Summer Colours, Pink. Flowering Trees. Rose Of Sharon.

Looks like I'm bent on creating/compiling my own personal gallery of all plants and flowers I can get my hands on. This way I'm kind of rendering my modest homage to the beauty of Nature.
Rose of Sharon flowers set against the blue sky and green leaves on a sunny day creates one of my favourite colour combinations — pink, cerulean blue and green.

Hibiscus Syriacus (Malvaceae - Mallow Family), aka Rose-of-Sharon or Shrub Althea is a flowering shrub in the plant family Malvaceae native to much of Asia. It is upright and vase-shaped, reaching 2-4 m in height. It is widely planted in areas with hot summers for its very attractive white, pink, red, lavender, or purple large and edible flowers. Individual flowers last only a day, however it flowers over a long summer blooming period (July-September).

These gorgeous trees grow along the nearby streets.

Rose of Sharon. (© 2011 LightColourShade. All rights reserved)

Old Buildings. Stone Walls.

Sometimes roaming off the beaten track you can stumble upon ancient ruins or cosy medieval buildings that aren't major tourist attractions, which means you won't have to elbow your way through the throng and no one will block your view.
Stone buildings are probably the only truly sustainable structures — they keep heat in winter, stay cool in summer, last centuries and are pleasing to the eye unlike modern perforated boxes. That's how I conceive architecture. This of course clashes with our single-use mentality society. If I could afford to build my own house it would certainly be a stone house.

What attracts me most to such places are the details rather than the whole since modern surroundings all too often break the spell.

A wooden door in a dry stone wall.
(© 2011 LightColourShade. All rights reserved)

Garden Roses.

Roses are my mum's favourite flowers; she says rose is the queen of flowers. Well, I believe garden roses are the most sensual flowers in the world.
A rose is a woody perennial of the genus Rosa, within the family Rosaceae that comprises over 100 species. Rose isn't just a pretty face — its petals and hips have a lot of culinary and medicinal uses. The only downside is sharp prickles.

Of course, the odourless clones churned out in greenhouses somewhere in Africa and suchlike and then shipped to Europe every day where they are arranged into assembly line bouquets and sold in flower shops together with pointless alien-looking genetically modified hybrids have little to do with true roses.
A rose without fragrance is like music without feeling.

These are normal garden roses from my neighbour's garden that give off sweet scent you can smell from 10 metres away.

Pink roses. (by-nc-nd)

Life In Inanimate Things. Still Lifes.

I've never been too keen on painting still lifes, to me it's not as rewarding as painting portraits or landscapes (so I only paint them to order). However, photography is a different matter — you can convey a lot of moods and sensations by simply arranging objects, for instance

a peaceful breakfast in a joyous sunny morning,

A cup of tea.
(© 2011 LightColourShade. All rights reserved)