As Autumn Wanes

Fall Breeze 2008

Everything changes over night. A storm comes up suddenly and unexpectedly. Heavy rainfall turns the warm colors into cold light. Strong wind defoliates the trees, and the last walnuts are falling to the ground.


We have to remove a vast number of walnut leaves from the grassland. It´s getting rather cold for this time of the year. Even lemons are watching out for cozy little places to warm themselves.

Lemon´s Excursion 2008

Swallows migrated already. Beetroot, black radish, salad, mangel and onions still find theirselves in the patch. Basil and sweet peppers are getting killed or damaged by frost. In the larder I find some jars with stewed fruit which have got moldy already. All the work for nothing, it´s enough to cry me a river.

Taking Wing 2008

My back hurts, and I hardly can move. I have been running into this situation through my own fault. A lot of stooping, kneeling and photographing in bad posture without going in for sports ... winter is just around the corner. Two new pictures I just have finished somehow correspond to that certain kind of seasonal mood:

Boundaries 2009

Uncertainty 2009

Indian Summer

Autumn 2008

The last warm und sunny days. Leaves just started to turn into red brown and yellow. Jars full of collected seeds from withered flowers and blooming herbs everywhere.



Sunflower seeds expected to be fed to birds in winter. Which probably won´t come anymore since four young cats, masters of climbing up trees, are populating our backyard.



Calyxes of marigold which gave the vegetable patch a vibrant touch of orange and yellow for a long time.


Green beans got dry too soon in a hot summer with little rain.

And I´m lucky to start off with a new series of mannequin photographs. I use a slightly damaged torso of a vintage mannequin as a subject. Unlike my "Secret Society" collection of black and white mannequins which I shot in a storeroom in a more documentary way, I`m now experiencing with a single body put on stage. I´ll write more about the new series in the next couple of weeks when work will be progressed quite a bit.

Secret Society No 17

"under construction"

Growing Our Own Food III - Crazy Harvest

After two years of random planting and yielding a large crop however, this summer and autumn our garden provides some surprising new experiences. I shall learn more about unpredictable circumstances, preferences of little animals, cryptic processes of nature and first of all, my own greenness.


These carrots look quite different to those you get in a supermarket, don´t they? If you watch them closely you can notice a lot of grooves and swellings caused by every single hard step they take to permeate the soil. We are lucky to lift only a few like the short one in the middle this year. It takes some time until the compact soil gets more crumbly.


I love beetroots, especially beetroot salad in winter. Maybe that´s why I couldn´t wait to seed them as early as possible. Now we´ve got quite a number of them at the beginning of august instead of autumn as expected.


Tomatoes actually have been playing a joke on me. Growing like crazy last summer, I decided to plant only two bushes this year. At the end there were eight growing in the vegetable patch like by an invisible hand. Since our compost heap originated insufficient heat, this spring unsuspectingly with the garden mold we brought onto the patch a lot of tomatoe seeds still as fresh as daisies. At lower temperatures I cut the fruits still unripe together with the stems and hang them on nails in front of the south-facing hayrick wall where they get red or yellow mostly within a week.


Chili peppers are drying in the sun. Unfortunately we mixed up sweet and chili pepper seeds. Now we enjoy the sweet ones like a rare delicacy and will be able to cook hot dishes for ages. Anyway, I love them!


We really have been looking forward to pick these delicious grapes in September and decided to purchase a grape press. The juice tasted good, somewhat sour as we tried hard to beat the wasps and birds to the draw which devoured the fruits for the most part.

I am an accurate person and know my own mind. I´m sure that natural gardening is a good exercise program to learn to let things rip.

Colors Are Finding Their Way

I am so excited. Our efforts to recultivate the old garden are rewarded by regrowing grass and flowers in multiple colors. Instead of removing the soil as proposed by "experienced gardeners", we covered the ground with grass clippings several times to convey soil organisms. This turned out to be the perfect treatment and saved a lot of money. Now one plant is paving the way for the next one. The following year the grass already is growing vigorously.





Nature definitely has a will of it´s own and a big sense of humour! It happened at the end of May that we discovered little sunflower plantlets all over the garden without having planted them. Why did this happen? Maybe for several reasons. First we were feeding birds with sunflower seeds in winter. Some of the seeds tumbling down the birdhouse found proper conditions to grow. Second some seeds ended up on the compost heap and have been disseminated again together with soil. Since June small and big ones are taking pleasure in life and are savouring the sun. Here are some of them:

Sunflower I

Sunflower III

I love the fun poses they often display:

Sunflower II

In front of the garden wall long-established coneflowers are flowering again:

Indian Summer I


Indian Summer II

Daylilies have been successful flowers in rural gardens for a long time. They flower for one day only. But new buds keep developing - producing a long run of simple, elegant trumpet shapes. I took some of them growing in front of the house and replanted these robust beauties inside the garden in a light woodland setting. I gambled but were quite sucessful in the end:

Day Lily

Poppies

When we first came to Hungary, the backyard of our house looked very poor. The former owners, overwhelmed with work, tried to eradicate the exuberantly sprouting flora. All the more we were extremely happy about any little flower which jumped the hurdle - mainly poppies in different colors. They grew in small red groups or standing alone, long stemmed with white and purple colored petals. I fell in love with these courageous beauties and invited them to some shootings.

Reach For The Sky 2008



White Coffee 2008

This lovely couple was nestling up against each other, and I witnessed their growth throughout the whole summer and autumn, sometimes experimenting at post-processing.

Strong Company 2008


Love 2008

After collecting seeds last year and sowing them in early spring this year, this one surprised me after a heavy rainshower. My newest creation:

Raindrops On My Head 2009