As we came out of the Great Glass House at the National Botanic Garden of Wales on my walk this week, I looked at the impending weather and took a couple of shots. I had noticed the family in the middle ground but only realised the symmetry of the children running away from each other as part of a game after I had taken the photo.
Those dark clouds did catch up with us but not at this point in our walk when I was still interested in the growth andContinue reading
My walk this week returns to the National Botanic Garden of Wales. It was Mother’s Day here in the UK and we took the opportunity of our membership to visit at a time when so many plants and flowers are getting ready for growth.
We can see the plants in our own garden getting ready for growth of course, but we do not have a team of volunteer gardeners and professionals attending to it and neither do we have the wonderful range of native andContinue reading
My walk this week has been around the lake at The Waterside – Felindre and seems to have been punctuated by ice. Indeed, the whole language and grammar of the posts has been dictated by the freezing icy conditions.
Influenced as I am by the things I see and hear around me, I look at the light and shade, the patterns and textures, and I wonder what it would feel like to touch, to run my fingers along some of the surfaces of frozen water, hard ground lightly dusted with snow or old reeds and rushes from last year as they poke through the semi opaque sometimes mushy lookingContinue reading
The top end of the lake round which I walked last week seemed to be wearing a range of icy clothes. I suppose I might be forcing it a bit, but the idea came to mind when I took the shot below and thought this rock in the stream had a flouncy skirt look about it.
And then I saw the submerged half frozen grass at the edge of the silt pond and thought “Wow! What great effect.”
The last two shots in this short sequence are clearly not references to clothing,Continue reading
My walk this week is another cold one around the lake at The Waterside – Felindre. It was very icy and the range of textures within that ice was fascinating. We had been led to believe there would be snow but as you can see, the forecasts were wrong for this little pocket of the country and a light dusting was all we got.
This was another short walk as my hands felt as though they would fall off with the cold and it was only a new pair of gloves knitted by my daughter that allowed me take the photos. Taking a close look at the various ice formations revealedContinue reading
In this my third and last post for my walk this week I am looking at some of what is left behind by both recent weather conditions and humans – the ice and jetsam scattered in the river and around the frozen woodland in a semi urban / industrial area.
The ice was not yet melting but had created strange bubble-like forms around old reeds at the river’s edge. Also at the edge of the Afon Llan was a collection of abandoned shopping trolleys tangled up with bits of wood swept downstream and caught up in their old metal mesh.Continue reading
The rest of the UK had snow but our little pocket of the country somehow managed to avoid it and so my walk this week was freezing but no more than that. The images of frozen water below may not be as dramatic as some of those to be found in countries closer to the arctic circle, but they are different to our normal situation here in South West Wales where, since taking these photos, we have returned to rain!
My walk this week was, however, one I had not taken before and although short, allowed me to view an area that combinesContinue reading
My walk this week braves the bitter wind blowing across Britain from Siberia. I have never seen ice like this on our local river, the Afon Dulais, but despite this and the fact that the rest of the country was under thick snow, we had next to none of it! The “beast from the east” and Storm Emma brought high winds and bitter cold but we were disappointed not to get any snow when seemingly all around us a colour, texture and acoustic change was taking place across the land.
Never mind, despite the ice feeling like it was inside my fingers, I still enjoyed my walk and the sights and sounds were still different to normal, but more of that later in the week. There was still someContinue reading