July in December

 Maltese Cross is a lychnis.  My mom had this fine old fashioned perennial growing in her garden.  I need to get it to spread around a bit more in my garden.  The flowers are very good in boquets, also.

 The montebretia is a good cut flower too.  In the garden it needs to be staked to keep it from flopping over everything.  The humming birds love it.

 The red currant bush was loaded with fruit this year.  I still have currant jelly from a couple of years ago, so did not harvest the crop this year.

The sumac trees in the woodland.  I like these trees for a number of reasons... the foliage and the autumn color.  They sucker and are producing a small sumac grove in the corner of my woodland garden.  They do not live very long or grow too tall.  They are easily removed if  needed.

As you can see these are plants from July with Christmas colors.  I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and is looking forward to an equally excellent year in 2013.

My new year's resolution is to get more of the albums for my web page finished.  I only managed to get the June Gardening album finished in 2012.  This is a start on the July album.  My travel page is getting further and further behind.  It was nice to have the Malta trip done up for show and tell to friends who were traveling there a few months ago. 

I have been spending far too much time chasing low lifes who have been stealing my photos from this blog and using them on their commercial web pages, and otherwise.  This is copy right infringement.  Anyone know a good lawyer who might work on a contingency basis?    In searching for help in this war I ran across this blog:  http://www.blogher.com/bloggers-beware-you-can-get-sued-using-photos-your-blog-my-story   It is very informative, but as you can see from the comments,  these  thieves are everywhere and need more photographers to rally to the cause.  Why should we have our work stolen with no credit or compensation.  Why should the onus be on the photographer to find the law breakers and go to great expense and hours of time to get some justice?  The social media places like pininterest, facebook, and etc., seem to encourage this 'sharing' and make anyone using their sites have to 'opt out' of their sharing.  And this only after a class action suit.  Instagram is owned by Facebook and is, I believe the photo upload engine for the site.  They have recently been in the news for their terms of use that were set to give them the rights to use any photos loaded to FaceBook.  Who knew they even existed?  http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/companies/121218/instagram-no-intention-sell-your-photos
With regards to this blog, it is owned by Google and is free.  You get what you pay for.  I have found many of my garden photos taken from this blog and used all over the net.   I think most of the photos are from older posts.  Since Google changed the format for publishing to our blogspot blogs I have not been using as many tags, labels, or keywords.  I think this makes it harder for the google bots to find the images and therefore I am getting fewer hits from the search bots.  I find it inconvenient to add labels to my posts in this new format.  This may well be a blessing in disguise.  I don't need the low lifes stealing my photos, nor am I in need of hits and views on my blog, as there is no advertising here.  My web page never has photos stolen.  It is old fashioned and not built for being searched by the google bots and so is probably the safest place to keep my stuff.  I know where it is, and I can send anyone there when I have something to show them.  I own my own domain and Godaddy provides ample hosting space at very reasonable rates.  I am thinking of getting another domain to use to build a wordpress blog.. perhaps in 2013.  Where will I ever find the time?

December in the Garden

 the white floribunda rose, Iceberg, that is next to our front door, still has some blossoms hanging on. 

 The last of the Autumn leaves have left the trees.  I have not been out for about 3 weeks.  But it won't take long to clean things up when I do get out there.  We have been having quite a lot of rain.  Our river is not over full, so we obviously needed all this rain.

This is an old photo of buffalo that I have been playing with and trying to make it into the 'Impressionist Painting' kind of a photo.  If you see it large and stand well back from the photo it looks suitably sharp.  I doubt that the impressionist painters ever had buffalo in their paintings though.  Monet would astounded, to say the least.

The apocalypse is upon us -- be sure you have some clean underwear on hand.