i n . b l o o m

My mum loves gardening. While I was still living at home, she would often try to persuade me to come outside and help her tend to her plants; she would (and still does) joke about paying me fifty cents to weed.

Even though I love flowers as a visual concept (as explained here), I was never very keen on the concept of gardening; one (among many) of my most dreaded summer phenomena was the experience of being dragged along to an open air garden centre; the heat and inevitable swarms (or so it seemed to me!) of bees and other bugs were unbearable to me. I was also always nonchalantly adamant that when and if I ever had a garden of my own, I would simply throw hand-fulls of seeds onto the earth and let nature take its course.

It's a mystery to me, but so far this summer I feel like I'm obsessed with plants; I keep pausing when I pass by beautiful gardens in bloom and can't resist capturing them on camera.

*

When I was little and we lived out in the county, there was a giant peony bush on the corner of our property; I remember staring in morbid fascination at the lush blossoms swarming with gigantic black ants.