A burst of colour (contains spider!)

Just because!

It was our wedding anniversary last week and my mother-in-law gave us a bunch of colourful roses. Roses are so much fun to photograph:

They're a cheerful bunch of flowers on my kitchen windowsill but when you zoom in they become all romance-novelly and exotic-looking!

We're well into autumn now and the rain continues to be frequent but we're getting the odd day or few hours of sunshine and blue sky. I love sunny days in autumn, I love the cool brightness - today was such a day and I went out foraging. The brambles are far from ready yet, but I got some rowan berries yesterday and hoped to get some more today so I can make rowan berry jelly, but there aren't that many rowans near us and the berries on the one I found, though plentiful were not ripe enough. I'll try again next week. It was nice to get out for a walk though and to get a few pictures of the colours:

Meet my spider. Almost every day there is a spider's web between the trampoline and the washing-line - it's a spectacular feat of engineering and art, and yet very often I forget and blunder through it, and the poor old spider has to start again.

I was quite impressed when I looked at this photo and noticed how many patterns the spider has used - see the flattened hexagons that look like chicken wire? I love the details that come out in photographs which I just don't pick up on in at the time.

Still in the garden, the insects are feasting:

The mint is flowering (pics above and below)

And my very small buddleia-in-a-pot (Buddleia Buzz) has flowered! I planted it last year so this should have been its first year flowering but it's been so wet and murky I wasn't sure it actually would manage it - then finally the flowers appeared..

..and so did the butterflies! All of my butterfly photos manage to look fake, as if badly photoshopped, but they're really real!

I don't know if anyone noticed the splash of yellow in the background of the first mint-flower picture, but that's my anthemis tinctoria (dyer's chamomile) which has given the most colour in the garden this summer - it's been brilliant, completely unstoppable and the hoverflies love it.  As there's so much of it I finally got round to doing another dye with the flowers:

Once again though I can't get a photograph that reflects the colour accurately - it looks quite buttery there but is actually a stronger, slightly harsher yellow (almost with a hint of mustard?) - but the pictures make me so happy even if they're not accurate. The one with the sun on the wool is when I'd just rinsed it and had hung it over the kitchen tap to drip dry for a few minutes. I've got a very sunny sink obviously..

I'll finish with a poppy just for a bit of red!