The Gallery; Still Life

Week 14 of Tara's Gallery. This week her prompt, inspired by a heavenly photo of some bacon, was 'still life'. I thought about photographing some food, I really did. But whilst we eat well here at Potski Mansions, we don't necessarily eat photogenic food. I'm going to blame the quality of the ingredients from Russian supermarkets not being what they might be, others might blame the fact that I care more about how food tastes than how it looks . Substance wins out over style every time, in my book. (Which might explain my tight waist-bands). Anyway, no pretty photos of cup-cakes or prawn cocktails here today.

Instead, I've photographed some wild flowers in the garden outside our house. They're not outstandingly beautiful, although they are quite pretty, but this photo is more about that what they represent than how they look.

We live in a compound, you see. We don't get to do the gardening ourselves; there's a team of people who do that for us. For the record, we are not allowed to do it. It's a tough life, sitting back and letting someone else take the strain, but I'm prepared to take that hit for the family...

Anyway, back to the point I'm trying to make. Not speaking much Russian yet, I don't have many opportunities to communicate with the gardeners here, but I'm betting they are not trained landscape designers, mainly because most of them are in fact from the same team of guys who keep the roads and paths clear of snow and ice in the winter.

So this makes it all the more suprising to me that this little patch of wild flowers - and many others like it throughout the compound - survive the ministrations of the gardeners driving the squadron of lawn-mowers that trundle out of the work-sheds at the back of the compound on any dry day in the summer. Most of the grass here is mown to within an inch of it's life, so how could the flowers have been missed, I wondered?

And then, last week, I was at home whilst the lawn outside our window was being mown, and I saw exactly how the wildflowers had survived when the guy behind the machine carefully and delicately mowed around them, making sure - in fact - that if even a single flower was blooming, he steered a course around it.

He clearly had a poet's soul.

So this photograph represents yet another reminder for me not to judge a book by it's cover.