Transformation- a taste of Autumn in a Rotorua apple orchard...

 Photographing things (like apples) with imperfections is a favourite pass time of mine.

I like an element of orderliness in life but I also love to allow an element of chaos and mystery  to come through and have its day in the sun.

The interior of an apple that has been mined by blackbirds,  becomes a cave for a fruit fly or a small  place to rest out of the rain for a bee.

                  

Even a full blown rotton apples can be made to look beautiful.

Apple rot art, maybe I  have have invented a new genre.

Bright orange berries of Autumn in the cottage riose garden at the apple orchard.

Turning brown as they decay beside their flaking skeletel leaves.

     Beauty can be seen  in what is customarily cast off as ugly or odious.No-one but me seems to like flies, it seems;  even fruity ones. Adventuring with my lens on macro, one crisp apple morning after the rain,
I spy a fly and a dropplet  of dew on an apple and quite surprisingly,  I discover a rainbow.

It's the season for leaves to fall to the ground making jigsaw puzzles that crunch under your feet like cornflakes, as you walk down the path on a crisp Autumn morning towards apple picking time.

But what about the texture  of a hanging grape vine leaf with all its back lit veins and blemishes? 

The Persimmon tree, such an Autumn shock.

The juxtaposition of the burnt orange  against  flaming  scarlet.

Forms a clash

It's balanced against the cool green of the rhododendron

tree.  

But what about the beauty of the fungus that grows on the persimmon?

Focus up close and you'll see a miniature landscape or even city or moon scape. .

Even a run down old rusty corrugated iron garden shed in an apple orchard can be a focus of beauty, a patina of character is imprinted through the process of decay. 

Have you ever noticed the feeling  of the items inside an antique shop as opposed to the feeling of the items for sale inside a brand new department store?

The process of time and handling etches each vintage item with a personality.   

Memories and mysteries are discovered through references to times long passed.

 The apple orchard is a place on the edge of change. 

Who will carry on the  legacy of the apple orchard business when the owners become to old to carry on? 

Will the whole place be sold and cut up for sterile subdivisions?

Made  smooth, shiny and souless by large  glossy houses that refuse to blend into the landscape.

Decay, rust, cracks and flaking paint....all the ingredients of imperfection mixed up in a confection of

chaos.

There are plenty of Autumn leaves still left to fall.

                                                                               But

There is only probably two or three weeks more apple picking time left so it would be great

 if any Rotorua people reading this blog could go and pick some.

They only cost $1.00 a kilo and they are the most delicious things in the whole wide world especially when you make them into a delicious apple (and Fejoia) crumble.

 I have made  up an amazing recipe, it anyone wants it, let me know.

Next time I make it I will even try to take a photo of it.

A wasp eating an apple morsel on the edge of the last of the summer roses.

Creativity Quotes of the day

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful an expression of life as growth.
-Miller, Henry Valentine

There is something in the decay of nature that awakens thought, even in the most trifling mind.
Sarah Josepha Hale

Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
Robert Browning