Bladder Campion - Silène enflé

On my early morning walks along a few kilometres of an abandoned road that used to be home to residential dwellings, long since decayed and vanished, I was able to watch the growth and maturation of a number of native and non-native wildflowers. Bladder Campion, a non-native import from Europe, grows wild almost everywhere in the Ottawa region. It is especially lovely in the early morning light, embedded in other wild grasses, and despite its odd anatomical organization, it is very popular with pollinating insects - especially bumblebees. It is also popular in Mediterranean cooking.

 

I find photography very challenging, learning both how to use the camera and how to use the world, as it were, in the sense of using light, depth, figure and form, and colour. And no one of those is separable. This spring, wildflowers became a way for me to work out some things, especially as their relatively static presence makes controlling for some of the other factors more realistic and less urgent.

Done