Nature walk

Yesterday morning Tahi and I took Liz (his granny) for a walk at Eastwoodhill arboretum. It's a beautiful park planted with an extensive range of exotic trees. There are various walks, easy to moderate, so we chose a reasonably easy one that was about an hour long, which took us around a good portion of the domain. It was great, the leaves on some trees are already turning red and yellow, Tahi couldn't believe his luck at the endless supply of sticks and loved running down the paths.

I love taking close up pictures of natural elements, like tree bark, because they look quite graphic. I also took a photo of the canopy seen from the ground. have you ever noticed the pattern that forms where the leaves from separate branches don't quite join?

There were some strange and beautiful "nature" sculpture made by a school, possibly put in place for the centennial they'd celebrated just a week earlier. I love the idea of art made with whatever is found on the spot and that fades away with time without leaving a trace.

Here's a not so nature sculpture, spot the intruder.

This is one I made earlier this summer at our new river swimming spot.

I'd also made a really cool one in Samoa 4 or 5 years ago. Some friends and I spent a whole afternoon picking bits of polished glass from the beach we were staying at, then we sorted them and made a big turtle on the sand at the high tide mark. It took us a while and unfortunately by the time it was finished it was getting dark, so I only got a couple of photos and they were quite dark. What a great memory though. We sat on the beach until the sea reached our little art piece. We then had to pick all the little pieces, as the local owner of the fales (bungalows) didn't like the idea of all this glass going into the sea and onto his beach! It didn't matter to him that we'd found it there in the first place. I have to add that every morning someone would be sweeping the beach, yes, to make it look like those postcard photos.