tishfarrell

[tishfarrell]

Waiting For Rain…In Kenya Past And Shropshire Present

Maasai Mara with desert date tree * We’ve been living back in the UK since 2000, our years in Africa increasingly faraway. And yet… And yet this spring and summer in Shropshire we’ve been very short on rain. The temperatures, too, have recently risen after a cold and windy spring. My gardening self grows anxious. Several times a day I do the rounds of my vegetable plots, checking on the kales,…

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Garden Treasures: The Salvaged And The Self-Seeded

Well, this was a big surprise last week, and a very lovely one too. It is the unexpected outcome of a little rescue job performed over a year ago, not long after we’d moved into The Gables. Back then, in the August of 2023, I was making a start on de-jungling various flower beds and found some rhizome fragments swamped by phygelius and euonymus and assorted weedy thugs. They had small spikes of…

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Hippos Under The Carpet…

This past week at Lens-Artists, Tina has wanted to know what we were thinking as we took our photos. This led me back to the old Africa album of vintage slides and photos from when we lived in Kenya. The header photo did not scan too well, but it was such an unexpected moment, it still makes me laugh. There we were driving along a dry savannah track in the Maasai Mara, the only water (or so we…

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Serenity ~ Inside And Out

There are vistas that manifest serenity – at least as seen through human eyes. (I mean who knows what fervid biological imperatives are playing out beneath the calm surfaces of things). This distant view of the Great Orme from Anglesey was shot on a late December day, the air so still there is barely the hint of a tide. No clouds either, and the sun warm enough to go coatless and believe the…

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Breaking the rules: more by accident than on purpose...

I’m not sure what was going on when I took this photo. An unintended composition, methinks: camera aslant; subject leaving the scene; shooting into the sun.  An all round combination of errors, but then I also quite like the end result. * Here both the camera person and the subject were on the move, in other words, me snatching this shot of an uphill cyclist through the car windscreen; caught on…

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Cinematically Cornish

This week at Lens-Artists Sofia calls for a cinematic approach to our photography. This is what she says: “There are a few things that give a photo that cinematic feel: camera angles, bold and high-contrast colours, light, locations, just to name a few. The main objective is to take a shot that is part of a story, there’s mood and a sense of location; our image is but a snapshot of a much wider…

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It’s All Birds And Bees In Our ‘Castle’ Garden

Well, they do say an Englishman’s home is his castle. And for this English woman, this stronghold must obviously include the garden. At least I like to think the garden is my domain; my own small fiefdom. The wildlife, of course, has other notions. This mama blackbird, for instance, is quite sure my purpose in life is to provide her with fresh feeding stations. As soon as I begin work in the…

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We’ve Been Having Blue Sky Days…

* They arrived with the spring equinox on March 20th… * … days hot in the sun, but ice-cold in shade, as if the air came straight off a snow field… * …yet so enlivening, it had us one day walking (instead of driving) to the builders’ merchants on the edge of town… …spotting, as we went, wild cherry blossom, the bright white blackthorn that is everywhere in drifts on farm hedgerows, and then the…

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Weather’s Untamed Ways…

…from heavenly ethereal to eerily supernatural: Herewith some recent views across the Menai Strait – from the island of Anglesey above Beaumaris to the Welsh mainland. We’ve just returned from a week’s stay on Ynys Mon. It was our first March visit to the island, our usual time-slot being late December, and our arrival coincided with both the spring equinox and a spring tide. In fact we had…

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Catching The Light And Finding Home

I took the header photo on March 11th, the last rays of sun over Shropshire-out-of-Wales, lighting up the first sprigs of cherry plum blossom. I have only recently identified this tree: Prunus cerasifera nigra – a native species that lives just over the hedge outside our kitchen window. Every day now, and especially when we sit down to eat, we are watching it with special attention. For it seems…

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Spring!

Or is it? February in Britain often teases, bringing us a sudden mild and sunny day, as it did last Saturday, followed by bone biting winds (today). Countryman poet, John Clare 1793-1864, wrote a poem about February fickleness. I probably mentioned this time last year. It’s worth a read. So: we have crocus and snowdrops, and the odd daffodil. Also hellebores, both waning and waxing. On the garden…

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The Tenacity Of Small Things

* A persistency of pansies I am truly astonished by the hardiness of pansies. They must have been bred with anti-freeze in their roots and shoots. Their structure is anyway so puny and fleshy; easily crushed by clumsy humans. So how can they still be flowering? The pansy in the photo is much tinier in real life, less than one inch across, and so tending more towards the wild heartsease, Viola…

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Swahili Geometry: Once In Lamu's Stone Town

Long ago when we lived in Kenya, we spent one Christmas on the Indian Ocean island of Lamu – a never-to-be forgotten, all too brief safari.  We stayed in the roof-top quarters of an ancient merchant’s house in Shela Village, a thatched eyrie that, being open on three sides, allowed to us eavesdrop on all our neighbours. It was breezy too, the natural air conditioning more than welcome in…

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Gordon Russell Furniture Designer 1892-1980: Pioneering Geometry

* “I want to make decent furniture for ordinary people.” Gordon Russell was a design pioneer—a furniture designer, maker, calligrapher, entrepreneur, educator, and advocate of accessible, well-crafted design. Educated in the Arts and Crafts tradition of the Cotswolds, he believed that good design profoundly impacts people’s lives. His great skill lay in bridging the gap between hand and machine,…

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Evolutionary Geometry?

Some of you may have seen this sculpture here before, known variously as the Shrewsbury Slinky, or by its actual title The Quantum Leap. It sits between the River Severn and a busy traffic system, sited on a narrow slice of public space, not large enough to be called a park. The architectural designers, Pearce and Lal, describe it as a piece of geo-tectonic sculpture, inspired through “the…

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Of Wind Towers: Geometry, Art & Science Combined

Wind towers – the low-tech means to bring relief from desert heat waves. This one belongs to the restored Sheik Saeed Al Maktoum House on Dubai Creek, built in 1894 by the ruling Al Maktoum family. It is now a museum and, if I remember rightly, the only surviving example of Dubai’s historic grand houses. * A perfect fusion of aesthetics, science and simplicity of function: this is how they…

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Reflective Geometry: C Curve By Anish Kapoor

Here’s one from the photo archive. I was reminded of it by today’s very chilly sunshiny morning. It’s a work by Indian sculptor, Anish Kapoor, and called C-Curve. We came upon this fabulous creation by chance after a visit to Kensington Palace, a piece of happenstance that made it all the more wonderful: Looking Glass Land made manifest. Not only were there the reflections to ponder on, but also…