spring petals

Spring Petals by GillyinKent

First of all, thanks to Muse Tammy for inviting me to guest post.

This was much harder than I thought it would be. Choosing a picture from the pool would have been easy, but finding something of my own to put with it was much more difficult.

I started thinking about what spring means to me. Flowers and blossom and new leaves, of course, but the theme encouraged us to ‘think outside the box’ and so I wanted to avoid straightforward flower pictures, however tempting and lovely they are. At the weekend I visited a beautiful old house and gardens, where the blossom was so heavy and abundant that it was a wonder the trees didn’t keel over with the sheer weight of it.

I filled a whole memory card with blossom photos but then my eye was caught by the way that the fallen petals were piling up on every surface. They lay inches deep on stone stairs and balustrades, they floated so thickly on the pond that you couldn’t see the water, and huge magnolia petals were draped like small and bizarre items of laundry over the shrubs that grew underneath the blossoming trees. I remembered that one of the experiences I love most in spring is when a sudden breeze releases petals into the air so that they float down like confetti or some strange and lovely spring snow. And I adore the way cushions of pink petals pile up in every corner, on top of cars, and in gutters, transforming everything in their profusion.

I took the picture above because I liked how the graphic lines of the steps and the hardness of the stone contrasted with the soft delicacy of the petals. I got exactly the same feeling when I looked at kat3no3l’s photograph below – the petals in her image are almost translucent in their fragility.

Gilly Walker of www.gillywalker.com and flickr
 

Pink Snow by kat3no3l (Katenoel)