Filling a Day of Social Distancing - 5/9/2020 – eBotanical Prints
/Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….
Here are the unique activities for yesterday:
The first hour of the day. Somehow there was a lot to observe when I first went into my office yesterday. There was ice in the birdbath. It is cantilevered off our deck railing about 1 story off the ground and tends to freeze before things at ground level. The ‘freeze watch’ forecast had been right.
Then I noticed that one of the buds on the iris stalks I brought in yesterday was open. I have a very flowery office at this point.
I was cleaning my glasses when a bird flew to the roof of the covered deck and dropped something blue that rolled down into the gutter. I put my glasses on and could see that the bird was a robin before it flew away. Then I used the zoom on the camera to see what was in the gutter: a partial robin eggshell! The bird was doing some nest maintenance. I hope the baby bird was kept warm by the other parent.
A few minutes later, there were two birds fluttering around in the air a little way from the bird feeder. I got up and took pictures of them after they flew to the sycamore. One flew off to the forest and shortly after a male Rose-breasted Grosbeak arrived at the feeder and the remaining bird flew off to the forest with the male. I think the two birds in the sycamore were female Rose-breasted Grosbeaks! I am glad we have the birds coming to our feeder occasionally this year. Maybe they did in previous years too…I just didn’t see them.
The flowers of the tulip poplar look unharmed by the cold weather.
Browsing Life Magazine from 1958. Internet archive only has 2 issues from 1958 (March and December) – the year another of my sisters was born. There were a lot of articles on the entertainment industry. I collected some of the ads (click on the image to see a larger version). Some of the brands are still around: Disney, Campbells, Coke, Pepsi, General Electric, American Airlines, Northern, Jell-O. There were also a lot of ads for cigarettes and various kinds of alcohol.
Tangle background for the poppy. I used light colors to fill in the blank areas of the tiles around the poppy image that I had ‘colored’ the day before.
Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts here.
And now for the monthly post about the digital botanical print books I browsed through in April 2020….
There are 15 new books this month. The first 3 are by Anna Atkins and are cyanotype photographs (process invented by Sir John Herschel) of algae/seaweed. Then there were 11 volumes of Flora fluminensis – Brazilian plants publish in the 1820a. The last book is much more recent (2006) and about Hollies; the illustrations are photographs in this one.
The volumes are all freely available on the Internet by clicking on the hyperlinked title. The whole list of 1,879 books can be accessed here. Sample images and links for the 16 new ones are provided below. (click on the sample image to see a larger view). Enjoy!
Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions V1 * Atkins, Anna * sample image * 1853
Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions V2 * Atkins, Anna * sample image * 1853
Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions V3 * Atkins, Anna * sample image * 1853
Flora fluminensis - V 1 * Velloso, Jose Mariano da Conceicao * sample image * 1827
Flora fluminensis - V 2 * Velloso, Jose Mariano da Conceicao * sample image * 1827
Flora fluminensis - V 3 * Velloso, Jose Mariano da Conceicao * sample image * 1827
Flora fluminensis - V 4 * Velloso, Jose Mariano da Conceicao * sample image * 1827
Flora fluminensis - V 5 * Velloso, Jose Mariano da Conceicao * sample image * 1827
Flora fluminensis - V 6 * Velloso, Jose Mariano da Conceicao * sample image * 1827
Flora fluminensis - V 7 * Velloso, Jose Mariano da Conceicao * sample image * 1827
Flora fluminensis - V 8 * Velloso, Jose Mariano da Conceicao * sample image * 1827
Flora fluminensis - V 9 * Velloso, Jose Mariano da Conceicao * sample image * 1827
Flora fluminensis - V 10 * Velloso, Jose Mariano da Conceicao * sample image * 1827
Flora fluminensis - V 11 * Velloso, Jose Mariano da Conceicao * sample image * 1827
Hollies foor Gardeners * Bailles, Christopher; Andrews, Susyn * sample image * 2006
