Double dose of spring, Gran Canaria

Almonds of Tejeda

This year, since we are allowed to go out and look at the beautiful spring of Gran Canaria, we try to do it as much as possible. Last spring, as I am sure everyone remembers, all or nearly all of Europe was in quarantine. What not everybody knows, perhaps, is how unnecessarily draconian the quarantine was in Spain. We were not allowed to go out of the house except for necessities. Said necessities didn’t include walking or any other form of outdoor physical exercise. Only dog owners were allowed to walk their pets, which give raise to infinite number of memes showing dogs being walked to exhaustion.

Even after we were finally allowed to get out a bit, the requirement of not getting too far from the house was imposed, thus preventing us from seeing the last flowers of spring. So, this year we try to compensate for that. I already did a number of hikes which I haven’t attempted before, and maybe I will write about some of them in details, but this post is here just to show the spring flowers and give very brief indicators as to where and when they could be seen.

Controlled burn, silver tansy, and heat of May

An eruption? A wildfire? Nah...

After years living on Gran Canaria I have identified for myself the three main "hanami" events. I try to go and see all three of them each year, but sometimes it proves impossible.
One of them is the blooming of almonds. Another - the blooming of tajinaste azul, blue bugloss of Gran Canaria. And the third one is the blooming of silver tansy, much less obvious event. I guess my attachment to these rare plants is mostly due to the fact that I found and identified them myself, while both almonds and tajinaste are well known seasonal attractions.

Up we go

Alien tentacles! Cthulhu raising to the surface! Tremble, you feeble humans... etc

When I went up the Mount Teide two years ago I didn’t really have a plan. Well, I had the most basic of all plans — to go up and survive. People told me two things at once — first “it’s kinda easy, you just need to pace yourself” and the second “but the altitude sickness can strike even the most fit people”. With this mixed message in mind, I can tell you I was going up listening to myself and asking all the time “am I ok?”, “am I still ok?”. I was perfectly fine, but this type of self-monitoring is not conductive to enjoyment.

This time I knew it was doable, and my first concern was the weather. What if the (blasted) calima turns up again? We won’t be able to see anything!

I can say straight away that we were much luckier this time — there was almost no dust in the air and the visibility was a lot better. First day, we saw Gran Canaria, La Palma and La Gomera above the sea of clouds while still on the bus. Next day, only La Gomera was visible from the top of the mountain at dawn, but that was also fine — I personally didn’t even get the camera out of the backpack, see the explanation later.

Flora of Gran Canaria — Tanacetum ptarmiciflorum, silver lace plant

Silver Leaf, Silver Feather, silver tansy, Magarza Plateada — common names describe the silvery leaves of the plant.
Taken mid-May, in a relatively shady spot

I first noticed unusual-looking leaves of this plant in early spring last year. They were growing in compact round bushes, something between 40 cm and 80 cm in height. The color of the leaves was very distinct — light cyan. When you look closely at the leaves, you notice they are covered with short white fluff. The shape of each leave is very neat, Irish lace-like.

I made a note to myself to find out what the plants were. They turned out to be Tanacetum ptarmiciflorum, Gran Canaria endemic and endangered species according to the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List. I like plants in general, but finding something endemic and rare is always more pleasing. Especially when something in question is beautiful.

Caldera de Tejeda in April: Flowers

Erysimum albescens, "wallflower" endemic to Gran Canaria

It is extremely rare not to see at least something flowering in Las Cumbres, The Peaks of Gran Canaria. But I figure from two-year observation that the maximum of flowering falls onto beginning - mid April. This year I missed the moment, due to this and that, but when I finally got there there was still plenty of flowers for me to look at and photograph.

Once of Cruz de Tejeda, you don't have to go far to get to the place where on a small spot you will find everything on the photographs below - and more. I hesitate to enclose ALL the pics I took. Head towards Roque Nublo, (signposted Llanos de la Pez). About a kilometer away, you will see a house surrounded by a fence. There is usually a couple of big dogs there. One of them, the friendly while totally huge newfoundland dog, occasionally hangs out *outside* of the fence. Don't be alarmed, he is a gentle soul. The area around the house is relatively flat, rare thing in those parts. Poke around a little. There is a lot of yellow Teline broom and lilac crucifer Erysimum- complementary color combination, really striking. Less showy flowers and plants are found in plenty on the same spot.

