I saw this fun sight when I met Chaitanya and Akshay at Alki Beach yesterday.
The babies were like little bundles of fluff as they were still covered with down instead of feathers.
A Surprise on Alki Beach
Category: Prompts
Beauty in the Greenbelt: Pacific Ninebark
In April of 2017, I took a live stake workshop. The participants cut branches from a variety of shrubs, took them home and planted them in containers. The stakes rooted throughout the summer and early fall. In November of 2017, I planted the ones that had in our forest restoration site.
Three of the Pacific Ninebark stakes not only survived, they thrived. When I was walking through the restoration site today, I noticed that there were many buds on the shrub. One of the flowers had partially bloomed. I think it is SO beautiful.
There are many flowers like this one on the shrub. The photo below shows about a third of the plant’s flowers-to-be.
This shrub will be so beautiful when all of these buds open. At this point, it is still a fairly small plant. I can only imagine what it will look like years from now when it is fully grown.
Cee’s Flower of the Day Photography Challenge
Friendly Friday Photo Challenge: Mood
I’m excited. I’ve been watching two ferns beginning to awaken since one of our teams took all of the blackberry vines off of them in early March. They are so close together you can’t really tell that there are two of them. This is what they looked like today!
The following photos show their awakening:
Before long there will be two big ferns!
Cee’s Black and White Photography Challenge: Vanishing Point
I created this image in 2014. My idea was to create a photo that showed that a seemingly endless number of toxic cigarette butts are tossed onto the ground as litter. To do that, I placed 1375 cigarette butts in a straight line on a sidewalk near my home. It worked!
Wordless Wednesday and Cee’s FOTD Prompt
Friendly Friday Photo Challenge: Raindrops
Wordless Wednesday
Oregon Grape Shrubs Awakening
We have so many Oregon Grape shrubs on the restoration site. Some of them north of the Hanford stairs were planted by Earth Corps 10-15 years ago. Some of the ones south of the stairs were planted by a neighborhood group 6-10 years ago. All of shrubs had been crushed by blackberry vines but thrived once they were freed from those invasive plants. We have also planted new Oregon Grape shrubs throughout the site.
More and more beauty
An Added Bonus
I spend so much time working in the Greenbelt that I often don’t notice what is going on in my own yard.
Two days ago, I realized my camellia shrub had started blooming, and the flowers were beautiful.
When I knelt down to take a photo of a bloom towards the bottom of the bush…
… I saw that there was something partially buried in the ground. I pulled it out.
Where did the shoe come from and when? It certainly didn’t come from my house. I looked around and noticed that the bottom part of my neighbor’s rotten garage was in front of me.
An animal must have pulled the shoe from there at some point. Finding something so unusual in my yard felt like an added bonus. I now had a mini adventure to report on, in addition to sharing the beautiful flowers.
Progress Report: Pearly Everlasting
When we received the new plants for our forest restoration project towards the end of October, the Pearly Everlasting shrubs looked like this:
And here they are in their new home:
In the last post I wrote about them, they were beginning to emerge from the ground. I was surprised as I had no idea this was how they would grow.
And now they look like this!
I look forward to seeing how they evolve from this stage to the way they looked when I first saw the shrub during a November 2017 workshop.
Living, Learning and Letting Go 