MinxterBLOOM

DE WALDEN PRESS:  Miniature Hand made limited edition books

These books are darling and astonishing. See more about Jan Kellet's Limited Editions at her website. 

She features several books about Shakepeare.  These two images are from Shakespeare's Flowers.

John McGahern, Irish writer and farmer, wrote this about remembering his mother in Memoir, published by Faber and Faber; Rev Ed edition (2 Nov 2006):
❛My relationship with this landscape extended back to the very beginning of my life. When I was three years old I used to walk a lane like these lanes to Lisacarn School with my mother. Lisacarn had only a single room and the teachers faced one another when they taught their classes. On the windowsill glowed the blue Mercator globe, and wild flowers were scattered in jamjars on the sills and all about the room. Along the lane there was a drinking pool for horses, gates to houses, and the banks were covered with all kinds of wild flowers and vetches and wild strawberries.

My mother named these flowers for me as we walked, and sometimes we stopped and picked them for the jamjars.

I must have been extraordinarily happy walking that lane to school. There are many such lanes all around where I live, and in certain rare moments over the years while walking in these lanes I have come into an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace in which I feel that I can live for ever. I suspect it is no more than the actual lane and the lost lane becoming one for a moment in an intensity of feeling, but without the usual attendants of pain and loss. These moments disappear as suddenly and as inexplicably as they come, and long before they can be recognised and placed.❜

Me?  Fast-forward forty years. Again, from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Collection.

CALL NUMBER:  LC-USF33- 001294-M2 [P&P]
REPRODUCTION NUMBER:  LC-USF3301-001294-M2 (b&w film dup. neg., 4×5 size)

LC-USF33-T01-001294-M2 (b&w film dup. neg., 70mm size)
MEDIUM:  1 negative : nitrate ; 35 mm. CREATED/PUBLISHED:  1938 Nov.

CREATOR:
Vachon, John, 1914-1975, photographer.

NOTES: Title and other information from caption card.

Other title from Documenting America, 1935-1943 / edited by Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan. Berkeley: University of California Press in association with the Library of Congress, 1988, p. 106.
LOT 0412 (Location of corresponding print.)
Transfer; United States. Office of War Information. Overseas Picture Division. Washington Division; 1944.

For fun, search on "flowers' at the Library of Congress "Prints and Photographs" collection.  Here is one treasure that popped up.  Two little boys at our swimming pool keep stripping leaves off so many plants on the grounds (I am the pool plantswoman.)  Their parents watch these boys in action. I am tempted to put this sign up near some special trees.  I am not sure this would help either the boys or their parents. However, 'tis the perfect sign, is it not?

TITLE:  Enjoy - don't destroy
CALL NUMBER:  POS - WPA - OH .01 .E56, no. 1 (C size) [P&P]
REPRODUCTION NUMBER:  LC-USZC2-5651 (color film copy slide)

RIGHTS INFORMATION:  No known restrictions on publication.
SUMMARY:  Poster showing two children picking flowers.
MEDIUM:  1 print on board (poster) : silkscreen, color.

CREATED/PUBLISHED:  [Ohio : Federal Art Project, 1936 or 1937]

NOTES:
Date stamped on verso: Apr 5 1937.
Work Projects Administration Poster Collection (Library of Congress).

I saw the fabled blue poppy today. Sigh. Really.  Here is an image that will stay up, only if the owner agrees. 

Photo by and (c)2008 Derek Ramsey. Co-attribution must be given to the Chanticleer Garden.

The aqua-blue color is just about perfect. I had not thought that I would see this flower.  The blue poppy is Bhutan's national flower.  This year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival features Bhutan.

Species details: 

Meconopsis betonicifolia is native to the Himalayas, requiring acid, humusy soil. Cool temperatures are best, but damp and wet feet can rot the root.Frank Kingdon-Ward, English plant collector in China during early 1900s, traveled widely in these high mountains. His introductions include rhododendrons, primroses, and this.

 I had no idea I would see this at the festival. 

Blue, perfect.

Amen. 

Botany Photo of the Day features this singular bloom in an extraordinary close-up. Do not miss this.