Photo Challenge

This Made Me Smile ~ Once Upon A Time In Kenya’s Highlands

It seemed the greatest gift for this nosy writer when Graham said I could go with him to survey the Kikuyu farms just north of Nairobi. Yes, yes and yes. I would be delighted to look for smutted Napier Grass. And hold the clipboard. And manage one end of the tape measure.

We were all set then, along with Njonjo, senior driver for the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, where Graham’s crop protection project was based.

It was the time just after the late 90’s El Nino rains. The Rift escarpment roads were terrible, many of them washed away. In other places great chasms had opened up, or the roads were strewn with boulders brought down the hills by flash floods. But this was also home territory for Njonjo. He had ancestral land there. A farmer then, when he was not employed as a driver. He anyway handled the Land Rover with great skill, and astonished us, too, by simultaneously negotiating giant pot holes and spotting plots of smutted grass growing many metres from the roadside behind kei apple and winter jasmine hedges.

Njonjo and Graham

Trading centre after El Nino rains

Of course, after a fine spell, the roads baked hard into gullies and corrugations. This next photo shows one of the Rift Valley lanes on the edge of the escarpment. You can just make out the valley bottom through the far haze:

I don’t recall why we were all out of the Land Rover at this point. Probably Njonjo was asking directions. Even locals have problems finding their way across the ridges. Anyway, this was the moment I met this lovely young man:

Small-holder farms at Escarpment, in the Rift’s shadow, Mount Longonot in the background

As we jolted and slid along the country lanes, Graham was using a GPS to select farms at random. When a location was chosen, Njonjo then took further charge of operations and went to find the owner of the farm, and talk them into admitting a couple of wazungu , who would like to look at their Napier Grass.

Over the weeks of the survey it became a matter of pride that no one turned us away. In fact the opposite was often overwhelmingly true. Wherever we went, we were met with great courtesy, mugs of tea and presents of farm produce: plums, pears, sugar cane, a cockerel. We had brought useful information that must be reciprocated. Njonjo was particularly adept at fending off serial invitations to lunch, and did so without us seeming too rude. Otherwise the job would never had been done.

This farmer gave us sugar cane

One chilly morning Mrs. Njuguna served up mugs of hot chocolate before we went to examine her napier grass plot

Napier Grass (foreground in both photos) is an essential animal food crop for small-holder farmers who zero graze their stock. Zero graze means they have no access to pasture, but grow plots of grass wherever they have space, including on roadside verges, and then crop and deliver the grass to their animal pens. (Commercial tea gardens in the background). Most farms (shambas) are on ancestral land that has been subdivided down the generations and may be only a few acres or less.

By now you’re probably wondering what Napier Grass smut looks like. You will also have gathered that in this context, smut has nothing to do with off-colour jokes or questionable practices. (That said, everyone found it hugely amusing that Graham was doing a part-time doctoral thesis on smut). It is in fact a fungal disease that attacks grasses, including maize and sugar cane. On Napier Grass it becomes visible when the plant begins to flower; the florescent parts look as if they have been dipped in soot.

Two happy plant pathologists: Graham with Dr Jackson Kung’u admiring smutted grass growing on a road reserve in Nairobi, as spotted across a busy dual carriageway by Njonjo.

The diseased grass isn’t apparently harmful to the animals that eat it, but there are serious implications for farmers who rely on it for zero grazing. In time, smut weakens the plant and so less and less leaf mass is produced. The spores spread on the wind, although Graham thought the most likely source of infection was due to farmers unknowingly giving cuttings of infected plants to their neighbours. The only solution is to dig up the plant and burn it.

Farmers, predominantly women, were keen to hear anything and everything Graham could tell them. Impromptu roadside smut seminars became a feature, Njonjo providing lectures in Kikuyu or Swahili for those who did not speak English. Graham also distributed information sheets. We never seemed to have enough!

On some of the farm visits, it was inevitable that Graham would be consulted about other plant diseases that farmers had noticed. Here there’s some problem with the fruit trees.

The farmer’s daughter watches us. Her father had handed her one of Graham’s smut information sheets: the school girl in the family…

The Kikuyu uplands are mostly 5-6,500 feet above sea level, the settlements strung out along ridges. Although at the tropics, early mornings and evenings can be cool, and especially in June and July, when there may also be fine rain and fog. Some of the highest settlements at around 7,000 ft are in the frost zone, the landscape’s bleakness, with bracken growing along the roadside, reminding me of Scottish uplands.

