Another week, more rain, but also some sun and a bit of drying, which gives heart, despite the forecast for yet more rain possibly starting tomorrow. I’ve been in heavy-duty mode on a number of fronts in the yard. Last fall was mild, then really cold with no snow cover, followed by a longish toughish winter (what else is new around here?) and a lot of the trees and usually reliable perennial plants didn’t “shut down” properly, with the end result that many failed to survive, despite having lived through many seemingly worse winters in the past.
I decided that anything that didn’t show evidence of leaves or indeed any sort of life was likely an ex-plant, given that we are into June now, so I went off to the garden centre and bought a bunch of replacement shrubs and small bushes. Of course as soon as I started digging out the “dead” bushes (mostly Barberries that have a lot of really nasty spikes), I realized that down at the soil-line there were a few feeble hints of life. It reminded me of the black death/plague scenes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail –”I’m not dead yet!” So, what to do? I decided that I really much preferred the Ninebarks that I had purchased as replacements (pretty foliage, nice size *and* no blood-drawing thorns) so I went ahead and dug up all the not quite dead Barberries and relocated them to the back lane where they will have a chance to rise again should they so choose. I just didn’t have the heart to pitch them straight into the garbage, so time will tell whether they make a comeback or not. The odd thing (well, one of the many odd things) about the winter kill is that some plant material that I thought was virtually indestructible has died, and others that we consider to be at risk even in a good year have come back perfectly well. There’s no accounting for these things, I guess.
My first photo was taken on the way home from the barn on one of the many rainy days, although the variation on the theme that day was that the rain was very fine, rather than bucketing down as has been the norm. You can see that things are *very* green, which is nice, and the young Warmbloods down the hill are enjoying the fresh grass. One of the big hawks that hunts the Ebon area was sitting on the ground with the horses–you can see him just to the left of the middle of the picture, near the dark bay horse. This seemed a tad odd to me, but perhaps he had caught a gopher on the ground and decided just to stay there for a while. The horses were quite happy to ignore him, and vice versa.

By Friday it had actually stopped raining, so wandering outdoors with the camera at the barn was something I could indulge in. I still can’t ride due to lack of horseshoes on my gelding, and his turnout is still too muddy for us to contemplate putting them back on with any assurance that they would stay on, so I had time to check out the activity “up top” at the show barns, as there was a small dressage show on the weekend. I noticed this young hare having a nice time amongst the dandelions as I went past a grassy area. I like to think this is the one that a previous barn-man rescued and bottle-fed as a tiny baby, but these guys all look pretty much the same, so who’s to know?

My quest to the show barn area was well rewarded when I caught a glimpse of this horse and rider pair doing their warm-up. It was very exciting just to see a clean horse and no mud, but the bonus here was having this rider (Shannon Camphaug Sluser) at the show at all. She rode at Ebon when she was at university here, but now does the higher-end circuit in areas much farther afield, so we don’t often have the pleasure of seeing her at local shows. This is her new young Hannoverian who needs to log some “show miles”, so they were in attendance at this show, and will apparently also be back in July. He is a gorgeous horse and a very nice mover, and I’m sure they will go places as a team.

There are ducks pretty well everywhere this year with all the rain we’ve had. There was even a mallard hen nesting in a stall at the show barns at Ebon, although sadly I think once her peace and quiet was shattered by the incoming show horses on the week-end that she has abandoned her nest. “Her” stall was left strictly alone and had a “do not disturb” sign, but just the fact of a lot of activity suddenly arising was likely enough to send her away. A shame, but nothing really that could be done about it. This isn’t the Ebon mallard hen, but is one that was enjoying the ambience in a pond at the university campus on the weekend.

I’ve been continuing to play with encaustics, and this weekend my assistant (aka grandson Mark) and I decided to try a “shellac burn” technique with one of my trial encaustics. This essentially involves coating the artwork with shellac and setting it on fire. Mark is always interested in anything that involves flames, so we had quite a happy time working on this project. Shot five shows one of the encaustics in mid-burn. We tried both a “wet” and a “dry” burn, and while both processes show promise, I need to do a lot more trial and error with this, as with encaustic in general.

©Copyright 2010 by Judy Wood. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit her website.