Fluffy Clouds and Fifty Shades of Green (Skywatch Friday)

 

"For still there are so many things that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring there is a different green."
– J. R. R. Tolkien

 

Green

 

 

"Green is a process, not a status. We need to think of 'green' as a verb, not an adjective."
~ Daniel Goleman

Ferns Unfurling

 

silently watching

fragile fern fronds unfurling

singing praise to spring

 

Macro Monday 2

 

Mosaic Monday @ Lavender Cottage

Greener Every Day

“Is the spring coming?" he said. "What is it like?"...
"It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine...”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden –

Photos taken in the old cemetery close to where I live.
A good place to go for a short walk this time of year;
with lots of birds singing in the big old trees.

Green Tomato Marmalade

For Lisa’s Macro Monday and Mary’s Mosaic Monday

Sometimes I’ve made green tomato marmalade myself from tomatoes grown on my balcony. Not in the last couple of years though… So I haven’t had any in a while; and was happy to find this (made in France) in my favourite tea shop in town. It’s supposed to be all natural ingredients. Like my own recipe, it also contains lemons. It’s somewhat sweeter than I remember mine. And greener. I wonder if that has anything to do with what kind of cauldron it is cooked in…???

Macro Monday: Uncurling

On Saturday I went for a walk around this lake, which is also a bird sanctuary. (Same place where I had my little chat with the pigeon in the previous post.) At one end of the lake these ferns were yawning and stretching themselves to greet the spring sun.

See more macro shots at Macro Monday/Lisa’s Chaos

To Separate Light From Darkness

I’ve kept myself busy today with a curtain project. Not as advanced as it may look from the pictures – all I did with the sewing machine was to hem to the right length. The eyelets at the top were already there ;) … Nonetheless, I’m glad to have the machine and to be able to do that much.

My bedroom faces north east. When I moved in (3 summers ago) I put up light white curtains, which have been good in the winter time, because then the nights are long and I like to get as much light as possible into the room in the daytime. But in the height of summer, when our days are long and the nights short… I get the sun right in my eyes very early in the morning (in spite of Venetian blinds). Last summer I put up a pair of darker ones that I had; it helped a bit but they weren’t really made to draw, and I wasn’t 100% happy with the solution.

Now in a shop I found these in a cheerful green but still supposed to be “blackout” curtains. They have a layer of white on the back which is supposed to reflect the incoming light back out and so keep the room cooler, as well as dark. They are also easy to draw and push back. (Luckily I have window sills that go into the wall instead of sticking out.) They were rather expensive, and I had to get a new curtain rod as well. But I’m hoping they’ll be worth it. So far at least I’m very pleased with how they looked when I got them up. I was a little hesitant about the colour in the shop – I didn’t buy them at first sight, but thought about it for a couple of days and then went back to buy them. But now that I got them up I think it was just the right shade of fresh “nature” green which goes with almost anything.