All in all, Graham’s smut survey was among the highest highlights of our seven year stay in Kenya. Although not everyone was always keen to speak to us:

Lens-Artists: This made me smile Ann-Christine is making us all smile with this week’s theme.

The Grateful Gardener

We have snow here in the Castle. We woke up to it early yesterday. What a shock. Snow in November. It’s much too soon. I’d seen the weather forecast of course, but was expecting only a spot of sleet that would soon melt away with the global boiling, not several inches of real snow, the sort perfect for snowballs.

Anyway, it’s not the snow I’m grateful for, but I do love the brilliant blue sky it’s brought with it. And also this golden Rowan tree in its white cocoon. It stands just outside our garden, and provides us with some borrowed treescape. And it, in turn, has recently been much loved by the birds, especially the blackbirds. Before the snow came they were busily stripping the stems.

I’ll miss the berries when they’ve gone. On bright autumn days they light up like jewels. This is how they looked in early October. A tree full of joy. Thank you, Rowan.

The snow fall also focused my eye on the latest garden addition: a Jelly King crab apple tree. Yesterday morning while sitting at the kitchen table eating my porridge, I could see its clutch of red apples glowing like little beacons at the bottom of the garden. Time for a photo then, and to say how very pleased I am with this Halloween birthday gift from my other half. Thank you, Graham.

It came a few days before my birthday, delivered in a tall box to the front doorstep, whither I was directed to investigate the new arrival. Once I’d broken through the cardboard, I was surprised to find the little tree had come with eight tiny apples still firmly attached. There were also a dozen loose ones in the bottom of the box, sadly not quite enough to make crab apple jelly, but filling me with high hopes. I decided to keep them as a spur to locating a wild tree. I thought I knew where there was one. And so it proved. Last week I found a fine crop of fallen apples in a patch of woodland on the way to the builders’ merchants. We now have crab apple jelly. No need to wait for the little tree to do its stuff then.

And speaking of stuff – we still have some of the salad variety growing outdoors and in the greenhouse.

This year I’ve grown Red Radicchio endive. For the past few weeks it’s been growing fatter by the day, and as temperatures lower, the more red it becomes. I’ve been plucking the outer leaves with hopefully plenty more to come. In the greenhouse I have tubs of red Chinese mustard, Moroccan Cress which grows like a cut and come again lettuce and a few oakleaf lettuces. Also some lettuces out in the garden, though they may have succumbed to the snow. Likewise the marigolds. But it makes me very happy to find a bowl full of fresh salad leaves in late November. Thank you, garden.

And one little plant that is standing up to the snow, once I’d dug it out it earlier today:

These sweet little hearts ease type pansies have been flowering for weeks and weeks in a pot on the garden steps. And they’re still going strong. They were a gift from my sister. Thank you, Jo.

Lens-Artists: Gratitude This week Tina sets the theme, both timely and thoughtful. Please visit her ever lovely blog.

The Silence Of Stones

This is Shadwell Quarry on Windmill Hill, Much Wenlock, part of the Wenlock Edge Silurian reef system.

There’s an air of brooding here, even on a bright winter’s day: of violation survived, albeit roughly; scrub and small silver birch trees recolonising the horizontal shelves. It’s a silence all its own, cupped by sheered off walls and the mysterious deep pool below. Then there is my own silence: awe at the scale of this one-time endeavour now shut down, truncated, closed as if it never mattered: the hard lives of the men who worked here, their injuries and doubtless deaths, unrecalled.

Half a century ago, this hillside and the nearby town of Much Wenlock rocked with every quarry blast. Then came the soft fall of lime dust that clung to every surface.

The quarry closed in the 1980s, but in its heyday in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, steam powered goods trains huffed and clanked up the incline from the Ironbridge Gorge to the quarry’s own siding, there to take on stone to use as flux in iron smelting at the Coalbrookdale Works and the furnaces of the Black Country; industries that are also long defunct, or exported to China along with the roar of red-hot hearths, the crucibles’ hiss of pouring iron, shouts of foundrymen.

