Sepia Saturday 25 June 2016

.... Our theme image is entitled "Woman Reads As Baby Sleeps"  It might seem like a "nice" bland and uncomplicated image but, believe me, there is a lot to discuss. Let's just see where Sepians go with it! 

The earliest images of mother and child found in the Catacombs of Rome, date from the Early Christian Church. After Mary was proclaimed Theotokos, Godbearer,  it became common to use her image in paintings and sculptures. 

Mary and child were the most used image through the Byzantine, Medieval and Early Renaissance for over a thousand years. Duccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, Caravaggio, Rubens, have turned their artistic skills to create Mother and child images. 

Italian Mother and Baby, living in tenements of New York. He  captured the misery of urban poverty as well as the tenacity of life. This forlorn mother with her swaddled baby is evocative of Mary and of many paintings of "Madonna and Child." 

In the early 1960s, myself and my firstborn daughter Marie-Louise.

Photo/text Ts

Sepia Saturday, 18/06/2016 Koala in my garden;

Well here we are again - yawnnnnn - it's Sepia Saturday time....

A Koala in my garden not yawning but trying to rest in a palm tree. It must not have been very comfortable as it left the palm...

...and tried  a Paperbark, which was also not to its liking. 

It walked quite fast to the back garden, scrambled over the fence onto my neighbour's frangipani tree,

where it looked triumphantly at me and later settled back for another snooze

Photo/Text Ts 

Wonderful Australian trees...the Melaleucas;

Melaleuca  is a genus of nearly 300 species of plants in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae, they are known by many common names, paperbarks, honey-myrtles or tea-trees. 

I have 4 large Paperbark/Melaleuca trees growing around my house. Some more are located in my bush garden. The trees are in full flower again and the Lorikeets come in swarms to feed on the nectar of the flowers.

At night, the bats gorge themselves on the flowers. The noise, the screeching  of the lorikeets and at night the squabbling of the bats, each one wants the best place. WONDERFUL NATURE.

©Photos my garden/Text Ts 

Sepia Saturday 11/June/2016 Ancient pools.

Plenty of healthy exercise and such...today's Sepia Saturday theme.

The “Great Bath” at  Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan might have been the first built swimming pool in the world and is one of the best-known structures among the ruins of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. It was dug during the 3rd millennium BC. The  pool is 12 metres x 7 meters, it is lined with bricks and was covered with a tar-based sealant. A hole  at one end of the Bath may have been used to drain the water into it.

Bath of  Caracalla; Caracalla was built between 212 and 216 AD under the reign of Emperor Caracalla. 

Pools  for bathing and relaxing were common in Roman cities and throughout the empire. The bath complexes  were not just a place for bathing  and relaxing but also for socializing. Rooms were provided  for reading and to relax. 

Typical features  in  a roman bath were;

apodyterium - changing rooms.

palaestrae - exercise rooms.

notatio - open-air swimming pool.

Laconica and sudatorium - superheated dry and wet sweating-rooms.

caldarium - hot room, heated and with a hot-water pool and a separate basin on a stand (labrum)

tepidarium - warm room, indirectly heated and with a tepid pool.

frigidarium - cool room, unheated and with a cold-water basin, often monumental in size and domed, it was the heart of the baths complex.

rooms for massage and other health treatments.

Additional facilities could include cold-water plunge baths, private baths, toilets, libraries, lecture halls, fountains, and outdoor gardens.

My granddaughter Fabrizia enjoys her swimming pool heated by sun power. (Photo Ts/ 2011)




Lake Constance/ Bodensee/ Uttwil on the Swiss side of the lake, where we used to swim in summer. This picture is from the early 1970s, It might look differently now, probably modernised.
Photo/sText Ts

In rerum natura;

Nature, whose sweet rains fall of just and unjust alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undetected. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

Oscar Wilde, "De Profundis"

Irish dramatist, novelist, & poet (1854 - 1900)

Photo Ts 

Thursday..... Dodder, the clever world of parasitic plants.

Golden dodder (Cuscuta campestris). Common names;Angel's hair, beggar vine, field dodder, love vine, strangle vine, strangle weed,

The parasitic vine called dodder is the sniffer dog of the vegetable world. It contains almost no chlorophyll – the pigment that most plants use to make food – so to eat it must suck the sugary sap from other plants. Dodder uses olfaction to hunt down its quarry. It can distinguish potential victims from their smell, homing in on its favorites and also using scents emitted by unhealthy specimens to avoid them.

 (Science, vol 313, p 1964).

A distinctive yellow, golden or orange coloured parasitic plant. The short-lived leafless climbing stems are hairless thread-like. These stems produce small suckers which penetrate the host plant's stems or leaves. The plant also produces quantities of seed. Each small, creamy  flower may contain 4 seeds.

This  parasitic plant that is  known as a pest of crops, it also attacks a wide range of naturalised species and native plants.

This exotic, introduced parasitic plant has naturalised  throughout the coastal and sub-coastal regions of Australia. It is most abundant in south-eastern South Australia, along the Murray River and its tributaries), south-eastern Queensland and eastern New South Wales.

Monday....bookshelf; The book of summers;

The Book Of Summers by Emylia  Hall

Every summer was perfect until the last.







A wonderful story from the beginning to the end. Happiness is followed by sadness,  provoked by unforgiveness of unforeseen actions, severely affecting all.

Hungary,  a place never forgotten,
Marika spelling out my name in Raspberries,
Zoltan waving his brush in a cheerful, paint-splash salute and my friend Tamàs.....

One great lie takes everything with it.