These last days have been sunny and windy. While the wind and lack of clouds nighttime means it's been pretty cold, the sunny is such a lovely sign: spring is on its way. Still too cold for the flowers -- this is how far the winter aconites have come. The snowdrops aren't budding yet. Late winter isn't very scenic, but with spring approaching and the sun shining, I took my camera and went for a walk with a cat, Randa, by my side.
The world has mainly two colours right now: a special kind of powdery blue (the sky) and golden tan (the ground, subtly reflecting the rays of sunshine). Very little green, though I see new leaves and a few patches of green grass and moss amongst all the hay and dead leaves.
Slightly montone, but if the weather is right and you manage to capture the colours it can be nice. Afraid I don't have that many good pics that really did that this time...
If some of the photos look hazy it's not so much the weather as a late winter/early spring -- we call this time vårvinter, spring winter -- tradition of burning in the fields. Farmer burning branches from pruned trees and such, far away (hopefully) from any grass that might catch on fire.
As I've mentioned before, the Bjäre peninsula is known for its abundance of Bronze Age burial mounds. These are a few I can see from home (as in our land, not from the house). In the old days, it was believed that trolls lived in the mounds. Not the grotesque giants of Scandinavian -- most notably Norwegian -- folklore and modern fantasy novels, but almost a sort of southern swedish version of faerie. Not fairy as in pixie, big as humans. Social beings with riches that look rather similar to humans but with special magical powers (e.g. invisibility).
It's funny, but since I've been doing the Margie and Me challenges, I've really been more aware of color. In the 2nd landscape pic (with the smoke streaming across the pic) I counted 8 different colors! Just goes to show that even a winter landscape can be colorful. Thanks for sharing those. And I love the top one of the yellow flower.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's interesting to see how excersises really makes us so much more aware of certain details. I had something similar happen to me when I read The Beader's Colour Mixing Directory. When I took an ecology class one of the excersises we had to do was identifying different plant species. Mostly common plants I already knew the name of. After that I kept identifying the wild plants I saw along the streets, walking from my apartment to the university each morning. It wasn't as they were new discoveries to me, but after days of determining flowers, I just couldn't see them as just flowers, but samples I had to (mentally) log and label. I discovered many plant along the route which I'd never really seen there before. Garlic mustard, wild pansy, bluebells etc.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you like the photos. Thanks for your comment!
(Shouldn't have said anything about spring: today it's been snowing, not much and it turned into rain again, but it's like someone wanted to say there's still some winter left...)