But then there’s another absent soundscape here, one so ancient it is hard for human minds to grasp. The limestone reef exposed in this quarry began to form over 400 million years ago in a shallow tropical sea somewhere off the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean. In waters teeming with corals, sea lilies (crinoids), bony fish, sponges, trilobites and molluscs began the depositing, compacting and solidifying of decomposing animal parts. And while this was happening there was apparently no terrestrial life, but instead there were endless howling gales rampaging across the landmass; brutal winds terrifying in their loudness.

Good that they’ve gone then. Instead we are left with other ungraspable events, for instance, envisaging how vast land masses shunted around the planet, ending up in places many thousands of miles from where they began; the slow, slow scrunch of tectonic plates; the gradual upthrusting and folding of ancient strata; a world we somehow think is in our power!

The stones beneath our feet, the rocky uplands maybe silent, but they have wider, wiser perspectives to impart if we choose to pay attention. I think our ancestors may have understood something of this.

Wenlock Edge quarry

Lens-Artists: Silence This week Egídio explores the principles of silence in the work of American photographer, Robert Adams. Please see his photo essay and be inspired.

Looking Back: African Dawn

These last few weeks I’ve been immersed in a major displacement activity – both actually and metaphorically. While trying to find a good place to store Graham’s newish photo scanner, I decided I’d quite like to use it and revisit our old Africa negatives.

The Epson, however, was unknown territory. I’d done my original scanning using technology long since deceased, and I wasn’t altogether happy with the results, or with my editing. So first stop meant downloading software and all the nonsense that goes with it (compatibility/senescence issues – not mine – since both scanner and PC are only a few years old as far as their owners are concerned, but they are obviously superannuated in techno-ageist terms).

After several efforts, and two different apps later, I’m finally set to go, but then there is the issue of dealing with negatives that are twenty and thirty years old, were processed in Africa, have thus moved continents, survived several house moves, and not been stored very carefully. My original prints are in far better condition, some astonishingly sharp, but they are stuck in albums. So yes, as I said, a major displacement activity.

Yet it’s serious time travelling too, and every now and then a frame emerges and I am transported. The image may have lost clarity, but I’m there at first light, on the shores of Lake Elmenteita in Kenya’s Rift Valley.

The greater and lesser flamingos that inhabit this shallow soda lake never stop honking and grunting. It’s a seamless shifting soundscape that you hear all night if you are camping nearby. The loudness ebbs and flows, depending on where the flocks are feeding, but always strangely amplified across the shallow waters. At dawn though, you forgive the din, just for the sight of them through the mist. In the distance they look like scattered rose petals, and since the air is frosty at this hour, this sparks thoughts of celebratory champagne and ice bowls of strawberry sorbet…

But let’s not get too carried away. If you venture out on the lake mud for a better view, beware. It’s slithery with flamingo guano, and the acrid smell of it, along with the soda, stings the nose, throat and eyes.

And yet…and yet these vistas have to be the most entrancing of all the many scenes in my memory archives.

When we lived in Nairobi during the 1990s we came here when we needed a break from city living, staying at Soysambu tented camp. The drive up the Great Rift had its own thrills, both the astonishing views of the Rift volcanoes, and the hair-rising truck driving along the way. It was always a relief to turn off the tarmac and bump along dirt tracks to the camp.

The lake and its surrounding land is mostly in the hands of the Delamere family. From the late 19th century to the 1930s, the third baron Delamere was both an agricultural pioneer and prime mover in the shaping of the then British colony. Among other land holdings, he acquired 46,000 acres around the lake in the early 1900s. At some stage there were attempts to grow wheat there, but the soil was too shallow and the land reverted to bush. In our day, the fifth Lord Delamere, managed the place as a private game reserve (more recently the Soysambu Conservancy) and cattle ranch.

The camp back then was sheltered by fever trees, sixteen tents each with its view of the lake and the remnant volcanic cone, known by local Maasai as the Elngiragata Olmorani, the Sleeping Warrior. There was always something to look at. The light on the lake changed every second and there were 400 species of bird to watch out for not least the campsite superb starlings, weaver birds, orioles, babblers, herons and storks – and then you might look up to see impala slip noiselessly through the trees or waterbuck out on the flood plain…

It could all have been a dream of course.

Lens-Artists: Looking back This week Sofia wants to see the things and places we treasure and would like to revisit.

