The first snowfall is visible on top of the Grotto range this morning–when I can get a glimpse of it through the blankets of cloud cover! And… the elk have mustered the courage to graze on my doorstep by night, eliminating all my violas and pansies, leaving me with my bedraggled snapdragons and hardy marigolds. T-shirt temperatures have plunged to necessitate extra layers for the send-off of summer. And I am plucking from this month’s archives some of its finer moments…
We live in old Coal Mining Territory and every once in a while you run across a reminder…
The skies have one glory, the flowers another…
Grotto Canyon…
I’ve been taking a closer look at all manner of flowers (and weeds!) this month…
This little love-ly is the sweet smelling, evening-bloomer, white cockle. Bane to farmers, and banned from our yards, but not from my sketchbook ( :
Another banned blessing to bumblebees…
The old goat has lost his beard…
Late summer’s bounty–wild raspberries!
And some strange insipid white ones…
And in the city, wildly brilliant crabapples!
We’ve endured a LOT of smoke this month which lends a certain mystique to the mountains but other than that has been an unwelcome result of lightning-lit fires throughout BC.
This too shall pass with the approach of fall and its close kin, winter.
I am happy to have preserved some flowers from summer’s bounty!
–LS
For the beauty of the earth,
for the glory of the skies,
for the love which from our birth
over and around us lies.
For the wonder of each hour
of the day and of the night,
hill and vale and tree and flower,
sun and moon and stars of light…
Refrain:
Christ, our Lord, to you we raise
this, our hymn of grateful praise.
–Folliott Sandford Pierpoint (1864)
All through January and February we skiied and I discovered doodling…
where Jim became a bicycle mechanic!
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