When I saw the theme of this week’s photo challenge–Motion–I immediately thought of this photo of a bird in silhouette, at just the moment it was taking flight. I happened upon the bird unexpectedly and managed to take only one photo before it flew off. I’m still not sure what type of bird it even was. But I like that this photo captures that split second before the bird became airborne.
What is it about watching the sun set? The jewel-like colors in the sky? The feeling of being witness to that day’s curtain call? Or is it that magical feeling that comes from watching that last flash of light as the sun dips below the horizon–that blink-and-you might-miss-it moment? For me, it’s all three.
A National Geographic article on the science of sunsets says the sun sometimes appears as if it is raging against the dying of the light, but for me, the sun’s final act of the day is a moment of utter silence and absolute peace. If I can capture even a fraction of that with my camera, I feel lucky. On a recent evening on the pier at Ocean Beach in San Diego, I felt doubly lucky when I came across two brown pelicans, who, like the sun, were also calling it a night.
This photo captures not so much a golden hour, as a golden moment. Winter in San Diego: the sun has just set but its light still lingers, casting a golden glow along the horizon, silhouetting the few hardy surfers remaining in the water, and reflecting off the wet sand. This is twilight. Four minutes later, it is gone.
During our wanderings around San Diego this past Christmas, we came across many striking trees with bright red, cylindrical flowers that looked like bottle brushes. I was delighted to see them, but they made me feel a bit homesick. Not for Maryland, which has been home for more than a decade now, but for Australia, where we lived for four wonderful years and where these trees are very popular.
They are Crimson Bottlebrushes (Callistemon citrinus)–a shrubby evergreen plant native to Australia that can grow to about 15 feet. It is a plant that loves warm climates with lots of sun, which explains why it is also well suited to Southern California. How it got to the United States, I don’t know, but Joseph Banks, an English naturalist/botanist, introduced it to England in the 18th century. Banks was a member of Captain James Cook’s voyage on the Endeavour (1768-1771), travelling to Madeira, Brazil, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and what is now Indonesia. Banks later became an unofficial advisor to King George III on the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and ships returning to England from far and wide brought back plants for his collections. As a result, Kew Gardens became a pre-eminent botanical garden, introducing many of these plants to the rest of Europe.
As for the bottlebrush, it is greatly admired by humans and hummingbirds alike, as I discovered when walking up to the tree to take a photo. I realized at the very last second that a hummingbird was closing in on the flower I had targeted. Had I had my wits about me, I might have taken a better photo (see last photo below), but time and reflexes were not on my side.
Though I cannot grow bottlebrushes in Maryland, I have at least preserved a small but very fond memory of Australia in these photographs, by way of San Diego.
One nice thing about traveling is that it allows you to taste food you might not normally have at home. But traveling also exposes you to unfamiliar flora. And having put my own East Coast garden to bed for winter, I was delighted to make the acquaintance of some gorgeous succulents in Southern California during the holidays. Succulents — which include aloe and agave, and even the euphorbia I grow in my own garden — have thick, fleshy stems and leaves and retain water even under the most trying conditions. They are ideal desert plants — and coastal plants, too, since they tolerate relatively high levels of salt and minerals.
I was not familiar with aeoniums, but their beauty made me stop in my tracks as we wandered through Old Town, San Diego. The photographs below were taken just after a rainfall and they show yet another characteristic of many succulents: waterproof leaves.
Perennial Pastimes 