Artichoke and Honeycomb

Artichoke
This morning I photographed some more things in my garden. I just love the picture of this artichoke flower- yes I know another artichoke!. It is huge, about two hands across and the colours are just beautiful. This one I am letting go to seed as the flower was so sculptural that i wanted to see how it would develop. The picture below is of honeycomb that the hive of bees left behind when we tried to move them into a real hive. The patterns are just gorgeous. I have been leafing through Phillip Ball's The Self-Made Tapestry- Pattern Formation in Nature by Oxford University Press in order to better understand pattern and repeats, and am fascinated that so much pattern/decoration is really just repeating what nature has already mapped for us, so that in a sense when we are creating patterns we are mapping, and that the marks we make on the surface are like footsteps through the maps. Oh and I found Maggie Relph's website ( for African fabric- she gets them in Ghana from local makers, so this is an instance of where the artisan does get paid - she also traveled through Africa with Guerba on a similar journey we did, but she did it several times) http://www.africanfabric.co.uk and whilst I was at it I also found this very good website about adire fabric http://adireafricantextiles.com, which is well worth a look in a spare moment. There is even a glossary of adinkra symbols and their meaning.