This lot aren’t here thanks to me, they’re wild.
We have tons of buttercups at the moment but they don’t photograph well. En masse they just look like small yellow dots.
The fly is for scale.
Here are a few more insects, for scale.
These are all different dandelions.
One more.
This is another very pretty wild flower that I have to be terribly careful not to mow when I cut the grass. No idea what it’s called. There’s one that only grows around here and is therefore called something-Asker, but I’m not sure this is it. Hope that helps.
I should have taken some of the lavender. And of a slug because that’s why I can’t show any irises.
A Bad Guide 
Wonderful! wonderful!
And I envy your camera, as well as your eye and your garden!
That’s a cranesbill, that is (one of the two beasties called “geranium”, but in this case correctly); my wife wonders whether it’s Johnson’s Blue.
On your post below the pinky purplish chap below the rose is Ragged Robin, my wife thinks.
Dearieshe reminds me that my mother used to claim that the only wildflower she could name was Ragged Robin. I suspect that her category “wildflower” didn’t include daisy, buttercup, or dandelion.
I am pretty sure that your unknown plant with a purplish blue flower is borage. The flowers with 5 narrow blue-to-purple petals, the buds and the fine hairs on most of the plant are quite distinctive. There are pictures on the Wiki article on borage, but Wikipedia.fr under bourrache has a better one, showing the general plant and the colour of the flowers as I remember them. When I was a child we spent several summers in my grandparents’ village in Southern France, and there was lots of borage around, not just in their garden but along paths.
The leaves and flowers are supposed to be edible, but only when young. The fine hairs become itchy (although not like nettles), eventually making the plant unpleasant to pick without gloves. But you can pick it for a medicinal tea at any time. It is recorded as “sudorific”, making you sweat, and perhaps good for a type of arthritis, rather than aphrodisiac as was thought in the Middle Ages. But I think my family drank some borage tea without such effects (perhaps you need a heavy dose for the medicinal effect).
dearieme, according to the picture on the Wiki page, cranesbill is more pinkish-purple and has smooth, deeply cut leaves, quite different from borage leaves.
Oh m-l, how I WISH it were borage! We used to have borage, and we sometimes ate the flowers in salads (except my mother wouldn’t, she found the idea rather shocking), and I loved it. They we had to move it for some reason or other and it didn’t thrive in the new place. I just saw some at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London and it made me wish we still had it. You can’t seem to buy it in nurseries here.
m-l, cranesbills come in many shades: ours include pinks and blues.
Borage we know well; it grows every year in our garden. We use it in salads and Pimm’s.
Thank you for cranesbill – slash – geranium, Dearie. I can’t tell you how many times my mother has told me that, but it goes in one ear and out the other. I’ll try to remember this time. I don’t know what you mean by ‘in this case correctly’, though. And please thank Mrs Dearie for ‘Ragged Robin’. I’ll look it up immediately. It’s not such a hard name to remember.
Cat, thank you very much. I’m using my ‘macro’ lens, I think that’s more important than the camera body. Now I’m wondering if I haven’t sharpened them a bit too much in P’shop & on the Raw menu.
Borage grows easily from seed and then self-seeds year after year.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘in this case correctly’, though.” When I was but a lad there was a plant everyone knew as “geranium”, but the namingnazis changed it to “pelargonium”, reserving “geranium” for what everyone called the cranesbill. I trust ziss ist klar!
I must admit that whenIwasbutalad I was more interested in fruit than flowers. I knew a bank whereon the wild raspberries grew.
A perfect dandelion (is that first one)!
Circles and symmetry are my thing.
Wonderful pictures, wonderful flowers and such a beautiful garden, Crown!
Berries are traditionally a big deal in Norway. Fruit & berries are seen somehow as separate items. I’ve heard that when Norway was the poorest country in Europe (‘the sick man of Europe’?) two or three hundred years ago people subsisted on the berries. Anyway we have wild raspberries as well as cultivated ones and lots of other berries (straw, goose, blue, black) & red & black currants too.
We call the bright red things on our kitchen windowsill ‘geraniums’ and it’s geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue), there’s nothing in A.A. Milne about pelargoniums – that’s a word I don’t use (though strangely I did know it).
I’ll try the borage seeds. I think I did it once before.
Thank you, Julia. I didn’t know you were interested in symmetry. I like it too in its place (on my face, for instance), but as an architect I got REALLY sick of it (except on old buildings, obviously). Especially during the 1980s it was so often an easy way out for so many designers. An example of that kind of thinking is the upper doughnut circle, the GCHQ building I posted about the other day: as if it weren’t monumental enough they’ve gone and made all the facades symmetrical. A circle is symmetrical in itself – fine – but the GCHQ people had the possibility of additionally making a reading (like a gramophone record or a cotton reel) of an unwinding line (a shallow spiral). Grrr, a wasted opportunity. I hope Foster will treat the plan and facades of the lower doughnut asymmetrically, although it’s so huge it may not matter – sort of like the Pentagon.