What’s In A Garden ~ Or Tales Of The Not Quite Planned

The thing about making a garden is you never really know what will happen there. Not really really. You do of course ‘set the stage’ for growing to happen – from planting up a few doorstep pots to toiling over ground work and designing and filling borders.

And then when you sow seeds, as I did here for Gigantes butter beans, and Black Knight morning glory – you could well envision how they might be if they were planted out together and set to grow up the front garden obelisk. (Header photo)

But you can’t necessarily predict the actual ‘show’, which of course is what’s wonderful about gardening. In many ways it’s ever an experiment. The pleasure comes when you walk outside and notice something special, the something whose actual disposition you had no control over.

In the back garden I planted out some more Black Knights with purple climbing French beans Violette. But at the moment they seem more keen to keep company with the courgettes. The flowers have an unearthly look about them. I could swear they radiate light from their recesses.

Then there are the wild and feral plants that invite themselves into the garden. Sometimes they are not too welcome. But sometimes they make one’s heart leap with delight. Here, entwined in our otherwise horrid hedge we have this glorious pink convolvulus (bindweed). The flowers are much bigger than the wild white version of themselves and they out-trumpet their morning glory cousins too.

And then there are the garden invaders that invite more curiosity than delight. These delicate crimson-grey poppies are presently flowering above the terrace wall and, as far as I can tell, is a single plant with many branching stems. As the flowers fade, the more ashy they become.I’m not sure what to feel about them.

But I know I love this white marsh mallow, a shrub I bought recently to grow on and fill a gap along the back garden fence. A perfect moment – catching the early morning sun on its face:

And then there are things that add to a garden that aren’t quite in the garden. Just over the hedge, on the roadside verge, is an ornamental cherry tree with deep burgundy foliage. At sunset, as we eat supper, we have a glimmering light show at our new kitchen window; not at all what we were expecting.

P.S. For followers of the house renovations: the kitchen’s not finished yet. Last lap stuff still to do.

Lens-Artists: What’s In A Garden Ann-Christine at Leya shows us some stunning gardens

Shadows And Silhouettes

Herewith a reprise of some favourite monochrome shots from the Much Wenlock archive. The header is the entrance to the Linden Walk, which several of you (Jude especially) will well remember.

The next photo was taken on the shadowy cutting of the old railway line that runs alongside the Linden walk: top-lit horse chestnut leaves…

Next, a former back garden view of foxgloves: sun setting over the fence…

A couple of wintery scenes now. First the ivy clad ash trees in Townsend Meadow:

…and twilight over Rookery Wood: one rook (centre) and several jackdaws:

Shadows & Silhouettes Dawn at The Day After is this week’s host at Leanne’s Monochrome Madness

Monochrome Madness: Trees Making Art

On a seaside lane in Aberffraw, Anglesey

This week at Leanne’s Monochrome Madness, Sarah from Travel with me invites us to show her trees, especially ones that are strikingly sculptural.

Britain’s coastlands are good places to find such trees, the prevailing winds bowing and retraining limbs, scissoring canopies. And yet, to my eye, these trees seem to dance with the elements, the header hawthorn caught in the end flourish of a pirouette; the tree below mid jete: a paradox of energy transfixed.

Henllys Wood, Beaumaris, Anglesey

Other kinds of physical setting may enhance the intrinsic art of a tree. This next photo is of an ash, I think, viewed through an aperture in Penmon Priory dovecote, also on Anglesey island.

At Newborough Beach, further along the coast from Penmon, there are other elements in play. Erosion.

This is a tale of deposition and decomposition. The extensive sand dune system, on which these plantation conifers was planted, blew into this part of Anglesey during a massive storm in the fourteenth century. Now bit by bit, the storms are stealing the sands away again, leaving a parade of ghost trees.

And talking of ghost trees, there are yet other transformative powers at work. At Croft Castle on the Herefordshire-Powys border, the estate walks of Spanish Chestnuts, have succumbed to both age and disease (Phytophythora cinnamomi or cinnamon fungus). The trees supposedly date from the late sixteenth century, their origins ‘explained’ by an Armada legend that suggests they were grown from chestnuts found in the pocket of a ship-wrecked Spanish sailor.

Now Croft is nowhere near the sea, but maybe that is irrelevant. This was the age of grand garden making, and it is well known how rare plant material, however it arrived, was ever coveted by the landed elite. And of course it’s a good story, a fittingly mythic gloss for this gallery of the arboreally deceased; trees that have been allowed to die and be dead in their own spectacular way.