I am always interested to find out the correct names of the plants (and not only plants), and I make my best effort identifying them. Sometimes I fail, of course. So if you know for sure what plants are called and spot a mistake, please yell me. 

Enjoy :)

Echium callithyrsum, blue candles of Gran Canaria, second go

Tajinaste azul

Last year I found these beautiful blue flowers for the first time, but I set out to look for them a bit too late. This year I wanted to make sure I catch them at the peak of flowering.

So as soon as I spotted some photos of them on facebook, I started to plan my next visit. The biggest colony of them is (still) at Tenteniguada, so I went there. It was cloudy in Las Palmas but as the bus approached the village, the sun came out. It was playing hide-and-seek all the time I was there. It seemed that donkey's belly, the cloud cover of the north, ended just about above Valsequillo.

pomegranate and cactus

Today we started to talk about plants and what can and can't grow round here with Rosa. I was mostly interested in whether it's worth buying and trying to grow a small orange tree (there are some in our local garden center/shed). I am still not sure about the orange tree, but Rosa is also very interested in things that grow, so she shown us a some of her current favourites around the site - small pomegranate tree (even given us one tiny fruit of it) and a beautiful cactus blooms that will last just today. Don't know what cactus that is - maybe there are some experts reading, identification will be appreciated. The flower is about 12 cm in diameter, very pale magenta/pink, the bloom is taller than the rest of the plant

Cactus pictures to follow

would smell as sweet?

Once setup for "black mirror" photos is set up, so to speak, it's difficult to stop making small still-life images with it.

The rose bud is from our garden, rosebush came with the house. The plant is very old and the trunk base is as thick as a small tree's. Flowers are not particularly pretty, they open too quickly, loosing the central swirl, most attractive feature in a rose flower to me. But they are highly scented, so much so that it seems almost unnatural. The scent is so strong that it reminds me not so much of other flowers, as of a small tube or essential rose oil that we used to have in our house in Moscow, years ago.

I just looked up the rose oil, and think that maybe "our" rose is related to rosa centifolia (cabbage rose) that is apparently one of the two main sources of the oil.  Well, all roses are related, but some more'n others

black mirror images on shutterstock

Non flowering lake and more flowers

My visit to Norway was short (less than one full day), but there was no plan, only a vague idea that I want to see more white flowers (wood anemones that is). So when we went to a lake and didn't find any around, it was decided that we will go back to Tønsberg were they we in plenty. There were also lily-of-the-valley, just starting to bloom. We met a guy in his fifties who was collecting them. He probably was not supposed to do that (I know you were not supposed to pick them round Moscow when I was growing up), which probably explains why he produced some sort of vague mumble instead of articulated words. But I understood him - he just wanted a few for their beautiful smell :)

white flowers and snakes

it's second year in a row that I go to Norway in early May, to visit my friend and to see wood anemones (hvitveis) everywhere. Last year I discovered that there were blue hepatica flowers there, too - not as many as anemonies, but still. And this year, lily-of-the-valley, wood-sorrel and violets suddenly caught my attention. I am sure they were there last year, too, I must have not been paying attention

problem with keywording

(picture is simply to have a picture here)

I have a strange problem with newly-bought Photoshop Elements 9 . It was bough specifically to be able to read raw files from my new camera - something that version 6 of elements can't do.

PE v 9 reads them and process them fine BUT! When I try to keyword ("file info" function), it rather consistently crashes. Which is a problem when you prepare images for stock. Don't know what I should do about it - maybe there's a free program somewhere which can fill in the metadata, not touching the quality of the image itself? If you know one, let me know, please

flowers isolted on black at shutterstock

old watercolors - "June"

Tomorrow, everything being well, I am taking part in a local charity event where I am going to try and sell some of my watercolors. They've been hanging on my own walls for a while, and we should start getting rid of stuff anyway, so - today we took them out of the frames (they weren't good frames, lots of thunderbugs got in), and I photographed them and packed into clear film. And now suddenly feel very nostalgic.

But - has to be done I guess. If they don't shift tomorrow, I will try to figure out what else I can do with them.

This is one of them - painted from my old photograph, taken with ancient nikon coolpix. If I remember correctly, I grandly titled the photo "June".

While looking through pictures, we also found rather cute sketches in little "fat cat" series - here they are

purple and yellow

Sometimes the gods have no taste at all. They allow sunrises and sunsets in ridiculous pink and blue hues that any professional artist would dismiss as the work of some enthsiastic amateur who'd never looked at a real sunset. (Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time)

Very true. And an artist given a task of inventing a flower will probably shy away from combining complementaries - purple and yellow. They clash, plus if you actually let those hues run into each other in, for example, watercolor, you will get a muddy shade of neutral.

