I know there is a Epi forum but I hang here, so here I will post my photos. As you know, I do like playing with the camera just about as much as I like gardening.

My plant ( I call her Annie after my MOM) is blooming again. When it does, I grab my camera and wallow around in the dirt. Taking pictures from all around. I need to think a new way of taking these photos.. any way, I tried to focus on the bud this time. I have them ordered kinda backwards., because I tacked them onto the collection of Annie photos from past years, so I had to have the new ones come up first, and that meant backwards. This years bloom photos are the first 30. It is getting harder to be different from the last time. Maybe I need a differnt Epi ,.. or a new camera. Slideshow link is way at the bottom.

I feel a certain relationship to this plant. I got the cutting off my mother's plant after she died. That is why I call her Annie. I treat her with a combination of abuse, neglect and tenderness and she rewards me with this phenomena 5 or 6 times a summer. It hardly seems fair.. Annie will get her post flowering treat of fish for breakfast this morning. She is so tired out with her flowers hanging lax off their limbs like dead white bats. Last time a deer came up and ate them.

Every time I climb into a throat of this epi, I feel like I am honoring her and channeling her love of photography. I feel very close to her sitting in the dirt in the dark bathed in fragrance. She too took amazing photos a la Georgia O'keefe. They were large cibrachromes prints back in the day of developing when she developed her large color prints in a photo lab herself. Our house smelled of chemicals. She loved rotting leaves in swamps and iris. She would put on waste tall rubber boots , grab her gear and her tripod, and wade out into the mire and muck and bring back beautiful images of colorful decay. She absolutely hated the idea of digital photography.

Here are my favorites for the night. One because it is like a flower version of the fires of hell and the other for its sublime peace. If you scroll all the way down you will find the link for the slide show. First 30 are from this years batch.

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Here is a link that might be useful: My