Of course, many of them are just for documentation purposes. Since I developed this unhealthy obsession with gardening this year, I want to document when different flowers started showing up or started to bloom or whatever, just so I can go back next year when the wait for them to show themselves seems endless again and make sure that it’s just my general impatience that’s making me impatient.

I have been terribly impatient this year, since the bloody winter seemed just never ending. But when I compare my photos of, say, early March to the latest ones it is quite nice to see how much is already going on. It is just so much nicer to look out at green trees and colorful flowerbeds than at bare branches and naked earth.

Right now I have a thing for tulips, although most of them are already dying again. Because the weather wasn’t right to take good pictures I missed out on most of them again. Ah well, there’s always next year I guess…

Funnily enough when I go through my garden I mostly tend to notice the tiny flowers, the ones normal people either don’t see at all or classify mostly as weeds.

Some of them might be weeds, but in my garden that doesn’t automatically mean they have to go. As long as they’re pretty and don’t run over the other flowers I am more than happy to have most of them around, not least because they are usually more useful to the insects than many of the exotic plants that are grown in normal gardens.

Plus, and this is a big plus in my eyes: they tend to need not much tending and nurturing. They come and go as they please, they grow wherever they like, need no protection in winter, throw around their seeds liberally and basically just save me a lot of work and give me more time to enjoy my garden as it should be enjoyed: in a lounge chair with a Mai Tai in one hand and a book in the other.

What makes me happiest is that my favorite tree finally unfurls its beautiful leaves. That one always takes the longest to start doing anything each spring, but when it finally does I know that summer is really not that far away anymore.

I love my garden.

And it was about friggin’ time, if you ask me. The last 2 weeks the weather has been dreadful, but since yesterday we have actual sunshine. Yay! I bloody well hope it stays that way for a while. Like, the next 6 months or so.

The above photo was taken yesterday in the afternoon in our garden. Here is one from the morning walk with the dog:

Does still look a bit wintry, doesn’t it? But it got better pretty fast. Once the sun came up properly everything was fine: blue skies all around.

And this is what Jenny looks like on the first really warm and sunny day of the year:

No, she’s not dead. She is sunning herself and trying hard to ignore me sneaking up on her with the dratted camera (for some reason she doesn’t like having her picture taken. I wonder where she got that from…)

One of the most impressive examples of a photoblog I stumbled on during that research is called Daily Walks by Diane Varner. Her photos feature animal portraits, landscapes, seascapes, plant details and all kinds of stuff. And all of them are incredible.

Below are just a few examples of my favorites. Pop over to her blog to see them in the original size.

Did I ever mention that I have an insect phobia? Well, maybe phobia is a bit of an exaggeration, but they definitely do make me uncomfortable. Even butterflies – no, strike that, especially butterflies! – give me the creeps with their fluttering and scuttling and everything. *shudder*

Luckily, that doesn’t keep me from admiring the critters in photos. Especially if these photos turn out to be as beautiful as these ones by Martin Amm. Click through to his portfolio on photo.net to see the big versions of the ones I posted here, and also all the others. The man has an incredible talent for finding the hidden beauty of those creatures.

You definitely have to be an artist to make an ordinary fly look like a precious jewel. Nobody would ever get me close enough to some of these critters to take pictures like this one. And yes, spiders are among the most uncomfortableness-inducing animals I know. Topped only by a shark circling around me in open water…

BTW, I found the picture on the companion site of the one I mentioned in my last post. This one has all animal photos – not quite as stunning as the landscapes, but there are some nice ones, too.
There is also a site with portraits, one with glamour photos (whatever that may be exactly) and one with nude pictures belonging to this strange conglomerate as well. All mainly by russian photographers as far as I can see. I have only cursory glanced at all of them so far. The nude pics didn’t impress me all that much. What I saw so far looked pretty generic, apart from a few exceptions. Glamour shots don’t interest me at all. The portraits seem to be pretty good, though. I’ll have to check them out in more depth later.

I will start with Wojtek Kwiatkowski, whose horse photos just blew me away.

I love horses, especially arabs. This man’s photos not only look like exquisite paintings that you would love to frame and hang up on your walls, they also perfectly capture the spirit of these beautiful animals.

Just gorgeous. Go and have a look at his portfolio.

Oh, and if you know of more photography websites, I’d love to get some new links.

I know they’re not the worlds best pictures. I am still fiddling around trying to figure out the settings on my new-ish camera. It’s gonna be a while before my photos with this one are gonna be as nice as the ones taken with the old one.
But at least Jenny is a much more patient model than Tessy, our last dog, was. Well, Jen has practice in modelling for me, after all she has done it since she was the cutest puppy in the world.