I love spring, the weather picks up, the evenings get longer and everything starts to turn green and bright colourful flowers pop up every where. It has been a rather mixed up year weather-wise…mild over Christmas and New Years, average January, unusually warm February and now nearing the end or March we are in spring (technically) and the temperature plummets! I was even in a snow storm up in London the other week!! This rather hypnotic flower was one of the first ‘proper’ macro images I took with my Sigma 105mm last spring, I am not sure of it’s exact name but I am led to believe it is from the Daisy (Aster) family…

An opening flower, just as the sun hits it some time in late morning, unfurls its petals to catch the sun and attract the winged visitors it needs to continue it’s heritage. The variety of colours and shapes of plants within a family arise thanks to cross pollination and mutations in the genes, is there an advantage to it? certainly – if a red flower attracts more bees than a white one, Darwin’s theories of evolution would imply that natural selection would cause the red flower population to flourish as the white dwindles. Of course thanks to man’s intervention we are able to cultivate and select traits we find favourable rather than Nature’s own methods…is this cheating? Perhaps. One could suppose that if we – Man – liked the look of red flowers so much that the white ones were selectively bred out, this could then be further extrapolated towards the dependants of the flowers, being identical except in colour may have no effect; a flower is a flower full of nectar [and pollen!] to a bee or bug but evidence suggests bees do care about colour and many other things besides. So, in cultivating what we assume to be the most beautiful displays of nature’s talents are we in fact twisting nature unfavourably? This is impossible to tell since an insect may visit many more flowers just in one day, in a typical garden it would have – excuse the terminology – the pick of the bunch.

We can’t be too down-beat over this point though, can we? But it does show how on such small scales man can have remarkably far reaching affects on the environment…With the bizarrely warm autumn temperatures last year I shouldn’t think this year will differ too significantly with potentially high temperatures during mid-summer.

With such strange temperature fluctuations in recent weeks, and months, I do wonder what sort of affect it will have on plants and animals since their behaviour is governed by the seasons. There is much-a-do about Global Warming and such but thanks to disagreeing scientists we’re still no closer to actually having our minds made up for us, officially. Some say its all thanks to man’s inherent destructive nature and continual growth that has lead to the enormous over-use of fuels and built up of – for want of a better phrase – environmentally unsound compounds, others though prefer to ignore the evidence and continue regardless. One this is for sure; we needn’t be told about the melting polar ice caps do we?…

Have we still got time to do something about it? I hope so!