wallflowers (PIPS!)

Des trouvailles magiques et bien élaborées et bien combinées a de Clair-Obscur.

Wonderful lessons in botany and resilience!
Splendid specimens with a dazzling light!
I like also the text, Annalia!

bellissimi i pip, anche

Buona pasqua.

Beautiful find! It is amazing that plants can live under such extreme conditions!

c' est en train de devenir un mur vegetal !!

Superb shot and PiPs!

Wonderful soft light and shadow!
Happy Easter!

A beautiful serie of springtime flowers. Wish you a fine and happy easter weekend, Annalia !

Great wallflowers, the graffiti frame the main shot to perfection! I wonder whether the sprayers deliberately left room for the flower;-)

Great collection and well spotted.

Thank you, everyone, for the visits and nice, stimulating comments. They reminded me of something I read not too long ago, namely, that some scientists - evidently despairing of our ability to mend our ways in time to save Earth from catastrophic climate changes - are apparently seriously looking into possible ways of "terraforming" Mars. I'm not joking. This is not science fiction, but actual, serious scientific research. Mars' biggest problem, from our point of view, is that it lacks a viable atmosphere. Well, do you know of any living creatures capable of making oxygen out of thin air? Yes, of course. Plants. Scientists are indeed studying plants that live in extreme conditions (upper reaches of the Cordillera Andina, for example) and trying to figure out ways in which they could, slowly, colonise Mars and create an atmosphere there. Almost everything else would then follow suit: water from condensation, warmth from a sort of greenhouse effect, in time even breathable air. Plants are marvellous little factories, life's powerhouses. But don't hold your breath and don't stop recycling quite yet. Plants' sense of time runs on a much slower clock and terraforming Mars would take them way longer than our lifetimes or those of our children and grandchildren. It still makes an awful lot more sense to try and save our own planet from the destruction we are ourselves responsible for.

Yes, of course we need to keep our planet alive (and work hard now to do so!). But I also love that there are people working on the future for our future selves (generations away from us). Besides, it is expanding our horizons that gives us things like replacement heart valves, and other tools that help us now. We just need to do it all thoughtfully.

I think this photo would work well in my group 'naturally occurring collages' (love having it in 'plants vs structures' already!).

Thank you, Laura. Invitation accepted, of course.
I don't want to stop progress, necessarily, I just would not want people to start thinking of planets as disposable ...

indeed.