Wandering through a 35 acre haven of gardens and woodland, camera in hand, discovering their seasonal displays. Snapping the delights of the herbaceous borders, the hidden garden, the summer wood, the dry garden and Golden Jubilee garden, and the temperate house amongst the many treasures to be found there.
The herbaceous borders give maximum opportunities to capture photos involving those most engaging and fascinating insects, bees, as above. You just have to be both patient and then quick! This one is industriously at work on a tithonia of some sort.
Most of the best floral subjects were to found within the boundaries of the Jubilee Garden where I took so many photos of so many flowers of so many colours, forms, textures and abundances that I had difficulty choosing just of few for this article and kept lots back for another day. Above is anguisorba hakusanensis, the Korean mountain burnet.
I could not leave out the intriguingly named love in a mist or Nigella damascena to give it its proper name, show above, which is a member of the buttercup family and very photogenic to boot.
Above is a big favourite of mine, called in olden times ‘day's eyes’ (because the flowers open in the morning and close at night) or daisies as we now know them.
Did I mention the temperate house, well there were lots of exotics as you might expect including a few of our good old friend, like the one I snapped above, the bird of paradise.
Finally, in the dry garden were lots of prairie grasses as you might expect. As ever I subscribed to the techniques of tele-zoom 'macro' for this sort of work using my m.Zuiko 40-150mm f4 Pro for it's 300mm equivalent reach, image quality, and superior depth of field.