Red rose will similarly have little chance of coming into existence if it had to be re-invented. Although some green and red mixtures give really intense black, which is a lot nicer'n mud any time, except possibly four am, when nothing matters anyway.

Incidentally, I really like Terry Pratchett books. Not the latest ones, mind you, but there are a few novels in discworld series that are my firm favourites - I have copies and re-read them from time to time.

irises on shutterstock

another one

The pink phalaenopsis was opening more and more flowers for about two months now, and I got tired of photographing it somewhat.

Now the white one fully opened its three flowers. Yellow one formed two flowering spikes, and cattleya is about to open a flower. I think it's yellow one, although not sure.

I just checked and apparently many orchids start blooming in response to dropping temperature. well, temperature inside our house is well and truly dropped what with cold snap and all. Let's see if that's going to be too low for them. So far they are doing great


orchid pics at shutterstock

backlit one

As one of my birthday presents, two small-ish studio flashes (similar to ones on amazon, but different ones) arrived a few days ago. I never have enough courage to unpack and test things immediately after their arrival, so they stayed for a few days in their box

this is first experiments with them and my still-beautiful birthday flowers.

black and, er, sort of white

It seems that I am slowly but surely going off monochrome images. I used to convert to monochrome a lot, which was not altogether unconnected to the fact that my very first digital camera produced an awful lot of digital noise and incorrectly exposed images (well, the last bit was my fault too). Monochrome conversion was a handy way of hiding those defects.

Sure, there are situations where pictures are asking to be converted, but it happens less and less somehow. Even in where the color is very difficult to handle, it feels a shame to destroy it altogether.

it is doing it again

our oldest orchid plant is starting to bloom again. it's one of those objects in our house that paid for itself many times over - I just checked how many images of it I have for sale and it's quite a few(there are some different plants in that search result, but still a few)

well, hope it'll turn up as photogenic this time and will sell just as nicely or better again

Oncidium

original plan was to go to Wandlebury for a little walk or something. but soon as we got off the front porch it started to drizzle, so went to Scotsdales. kids like it there because there are fish and some pets to look at and I like it because I can buy myself a new flower every time. this time the orchid gallery had some plants there that I immediately labeled as "suspiciously cheap" to which Yuri (I think it was him) added "going all the way up to outrageously expensive".

the plant of the picture is from suspiciously cheap end of the spectrum - 3.99 I think it was, cheap for a tall bright orchid.

And another bit of useless information learned today was its name - Oncidium. I hope writing it will help me remembering it.

and we did go to Wandlebury after that, too. Heavy rain only caught us on the way home.

alarums, excursions and wandering commas

our next door neighbours had a problem with their house alarm - it went off during daytime a couple of times over the last few days, last time today. as a well-trained house alarm, it was making noises for 20 mins or so and then stopped. both times I went out to check the front and back doors and of course it was nothing, so I didn't think too much about it. I saw our neighbour after it went off the first time, and she apologized for the noise

today, she intercepted me in front of the house and presented me with a bunch of roses and lilies. I thought they arrived for me while I was out but no - that was from her, to compensate for the inconvenience :) I thought it was really sweet, although not necessary, I wasn't all that inconvenienced, after all. But she said it makes her feel better :)

So, now I have photographed the roses, and lilies are still unopened, so I am all set for flowers for the nearest couple of days

the alarm, btw, apparently was triggered by thunderbugs getting inside the system. you know them, they get everywhere. they are especially annoying as wandering commas on your screen, when they get under the glass (or whatever you have). And the next stage, of course, is a stationery comma - when they die there

and now it's gone

I might have already posted photos from this series. clematis vine definitely stopped flowering a while ago, so that's gone, but now the blue glass is gone too. so it's a memorial sort of post

Timur went to fetch his breakfast things today, and tried to take the top glass from a tallish stack of them. there were, oh, seven maybe glasses altogether. now we have two red ones left, and that's it. whole kitchen was covered in glass shards, some went into our brewing coffee.

Timur was really upset - both by breaking so many things in one go and by my shouting "stay where you are!" (he was barefoot).

On the brighter side of things I now have quite exceptionally clean kitchen and an excuse to go shopping. And according to Russian folklore, crockery breaking is a lucky sign