autofantasia's photos with the keyword: plants

For this week's Sunday Challenge , which had the theme of transition . This is a shot of some autumnally coloured peony leaves which I'd just added onto the top of our compost heap. In a few months they and everything else in that pile should have been transformed into lovely crumbly compost ready to use as a mulch around the garden. Also for Sight and Sound ... Pete Seeger (words by Lee Hays) with the short, but somewhat amusing "In Dead Earnest" - enjoy: youtu.be/0Op-OxfwsNg youtu.be/X6tJKfVyGbE

Following on from the shots I took for this week's Sunday Challenge I thought some of you might enjoy seeing this panorama of the first walled garden at Thornton Hall. Created from 11 individual images and stitched together in Photoshop it gives a good idea of what this great place is like to visit. Please view large for best effect or better still go to See All Sizes where you can select from various options. The original file was absolutely massive as is the case with these creations, so I created a smaller JPEG version for uploading, but even that is fairly big at 18,527 x 4,520 and is over 57 MB in size. So you may well need to zoom out on your browser a little bit to find a happy medium of detail and viewability. www.thorntonhallgardens.co.uk

For this week's Sunday Challenge , for which the subject was rain , which to be honest we've not had an awful lot of this summer. Thankfully, on the day my wife and I had planned to visit Thornton Hall Gardens on the outskirts of Darlington it was somewhat overcast and we did indeed get some rain. Nothing that heavy mind you, more drizzle than anything else, but sufficient to add some moisture to the plants. The garden in question was open for charity, something they do several times a year, and it is well worth visiting. So much so that we actually went twice this week as we found there was so much to see that the initial half-day we'd allocated wasn't sufficient to get around and do everything justice. In addition to the gardens they have a small tea room and sell a limited number of plants, many of which they themselves have grown. So, if you like your gardens, are ever in the area and fancy supporting a few good causes at the same time I can thoroughly recommend a visit. You will find a few more of the images that I took for this challenge in the Notes should you care to check them out and if you want to learn more about Thornton Hall Gardens please follow the link below: www.thorntonhallgardens.co.uk Please view on black for best effect.

For this week's Sunday Challenge , which had the theme of heat . Taken in our back garden earlier this week on one of the rare occasions that we enjoyed some warm sunshine, something that is essential if your are to see these lovely flowers open up fully. Osteospermums are in fact relatively new to most gardeners, and were almost unheard of 25 years ago. They have risen in popularity in the last decade as they have become more commercially available seeing more and more people use them as summer bedding plants, either to put in the border or into pots. As I said earlier, Osteospermums require full sun for the flowers to fully open, although while half-closed it is still possible to appreciate the different colours on the underside of the petals. The name Osteospermum is derived from the Greek osteon ( bone ) and Latin spermum ( seed ). They belong to the daisy family ( Compositae/Asteraceae), hence their common names: African Daisy or South African Daisy; Cape Daisy; and of course Blue-eyed Daisy. If you want to know more about them please follow the link below to a great little website that I've just discovered. There you can learn more about the propagation, botany and plant care of this beautiful daisy plant: www.osteospermum.com Also for Sight and Sound , what else but Morecambe & Wise with "Bring Me Sunshine" ... youtu.be/qfXjDELeW5M youtu.be/toqxJ4jbXaM

More from the 'processing room' ... this time it's an orb created from a shot I took in Harrogate of some brightly coloured coleus plants. Dead or Alive - You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)

Well, not quite! I took this shot of some Crocosmia in our front garden, which has yet to flower with this week's Sunday Challenge in mind. In the end though due to the winds we've been having I found it impossible to get a clean, sharp shot of it that I was happy with so I went with the pine cones instead. However, with a bit of tweaking here and there I think I've managed to make something out of it that has some appeal. I'll probably try taking more shots of them in calmer conditions, but for the moment I thought I'd share this one.