Chestnut buds

Photography

Chestnut buds opening up fill me with wonder. The leaves enclose the flower buds like little hands, unfolding one by one. How cherished these flower buds must feel.

Finally, just before the flowers open, the tree show off its leaves like lovely drapes of fresh green cloth.

Arboretum Poort-Bulten, De Lutte (NL) – April 7, 2020.
The last picture was made on April 21, 2021.

Pretty in Pink

Photography

April 2020. These cherry blossoms were photographed during a lovely walk in Arboretum Poort-Bulten (De Lutte, NL) with my niece. They remind me of the movie ‘Pretty in Pink’.

The full blossoms are light pink, but the flower buds that come first have a much darker tone of pink. Below a picture of the same tree in April 2021, this time with green grass in the background. In this cluster of flower and leave buds, the leaves are just about to show themselves and point towards us.

Atalanta

Photography

A Vanessa atalanta butterfly on a yellow Buddleja (xweyeriana ‘Sungold’). Apparently, the English name of this butterfly is ‘the red admiral’.

The Sigma lens on my camera offers the beautiful bokeh that creates a kind of transparency in the background. Of course, in downsizing the image for use on this website some of the lustre in the original was lost.