Our culture is obsessed with beauty. The media shapes our perception of it. Everything should be perfect! People, gardens, animals, blogs' pictures, too.
Enough cuties and beauties! How about these masterpieces of REAL garden life?
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Show your origins! This is a real Fertilizer Day!
Nasturtium growing on a compost pile:
Show a back side for the Bloom Day!
Get on your knees and show what is hiding underneath!
The sky is not only for beautiful clouds and birds!
This is a Skywatch, too!
Wilting is natural! Don't hide your wrinkles!
Everyone has liver spots!
You don't? Look better. Check your hands. Higher. Higher. You see?
We'll see how YOU look at my age!
Enough smooth, bright, polished faces!
How about pale, rough and wrinkled?
We are as tasty and crunchy as those long and skinny ones!
Show what's above that gorgeous bloom you pictured proudly!
No bloom! Gone, eaten by slugs!
Reveal what you haven't done in your garden!
Foxglove self seeded and not weeded:
Show your true colors! Or no colors. Everyone loses something with age!
If life hits you hard, it doesn't mean you should be out of it!
And last, but not least, show your real face, your face in the morning, before your first coffee cup, without make-up.
Show yourself not on your soft armchair, but on your favorite place - a porch with chewed corners!
Did you like me groomed and regal?
Love me disheveled and sleepy!
This is my Camera Critter.
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Come on people, bring the truth about your garden, show us its REAL side!
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P.S. Did I say that we all lose something with age? How about some memory?
My husband just brought my camera from outside. It sat on the garden table, under the heavy rain, for the whole night... Does it work? If I won't post soon, you'll know the answer.
You have quite a reality show going on today.
ReplyDeleteDonna
What a funny post! I am not perfect and neither are my gardens. There are definitely some ugly areas around our property, which we are working on.
ReplyDeleteLove your camera critter.
I sure hope your camera is still in working order.
FlowerLady
Tatyana~~ My fingers are crossed for your camera. For me it's the elusive coffee cup and clippers.
ReplyDeleteI willingly admit that I'm "wilting." My days of attracting a pollinator are over. He's settled in nicely. Now my petals sag and and my foliage is sun-damaged and liver spotted. And my girth has expanded so I could use a little propping up.
But we are as tasty and crunchy as those long, skinny ones. LOL
At first I was hesitant to post photos that cast a negative light on my tableau. But as I age, I'm thinking, so what? I'm not perfect. My garden's not perfect so why pretend? Love your post. [Not crazy about that spider however.]
This is the best most real post I have seen in, well, EVER!!
ReplyDeleteOh my, I thought I was the only one that did strange things. My memory took a permanent vacation & forgot to tell me it was going.
ReplyDeleteI like the "other" side of the garden. It looks like mine.
Persimmons are getting ripe. Necture of the Gods.
I think this is my favorite post, Tatyana! And how in the world did you get a pic of my liver spotted hand? Scary similar to that leaf!! Spider picture is excellent but I love the last one most. Great thought for FF ;) Honesty will win every time...still LOL!
ReplyDeleteLynn
One can find beauty and purpose anywhere, any time, in the garden if they look closely enough. :) I've posted photos before of containers full of dead heads and shrivelled leaves and they were actually very pretty. :) Oy on the camera - I hope it's not damaged.
ReplyDeleteNice to see that your garden is really alive! There is beauty in honesty. Let us know how your camera survived. Maybe this is an opportunity to upgrade?
ReplyDeleteOh man, I sure hope your camera is ok. That is a big oops!
ReplyDeleteDo want to know when you were in my garden taking all those 'lovely' photos of 'my' mess.
Great post....we are all felling the effects of aging...so to say. Posting soon about dogs in the garden...it's a side of my yard never posted before.....
ReplyDeleteI love this post! Great fun to read and those pictures... / gittan
ReplyDeleteGreat post, Tatyana. And a nice compromise between the perfectly photoshopped and the real. Because some of those mottled and not so perfect leaves actually look beautiful. More interesting than the young things.
ReplyDeleteHope your camera makes it... Otherwise, just try some text posts. Country Mouse does them as a challenge, and they're quite fun.
Hi Tatyana
ReplyDeleteI hope your camera is OK.
I know people who grow courgettes and pumpkin on the compost pile. Heavy feeders love it.
Rub pooches ears for me.
Rob
Could try putting your camera in a bowl of RAW rice. They say it draws the moisture out of a cellphone, after you've chucked it in the swimming pool.
ReplyDeleteYou have outdone yourself with the nasties today! Compost heaps are like giant alien wombs, incubating who knows what.
ReplyDeleteRosey
You can't imagine how much I enjoy your comments! Thank you so much! The camera is alive!!! It's Olympus. Thank you Olympus. It was my husband's gift to me for Christmas. I should remember about rice. But I hope I won't ever need it for this purpose.
ReplyDeleteOy, I've almost left my camera outside more than once. Hope yours is OK.
ReplyDeleteI've become too dependent on the pullback and airbrushing to let it go. :) But I could show some less-than-perfect parts of the garden. Just not sure I want to! lol
Love the honesty & not so beautiful part of your garden. Just like people, it glows with inner beauty...maybe only the kind gardeners can appreciate, but there nonetheless! As far as showing myself before coffee? No thanks, lol!
