Finding colour at the end of April. For sometimes colour can be found in the most ignored of places.
“Colourful and Opulent” are probably the best ways in which to describe the season of Spring, and it is Springtime that happens to be a favourite season of mine — I have two favourite seasons, Autumn being the first one and Spring being the second one; then again both of those seasons could easily be classed as being my favourite seasons and using a numerical system of scoring them by either first or second seems wrong. Digression aside though with Spring and Autumn you get something which is unique, whilst Summer and Winter are seasons of neutrality and perhaps even a lack of colour, Spring has the colour of nature awakening from a long sleep and Autumn is when life puts on its theatrical show before going back to sleep — and that is perhaps why I love the seasons of Spring and Autumn, as they are seasons of colour, one’s that have inspired many to create artwork, from beautiful poetry to paintings, sketches, watercolours, photography, you get the idea. And here we are on the 29th of April 2023, the second to last day of what has been a month that has gone by far too quickly to say the least. But this year the weather has been slightly “meh” to say the least, leaving me with the question,
“Just where is Spring, for it seems late this year.”
Compare that to last year in 2022 when April was warmer, of course now the warmth is in Spain where temperatures have risen above 40 degrees — but of course I for some reason do not think they will get to that in the UK this year, and that is based on probability and looking back at the weather since 2018, which has a pattern to it. Again, I digressed. But as it is the penultimate day of April, I was wanting to capture some colour, just the other week I was on the way back from Belper, and noticed a carpet that nature had provided, some early Bluebells on the ground in a section of woodland near a stretch of road that I was on, and whilst Bluebells should be blue, they were actually purple, not deep purple (pardon the pun) but a light shade of purple and is there a thing as a Bluebell that is actually blue? But it was that sense and sight of colour that made me pause for a brief moment, and I knew that perhaps this was a sign of Spring and its arrival, although is Spring this year, a little bit like Autumn of 2021, in the fact that it never really happened? Then again that is due to the changing climate and the world we live in. But seeing that colour made me want to capture some colour, and where better to do it than somewhere that so often we ignore. Not the local parkland or country park, but instead somewhere that offers itself as a home for wildlife, that also is a unique and bio diverse environment within its own rights. Yes that is it, a Garden.
Even for photography it is a Garden that gets ignored, for they can be challenging and complex to photograph, privately owned gardens, your own gardens or public gardens — they all offer so much more for a photographer to really challenge themselves, but what had started out as a warm afternoon with blue sky, slowly began to change this afternoon, dark skies approached as did the rain; but a window of opportunity meant that I could go out and capture the following photographs.
Needless to say that when I looked back at them, I knew that I had found colour, Springtime colour that is opulent and just simplistic and beautiful in only the way that nature creates, and that is the amazing thing with Spring, much like with Autumn, is the colour that it can provide, plus where did I find that colour? But a Garden, an ignored place that offers so much more, and how many times do we actually take time to slow down and look at a Garden? More than likely not a lot, but slow down and take time to look around a garden and you will see that it is a place of beauty, that only nature can provide with its intricate ways of creating artwork, that artwork is of course colour and I found it at the end of April — but I also wonder what kind of colour will I find during May? Hopefully more so than April, and perhaps this year May will be when the Springtime colours begin to show themselves even more!