Awfully symmetrical, Mount Fuji.
You`re right, AJP, I agree with you, this kind of obsessive symmetry could be enervating.
I was going to say that I most like sauvage symmetry as in this perfect dandelion… But now dearie broke, smashed and completely destroyed the possibility of any exalted (and cheese, maybe) praise of Nature. ;-)
And you’re both right, it would be a bit quixotic to complain about symmetry in nature, and anyway what’s not to like? I was only complaining about some current architecture (and even then I think there’s room for an occasional local symmetry along an important axis, or something like that, if the subject is right for it).
I took Dearie statement as joke, of course (Was I wrong?)
Nature “symmetry” is always imperfect and that’s why it’s beautiful, don’t you think?
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Did you know that there is a theory (or hypothesis or maybe a conjecture) that one of the key determinants of beauty in a human face is symmetry? True or not?
I took Dearie statement as joke, of course (Was I wrong?)
I don’t think so. I too took it as sarcasm.
Nature “symmetry” is always imperfect and that’s why it’s beautiful, don’t you think?
Nature’s forms often appear less rigid, less relentlessly rational than ours do, but at some subatomic level there are perfect formal symmetries, aren’t there?
Did you know that there is a theory (or hypothesis or maybe a conjecture) that one of the key determinants of beauty in a human face is symmetry? True or not?
Since there aren’t any absolute criteria for what’s beautiful it’s got to be at least to some extent untrue. But I know fashionistas talk about this. I’ve never seen them show examples, though. – And obviously, if you look at the profile of a beautiful face, or even at a threequarter view of it, these aren’t symmetrical, so…
What I’VE heard is that people like bilateral symmetry, because it’s like human & animal forms, but don’t like biaxial symmetry, because it’s – I don’t know: too scarily perfect or static, or something.
I’m sure that starfish love five-fold symmetry just as much as we love bilateral symmetry. They would probably like geraniums and pelargoniums very much, if they could only tell us.
My wife’s face has a slight asymmetry, which I of course find endearing.
What on earth did Blake mean by fearful symmetry? Maybe Tom Clark has an idea.
(I’m not sure that I should limit myself to earth.)
I never knew until today that pelargiums were such close kin to geraniums.
Near our place in the country, our house in Westport, Massachusetts–that place where the squirrels came down the chimney–where Tesi once helped an osprey to get out of the screen porch–where Asa and I found a mantis shrimp burrowed into a mudflat–where I watched tropical storm Irene as she didn’t quite blow the big windows in–we have Johnson’s blue in one of the flower beds and some other smaller geranium growing wild in the grass somewhere in the neighborhood.
“Pelargonium” to me is the name of one of the characters in Elsa Belkow’s book The Flowers’ Festival, also known as Flower Festival in the Hill.
“I too took it as sarcasm.” It was, in fact, an attempt at outreach.
Outreach. What are you, Japan Airlines? Well it did take us in a new direction, so thanks.
I didn’t think it was the symmetry of the stripes, but rather the tiger – tyger – itself, burning bright, that was fearful. I have a quasi-maths book called Fearful Symmetry, by Ian Stewart & Martin Golubitsky, two Maths profs, that’s about symmetries in nature (I’ve never read it, it was a birthday present 30-odd years ago).
I don’t know The Flowers’ Festival, I’ll take a look.
My wife’s face has a slight asymmetry, which I of course find endearing.
And this of course is far more important than any notion of beauty. Actually, I have a feeling that beauty is out of style in art at the moment. Either that, or it went out and came back in again. I’ll have to ask MY wife; she keeps up with all that stuff in her teaching job.
Symmetry in nature: I think that the “abstract blueprint” for a flower, a face, etc is perfectly symmetrical, but as it is “realized”, made concrete using the actual material components of nature, the finished products contain slight asymmetries which make them a little different from each other (and, among other things, easier to recognize them as individuals). Sometimes mutations interfere with symmetry and cause a gradual change in shape (cf the pictures of various fish by Goethe, with some dimensions exaggerated). Actually this notion of “abstract” blueprint or ideal and “actual, concrete” realization is quite important in language study (not necessarily under these exact terms).
That’s all very interesting, m-l. I’m going to look up ‘abstract blueprint’ later today, when I’m feeling less stressed…