One of Croft Castle’s Spanish Chestnut ‘ghost trees’

Finally, and in more comfortable terms, there are those trees whose familiar contours or particular disposition mean home to us; they become our personal landmarks. Here are some from our Wenlock days:

The Linden Walk, Much Wenlock in late summer

The allotment ash tree in winter

The little tree on the hill above the house

Monochrome Madness: trees This week Sarah at Travel With Me is featuring trees. She suggests we consider sculptural qualities.

Two By Two

This week at Lens-Artists, Elizabeth of Albatz Travel Adventures has us thinking about diptychs. This is what she says:

“A diptych is two images placed in proximity to one another, forming a pair. To make a successful pairing there should be several things in common, and something very different, contrasting.”

Please see her post for a range of inspiring examples.

My header pair is perhaps a bit daft, but it appeals to my sense of humour: man ruminates deeply on the ebb and flow of the Celtic Sea.

Man makes up mind: enough is enough.

Location: Anglesey, North Wales.

The next pair also has a Welsh location, taken on the Tallyllyn Steam Railway. Some of the enthusiastic volunteers who help run the trains:

Crab Apple Tree (with Japanese anemones) in our old Wenlock garden:

Townsend Meadow, Much Wenlock and a fine crop of wild oats:

Up in the Shropshire Hills: the Stiperstones

Also on the Stiperstones – fields of gorse, once widely cropped for winter animal fodder; these days, more valuable to bees and other insects:

And finally some light and shadow. Leaves – back lit and top lit:

Lens-Artists: Perfect Pairs

Pondering On The Rectilinear

Penmon Lighthouse, Anglesey

This week Lens-Artist Egidio wants us to consider the rectangular in our photo compositions (link below). E.g. how the leading line of the horizon may create two rectangles between sea and sky, or land and sea, or land and sky. Then there are reflections to play with, or different textural zones, or a leading line up the centre of a scene dividing it visually into lateral rectangles.

And then there is rebatment/rebattement of a rectangle, which is not quickly or easily described, but my first photo (I think) is an example. The lighthouse is centred on a line that would make a square of the right hand side of the rectangle. Anyway, this technique is explained fully HERE.

Egidio gives other examples of rectangular approaches, so please pay him a visit.

These next photos were taken in the National Nature Reserve of Ganllwyd near Dolgellau, mid Wales. The footpath took us through dense woodland with streams everywhere. There was a steep climb…

…which brought us here, to a mountainside that was the scene of the Welsh goldrush in the late 19th century.

As you can see, it was an overcast day, and the view so big, it was not easy to know where to begin with it, or focus the eye, although the heavy clouds do indeed make their own rectangle. So…

I made use of old mine building walls and windows to frame views/narrow the focus/add a bit of interest.

And finally, down from the mountains to the Mawddach Estuary.

And another gloomy (and very windy) day. The Barmouth Viaduct, a one-time railway bridge, now takes only pedestrian and cycle traffic. In this photo it acts like a zipper between river and mountains.

Lens-Artists: Two rectangles Egidio at Through Brazilian Eyes wants us to consider the rectangular in our photo compositions.

Taking Off!

The last day of Becky’s May squares, and I thought this photo of my aunt, Evelyn Ashford, somehow sums up the themes of renewal and moving forward. It shows such spirit, doesn’t it; a sense of hopefulness and forging ahead.

I’m guessing it was taken in tough times too, around the start of the war in 1939. Evelyn would have been seventeen. But it’s possible it was taken earlier. Her very ‘grown-up’ tweeds may be explained by the fact she was employed in the dress department of a big Guildford store. She had started her working career aged fourteen, apprenticed to the local draper in Cranleigh where the Ashfords lived.

I don’t know who the photographer was, possibly my father, but a bit of sleuthing has revealed the location as the trig point on Pitch Hill, Surrey, not far from Cranleigh. Evelyn is taking flight over the South Downs.

Evelyn Mary Ashford 1923 – 2013

You can find her story in an earlier post The Many Faces of Evelyn Mary Ashford

And more at:

Tales From The Walled Garden

Tales from the walled garden #3: when Alice met Charlie

Tales from the walled garden #4: more about Alice

Tales from the Walled Garden #2: back to the potting shed

#SquaresRenew

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge