Anything Green in Your Garden?

Have a Good One this Weekend!

Return to Nature

Look what I found today.......

This is what living in L.A. does to me.

Lacey Days

I suppose it's because I'm so spoiled these days having five months of spring and color from January through May that I've headed in a black and white direction.  (Still loving color though guys - not complaining!)  But I have to keep my eye fresh and I don't want to bore you either.  So here's a little something I did recently.  I love the aspect of blog life that gives me access (Thanks Terianne you totally get it! - you too?) to so many kinds of beauty and invention and all your different eyes and ways of experiencing the world.  It pushes me to try things I've never tried.  When I took photography class in college I was really quite "blocked".  I was like - "huh? sorry NO IDEAS!"  I actually much preferred taking pictures of people then. Now, I'm enjoying exploring still lifes more and seeing how I can expand my vocabulary.  Of course a little busy-body Miss always wants to know what Mommy is doing and how she can be part of it. I guess she's a little like me too, it's very important for her to investigate - with her nose - everything that represents some kind of change or novelty in her surroundings.

So a little bit of lace.  Not SO girly in black and white and shades of gray.  Just a couple pics.

Somehow reminds me of an Italian grandmother.

Glittering Surprises

"Bountiful", Abbot Kinney Boulevard

Sometimes life just needs to be a party.  Sometimes something like this would help.

Warisan, 7470 Beverly Blvd.; Los Angeles; (323) 938 3960 or  www.warisan.com. 

Paradis Retrouve

New week, new attitude: via Paradis Express - Delphine and I seem to have a pretty good thing going, trading pics....here are a few goodies from her site of the last little while.  Just in case you missed them.  (I wouldn't want you to!)

Chilean Pavilion, built for the 1889 Paris World's Fair, brought back to Chile.  Architect: Henri Picq.

Denise Grunstein - Swedish - quelle surprise!  Check out her site, you'll love it!

also check out New York artist Kate Raudenbush, below (I want to be her when I grow up!)

Tom Stuart Smith's strange and beautiful New Zealand inspired garden in London. 

 and last but not least, ookami for hauntingly poetic hand tinted vintage photos.

Did everyone have a good weekend?  Say yes?!

What's On Your Plate This Weekend?

For your weekend delectation, via amazing Sophie Munns who, from her little corner in Brisbane, OZ finds the most intriguing and wonderful things, here a post 

about the newly formed Dutch food and design group "House of Origin" who are developing inventive and beautiful ways for people to rediscover food and reexamine their eating habits.  You will be dazzled and charmed.

HAPPY WEEKEND EVERYONE!

Corner View - Statues and Fountains

Happy Wednesday and it's that time again!  Here's a re-post of something I did last fall.  Somewhere in there you will find a fountain!  Not much in the way of statues though.  Apparently there are not so many statues on this side of Paradise!  (How to remedy this hmmmmm?)

Funny to see it again, I think I started this blog out in a much more lyrical, reflective frame of mind.   I guess that mood kind of comes and goes.  But moi, personellement, I find these photos quite gorgeous (even if I took 'em!) so hope you like them too.  It seems o.k. to drag them out again.  For those of you who didn't know me....."back then".  Anybody else ever been to Burghley House?

I've been away from home for about a week.  And the week was so not about the kinds of images that follow.  They seem apropos to the time of year though, when colors are fading, some are ripening, all are becoming richer and mixing with many more grays.  And then, aren't there some of you who are still nostalgic for summer (as I would so be if I were in colder climes).....?   Here's a little nosegay to ease the passage.

A couple of years ago, I went to visit this house with my mother-in-law.  It is in Stamford, a graceful and gracious old town in Lincolnshire.  Parts of this house had just been used in one of those English costume dramas. Anybody recognize it?  It is one of the true treasure houses of Britain.

Burghley has been in the Cecil family for over 400 years.  The original Lord Cecil was a Treasurer of England.  And he made sure he got "some".  The house interiors are fairly distinctive in that they are quite dramatic, dark, baroque, and grandiose in an Italianate way.  It is all about scale. "Younger" "English""houses" tend to be a little more French in their style with paler, more delicate and feminine decoration.  This is pretty much a guy's house.  Don't remind my MIL that English style actually did originate "over there".  She will not hear of it.  Unless you mean to say that English style is a hodgepodge of everything and then she will agree that that is certainly true.

Go to: http://www.burghley.co.uk/ and you can find out more if you are planning to be in that part of the world. We went in late August and it was not too crowded.

Photo taking is not allowed inside but I seemed to find things to snap. Outside.  This series seems to be all about blues, textures, patterns.

I don't know about you, but I want to stick my hands right into these pictures and swish them around.  Just to see how the elements might rearrange themselves in artful combinations.  I love the mystery of the dark water and how the fish and the reflected colors slowly reveal themselves.

How the water takes on the color of the sky, and so an added dimension.

How beautiful black can be when it is swathed in blues and studded with orange and green.

How grey makes it more into a COLOR vs. it just being a space filler.

In nature, every color exists already in all the best combinations.  We humans try to be so clever and put it back together in original ways.  But the universe will always have gotten there first.

This could have been made into a William Morris fabric pattern.

And what could be more beautiful than hydrangea blue, forget-me-not-blue, robin's egg blue, cornflower blue?

Even the windows are blue.  See?  Nature got there first.

Here's where you will find even more Corner Views, and meanwhile Thanks! to Joyce for keeping us all on track and nice to have you along at Passage Paradis!  (xo)

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