Lens-Artists Challenge #313 – Cool Colours

John is our host this week, and he wants us to concentrate on Cool Colours. Please visit his inspirational site for more about the challenge!

Cool colors have shorter wavelengths than warm colors (red, orange, yellow) and Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines ”cool” in seven ways. For this challenge, John has concentrated on hues in the range violet through blue to green, and I decided to stay with those hues too.

Going through my archives, I found an all time favourite image that has it all – cool colours from violet through blue and green. It is photographed in Lofoten, Norway. A magical place on this planet that has it all, in every respect.

A violet evening in Nice is indeed a soft and velvety dream. A gallery from Japan and the Wistera bloom in April adds to the fact that violet is named after the flower with the same name.

Violet is considered a creative colour and associated with energies and mindfulness, it represents the future, imagination and dreams. It is also one of my favourite colours.

Blue usually stands for serenity, stability, inspiration and wisdom – a calming colour. Personally, I never wear blue – except for jeans. But I love it in nature – the sky and the sea. Especially in summer mornings and late evenings.

I often walk along the sea at our summer house – and this was a magical night in June some years ago. A warm breeze and slow waves aganst the shore.

Of course we must have some flowers too – and this Agapanthus is from my own garden. Blue and green in the setting sun made the flower glow a bit warmer, leaning towards the last rays.

Finally, peeping over my neighbours fence, I see the blue King Frog sitting in his violet flower parasol, enveloped in a green cloak. Now we have all the cool colours in one single picture again.

Green was my last colour, and a favourite one as well. It represents growth, harmony, fertility and freshness. It is restful and relaxing to the eye – cool – due to its spectral wavelength. I sleep in a green bedroom because of this – and it works well.

A big thank you to Sofia, for hosting last week’s Sense of Scale – an interesting and eye opening challenge. So many great examples that never had crossed my mind! Next week, Anne will be our host. Be sure to follow her here so you don’t miss out on it.

Want to join in and don’t know how? Here are the details.

Thursday Thoughts – Great Dixter

When we left Sissinghurst that day, I wondered how any garden would be able to match it. But, Great Dixter did. Great Dixter is a house in Northiam, East Sussex, England. It was built in 1910–12 by architect Edwin Lutyens. The original Northiam house, dating from the mid-15th century, was acquired by a businessman named Nathaniel Lloyd in 1909.

Lloyd and Lutyens began the garden at Great Dixter, but it was Lloyd’s son Christopher Lloyd, a well known garden writer and television personality, who made it famous. The garden is in the arts and crafts style, where the planting is profuse, yet structured, and has featured many bold experiments of form, colour and combination.

The garden is currently managed by Fergus Garrett, who worked closely with Lloyd up until his death in 2006 as Head Gardener and introduced a number of innovations into the planting scheme.

I hope you enjoy the variety of this garden in my short gallery! For species and other facts, please visit Jude again!

I am sorry to say I haven’t even tried to find the names of all the flowers, but, Jude will know.

They are all glorious. The house and gardens are my number one from this week.

There will still be more gardens to come…

Lens-Artists Challenge #312 – Sense of Scale

Sofia challenges us to show how we give people a sense of scale in our pictures. This is sometimes quite essential… Please visit Sofia’s site to get more inspiring examples!

My take on this challenge must mainly be using people for scale, but also different perspectives as from below or above, from afar or from a frog’s perspective. Finishing with a macro, of course.

This was a waterfall in Alaska that I did not hike up to – but wow when I zoomed the lens! People walking there made it quite clear it was not as small as it seemed from where I was standing.

This picture is from a tour to the Space Needle in Seattle – where looking through the glass floor sets the scale properly…

The Nice Carnival with its many show wagons is also a way to celebrate the sense of scale and give you interesting surprises.

Some years ago we went to Barcelona under the construction of the great Sagrada Familia. The picture was taken from one of the towers. People and buildings giving you a hint of the size of this gigantic Cathedral.

Back home I was once fortunate enough to visit a statue of a harbour worker – when an elderly lady turned up and walked beside him. A sense of scale in more than one dimension.

This was the first time I visited Segovia, Spain, and I walked in awe up to the aqueduct running through the city, towering over the houses. I believe this is one of the more exciting and surprising moments during all my travels. The elderly gentlemen in front of me were very sweet, and I had no problems keeping the same pace as they did…

Next is an old favourite from the kite festival in Denmark. With kites you can easily use your camera from under their bellies… People and cars become tiny and the kites just as spectacular as they are. I think I’ll have to go there once more!

This one I have used before too – but I still love those legs sticking out of a rusty head in Riga.

Lying down on the stone floor in our apartment in Spain, I found the tiniest ants I had ever seen. A tea spoon became a valuable measurement of scale.

Then came the tiniest husband I had ever seen… In Alaska he jumped from a mountain – safely of course. If I remember it right, he is number two from the left. I let the tree tops stay in the corner of the picture to remember just how difficult this scale was to fathom.

Finally…

…in Weltfogelpark Walsrode in Germany, apart from the real birds, also the tree sculptures were greatly admired. In Bhutan the forest and trees set the scale for the golden Buddha statue. I had to finish with the tiniest of snails (5mm) in this withered flower.

A big thank you for all your garden displays last week, big and small, fancy and spectacular, creative and inspiring – and above all – Loved and Needed! It truly was a treat to read every comment and see every picture. I had a great week.

Don’t forget to tag Lens-Artists and link to Sofias original post. Next week is John’s turn to host so please visit his site for inspiration. Until then, stay well and enjoy every day.

Thursday Thoughts – Sissinghurst, a Gardener’s Dream

Sarah of Travel With Me posted on Sissinghurst for the LACP this week, and I recommend reading her post for its beauty and for the background history of the house and grounds. For species and extraordianry flower knowledge, I recommend you go to Jude’s beautiful site. As I visited some weeks ago, I had prepared a post for today – but this garden is well worth visiting more than once.

Sissinghurst in Kent is a famous English garden, with a series of ‘garden rooms’, each filled with different planting schemes and unique designs. This garden is a result of Harold Nicolson’s design and the plantings of his wife, author Vita Sackville-West.

It was such a treat to visit a place where creative cooperation showed such magnificent results. I have read several works of Virginia Woolf, and knew she had an intimate relation with Vita Sackville-West. I can imagine they must have enjoyed each others company as creative souls. I could almost see them walking together here, arm in arm through the gardens.

I loved the different ”garden rooms”. Maybe mostly the white garden and the yellow garden.

This is the view from the top of the tower, where the different ”rooms ” are clearly showing. And Vita Sackville-West’s writing room in the tower was extremely difficult to photograph, as it was in the middle of the narrow staircases and only a tiny platform to land on while other visitors were passing by.

I hope you enjoyed Sissinghurst once again!