a Grand-Pré afternoon

It's a welcome rainy day here in the valley. And welcome cooler temperatures, too, in the low 20's C.
It's a perfect day for colour-correcting the pictures I took on Sunday when we took a little jaunt over to Grand-Pré, the rolling farmland and dyked fields to the east and northeast of Wolfville.

First stop was The Tangled Garden for some Rose Petal Ice Cream

 

Wally and I are at odds about the dried flowers.

I love 'em.

 

a beautiful handwrought iron hinge at a gate to the gardens

 

I so wanted to walk the gardens, or rather, sit in them.

One day I will come back with my sketchbook.

  

Outside the gardens there was still much to see like these

beautiful grape buds and blossoms

 

this pink mallow and giant castor bean leaves

 

royal purple clematis

 

purple clematis and pink bud

 

surreal beauty of a thistle

 

a spiral-thorned ornamental thistle

 

Planet Thistle up close

 

Fat Rose Hips

 

tiny rose full blown

 

 

a small natural rose bouquet

 

Grape vines

 

Always game for a craft show, we came 'round the back of the Grand Pre Museum to find out what the tents were about, but the afternoon festivities in memory of the Acadian Expulsion of 1755 were over, and people were busy cleaning up.

 

Nearby stands the statue of Evangeline

 by Louis-Philippe Hébert made to commemorate the Deportation of the Acadians

  

Hey! More Hay! This poster explains the straddle

 

Two men working the hay straddle

 

An old illustration of an Acadian threshing scene

 

a lovely Acadian in original handwoven linen and wool costume stands in front of the hay straddle

 

a tiny roadside church on the perimeter of a dyked farmfield

 

Looking across the Minas Basin from Grand Pre towards Blomidon at low tide

 

 Ever the fan of the mother and child image,

I took some pretty fuzzy shots of this quintessential subject

 

 Forgive me for it was hard to decide which of these pictures I liked best

 

 Each had a story of its own

 

 I think of the reflected light in a particularly favourite painting of mine by Berthe Morisot.

If you should go to this link, tip your screen back to help darken the image which will make it easier to see her wonderfully loose brush strokes that would work so well on this beach scene

 

Leaving the sea, we came out to the dyked fields that were created so long ago

 

Houses overlooking the dyked cornfields

 

 And finally my humble efforts at painting the Artist Trading Cards I've been making this month

 

and my latest efforts in process. I got out the tracing paper for this one as I wanted to try some multiples of the same composition, and of course this is the fast way.

 

peace in your journey