Zac Ware: Roving Reporter

The Guitar Tree and other images:

I last wrote of Zac when he played at Edinburgh Castle in July, explaining that he had been too busy "roving" the world to send me photos. However, last month- having finished his tour with The Proclaimers- he gave me two CD's full of his photos from this tour. Here are some of them, commencing with "The Guitar Tree":

Discovery Apples

Before returning to Ficus tree issues in Santa Monica, I will finalize my time in the UK with a post about Discovery Apples.

Having been brought up on British apples- and mainly organic ones at that- I have long felt that we indisputably have the best apples in the World with regard to flavour and smell! Always, I get excited when I go into a shop in the late Summer and SMELL the nostalgic smell of Discovery Apples- the smell being the foretaste of an apple that tastes as delicious as it looks.

Coincidentally, having last month just bought and indulged in my first Discoveries, I received the following email from my friend Artist Helen Ganly, another Discovery devotee, writing about her Grandchildrens' Discovery experience:

“Here is a picture of Sammy and Roza's apple tree.

They dug the hole when they were six and eight.....five years ago!

I chose 'Discovery' because of its marvellous luminous pink /red apples which make it look like a tree from a fairy story, and for the way the colour bleeds from the skin into the flesh when the sweet apples are ripe.”

And here are the images she sent me:

Saskia Sutton

For the last month I seem to have been constantly travelling without time to concentrate on this blog so that I now have a lot of catching-up to do. I will start chronologically:

In July, I published a post about the artist Philip Sutton and his wife Heather. Shortly after this I visited their daughter, producer Saskia Sutton. This was a delight in many ways: having known Saskia since she was very little, I had last seen her when she was about 13. As a child she showed great visual sensitivity so it was wonderful to see how this artistry had blossomed, as expressed in her house that gave one constant exciting colour experiences- she is not afraid of colour and the many paintings by her father glow beautifully against the vivid paintwork of the walls. Strangely, working with directors and producers I have often found them to be non-visual. This Saskia is certainly not.

Below are some images of her mouth-watering house concluding with a couple of an ancient North American Western Red Cedar in a nearby park; as Saskia pointed out, the low-lying branches where children had sat were highly polished.

April: Oxford Road, San Marino CA & Oxford UK

Last week I returned to the UK for a period, according to the terms of my Visa, and last week I received emails with very different images of April both from California and Oxfordshire. The first photo was from Scott Smith of Kate Holt and me in the Huntington Botanical Gardens, Oxford Road, San Marino (see posts Huntington Gardens). The second email from UK Artist Helen Ganly showed evocative photos of a Winter Wonderland Oxfordshire- I start with flowers from my Huntington images and include some Malibu Lagoon yellow flowers:

From my Roving Reporter:

As said in my previous post, I now have a "Roving Reporter", Zac Ware . Here are some of his images from Sweden: pom-poms gone mad?