, taking us, in our imagination, into places of adventure and change. It may well be that they knock down the next elderly person that comes in their way. They may tip litter and old bones all over the place - but that doesn't mean they aren't making an interesting noise as they do it.

Does it?

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I DON'T LIKE FLOWERS

I don't like flowers. They have their place, of course. They look good in vases and there wouldn't be seeds without them. But when I think about what I like to have around me - it's bark and leaves. Between them, it's hard to choose. My first instinct was to plump for leaves. Then I thought about trees in winter. They look just as good as their summer selves so maybe my final, finely tuned decision is in favour of bark. Though I feel uncomfortable with it because leaves and stems are what I like to take photos of and I'm always moved by the little hairs that show up in pictures but which we rarely notice otherwise - and the veins and wrinkles and shapes that we may examine from time to time, or be startled by when the sun shines through them but which, most days, we ignore. (Of course we do. We none of us have time to work through a forest, leaf by leaf.)

It's a funny time of year for flowers round where I live. The burst of spring yellows and blues is over. Alexanders are tipping, as is the Hawthorn (May). Sloes and apples are clearly in place. Indeed, sloes are already their full size - though green. Thus, we have autumn embedded in summer.

Locally, tall, white, umbrels are what catch my eye most. Some are lovely. On others, the individual flowerlets are so densely packed they resemble nothing more than sickly cow pats on sticks; or perhaps white picnic plates.

Rape plants gone wild stand out splendidly from the dull, decaying mess and then there are buttercups - I like buttercups.

And the problem, for me, is exacerbated because I find yellow and white hard to photograph.

White flowers lose definition and yellow glares back so glaringly, images of petals get splodged with horrid white patches.

There are masses of garden bloggers who show white and yellow flowers, apparently without difficulty, but for me it's a labour. And for someone who doesn't even like flowers much, who prefers leaves and stems - it isn't even a labour of love.

So . . . in this post . . . I'm getting it over with. A flower post of white and yellow flowers which took hours to construct because I kept having to go and try again until any showed up at all.

I hope you enjoy it.

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And you might like to tell me (and each other) - are you a flower person or someone who would you prefer to kneel in long grass and peer up at its seed heads against a blue, blue sky?