ReplyDeleteThank you for having the courage to show on your blog what we all have in our gardens but don't like to show. We love to show our successes but seldom our failures. It is probably our failures which give others the most hope!!
ReplyDeleteThanks for a bite of garden truth and the great commentary. Hope your camera is OK.
ReplyDeleteThere's always the ugly side to a garden...but maybe we don't allow ourselves to think about that part too much.
ReplyDeleteTatyana, your fresh wit, and unique outlook always charm me.
ReplyDeleteHi again, Tatyana~~ Thank you for the sweet words. I hope we can meet too. I'm glad your camera is alive and kicking. My Castor is in a container positioned about two and a half feet off the ground. Maybe you could do this to keep dogs/kids at bay. Food for thought: Rhododendron foliage is very toxic yet the plant is ubiquitous. I know Castor seeds are deadly but how toxic the foliage and flower are, I'm not sure.
ReplyDeleteI had one more thought on the unsightly side of things. When I began gardening [a hundred] years ago, I couldn't help compare my garden to the airbrushed images in the garden magazines. Similar to the faultless, out-of-my-league fashion models, the pristine garden photos didn't do much for my self-esteem. It was when I began visiting fellow gardeners and witnessing their imperfect gardens that I realized my garden was reality and what I was seeing in the magazines was a fantasy. Always a good thing to remember.
Tatyana, that's a great post! It reminds me to look at the other side and appreciate the not so 'pretty' things in life too. After all, beauty is a realitive thing. It is what we think and how we see it. And yes, you can always trust Olympus. Mine is Olympus too but an archived one.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of showing not so perfect plants - it's helpful too I think. I'll be in the garden, camera in hand, with a new perspective. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI hope all my foxgloves come up like that! Cute dog!
ReplyDeleteGosh, Tatyana, I loved this post, but reading the fine print am quite worried about your camera! Hope you have a back up! Our culture's unhealthy obsession with perfection is a pet peeve of mine, too. Gray hair, wrinkles, certain once proud and pert body parts now rubbing the belly button, I could go on but don't want to sicken anyone further. In the garden, that aging process is a thing of beauty, or can be if our eyes are trained to appreciate the work of nature in all things. :-)
ReplyDeleteFrances
LOL! Tatyana, You promised you would not put those pictures of my garden on your blog. Especially the ones of what all of my cucumbers looked this summer.
ReplyDeleteThank goodness your camera is okay! I did that myself earlier this summer and it made me sick with worry. Your post is great. I am at that age where I appreciate these things. It's hard for me to photograph them tho ~ I'll have to try harder!! I'm "oh-so-envious" of all those foxglove seedlings ~ I struggle and struggle to get one to come back. I remember how beautiful yours were. Looks like you'll have them again next year.
ReplyDeleteI fell in love with bacteria last week...head over heels in lov e with scum and slim and all sorts of crazy stuff...I think it is beautiful....since I gardne for the bugs and the birds I look to see if any leaves have been eaten yet...yet is the ket word....
ReplyDeleteeaten leaves means bugs are doing what they do best....
Hope camera is okay.
Sherry
Good to know everyone has a dark side lurking in their gardens. I especially love your spider photo as long as it is a photo and not the real thing, it's great!
ReplyDeleteHi Tatyana! I'm glad your camera is OK. I love your post! As I was taking photos in my 2 veggie gardens today, I had a theme, "The good, the bad, and the ugly" going through my head, but ended up not using all of the "ugly" photos. Maybe I'll go back and post some if I get some blog reading caught up with first. I did include some of the not so pretty things in my post, though, such as the leaves full of powdery mildew, and a squash with a bite taken out. Oh, I just thought of something really nasty that I don't think I took a close photo of. I'll have to see if I did.
ReplyDeleteYour camera critter photo is awesome!
Well, I just made a post, and was about to program it to appear tomorrow so I could go get a photo of my compost pile. My finger landed on something that sent the whole thing away! When I went to get it from my history, it came up blank.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to see about starting over tomorrow.
I gave up on a tomato plant and the sad thing is, after it began wilting and dieing off, it decided to produce fruit! Oy! I definitely have brown spots--on my hands and face! I think I got them from my rose bush earlier in the year. :)
ReplyDeleteI liked your post. It is so true...nothing is perfect.
ReplyDeleteI love this post, Tatyana! It's so true. I am not what I used to be, but I like to think the wrinkles and age spots indicate wisdom and life experience:) And I could certainly take a lesson in showing the less attractive side of my garden--I would certainly have enough photos to share:)
ReplyDeleteThe last picture has to be my favorite of all; what a sweetie to pose for you.
Forgot to add I'm glad your camera is okay. I haven't done that--yet--but I've left enough gardening tools outside to form a nice rusty collection:)
ReplyDeleteSnork. Wonderful celebration of imperfection. Yan
ReplyDeleteWhen I did a scheduled post for Wordless Wednesday, I noticed I had a draft, and when I looked, there was the start of the post that I did, answering your invitation to post something not so pretty. I put a link to your post.
ReplyDeletethe truth about gardening is not all pretty but there is a moment when not so pretty mixed as there is growth, full bloom and fall. You have captured all the seasons of the cycle.
ReplyDeleteThe 'honest, ugly' truth:) Great post.
ReplyDelete