A gentle rain overnight left Piney Woods Church Road covered with tiny jewels — water droplets reflecting the roadside landscape, upside-down in miniature. I think I would be content to spend the rest of my life just photographing drops of water for the wonders they contain.
Resurrection fern (Polypodium polypodioides) is among my most favorite ferns. It spends much of the year looking like dried-up leaves clinging to a tree branch. After rainfall, it magically transforms itself into a vibrant green, luxurious fern layer festooning tree limbs. Resurrection fern is an epiphyte, gaining all the nutrients it needs from what is in the air and what might collect on the outer surface of the tree bark. It does not harm its host in any way. This photograph was taken among the pecan trees, about halfway down Piney Woods Church Road. I dedicate this image to Fern’s Market in Serenbe, which has provided me with a marvelous haven for reading and hanging out since it first opened in 2012.
I am learning to look everywhere for possible photographs — for potential doorways into wonder. Sometimes, they appear literally beneath my feet. That is what happened in the case of this picture. I looked down just a few steps ahead of me, and glimpsed this composition, already created by happenstance.
On yet another rainy, wintery afternoon, with the air temperature struggling to rise above 40, and the wind chill in the lower 30s, I started off down Piney Woods Church Road hoping to discover something new — some further omen of spring’s return. I was delighted to find, almost immediately, more red maples in bloom — this time, a couple of trees growing near the intersection with Rico Road. I snapped a number of photos of them. Upon returning home, I was most drawn to my images of this particular cluster of flowers. Alas, a dead stalk of some kind of large weed in the background provided an annoying distraction in every single shot. So I broke with tradition, trudging back a second time to take the photograph below.
I was going back through my photos from today, and I found several that I took in an attempt to capture a clump of resurrection ferns growing on the branches of a pecan tree. The lighting didn’t cooperate, unfortunately. But after trimming one of the images, I found the result so intriguing that I decided to share it here.
For once, I have nothing more to add. I am positively tongue-tied.
After a string of cloudy days, skies cleared by mid-morning today. By the time I got outside late in the afternoon, it was cloudy again. The result, though, was this photograph, so I don’t mind.
Having provided readers with a couple of bright images, I have decided to include this one, too — an image so monochromatic that changing it to black and white makes no visible change at all. There is something peaceful, though, about gazing through the branches with half-focused eyes, admiring nature’s geometry….
With overcast skies and below-seasonal temperatures anticipated for several days yet, I am hungry for bright colors, which are all too scarce on my daily Piney Woods Church Road walks. Today I glimpsed a flash of brilliant red, when a cardinal alighted in a loblolly pine tree at the intersection with Hutcheson Ferry Road. Alas, my +10 macro lens was on at the time, and by the time I had unscrewed it and pointed the camera toward the pine branches, the bird was gone. Fortunately, though, water oak leaves this time of year are quite obliging (and far less ambulatory). I don’t think I could ever be sated by all the possibilities these leaves furnish for photographs evocative of stained glass windows.
On a raw gray day, with the temperature hovering in the mid-40s, I compelled myself to seek out more signs of spring’s eventual arrival. I spent perhaps fifteen minutes endeavoring to photograph a tiny bluet (Houstonia pusilla), a native wildflower so minute (a few millimeters across, on a stem a couple of centimeters high) that it is a challenge to capture even with a macro lens. The result, though, is worth the effort: a photograph with a vibrant splash of violet color, in the midst of a dark and drab late-winter afternoon.
