Not every photo needs an event. Between reports there are frames taken along the way: a flower by the path, light at dawn, a cloud that for a moment looks like a face. Here is a selection from 2024, from the first spring flowers to a golden September sky.
April: rain and the first flowers
A magnolia blooms before its leaves come out, so for a few days the whole shrub is nothing but flowers. That day they caught the first drops of rain. A few days later the narcissi and tulips opened.
May: everything blooms at once
In May it is hard to keep up. Houseleeks, the plants of stone walls and old roofs, grow in rosettes: young ones always sprout beside the old. Old folk belief held that houseleeks on a roof protected the house from lightning.
The star-of-Bethlehem gets its English name from its white, star-shaped flowers. Its Polish name, śniedek, sounds like the word for snow: for when you want winter, but without the frost.
July: dawn over the Little Wawel
On 20 July at 6:28 am the first sun lit up the Renaissance castle in Sucha Beskidzka. It was built in 1554–1558 for Kasper Suski, and locals call it the “Little Wawel”, after Kraków’s royal castle. It is one of the finest Renaissance buildings in western Lesser Poland.
The photo of the castle at dawn opens this article.
September: a sky with something to say
On the evening of 18 September the clouds formed shapes in which everyone can see what they want. Forest on the left, and on the right... is that a face bending over two little clouds? “All that we see is but a shadow of what is unseen,” as Plato put it.
A moment later the sky turned orange and gold, as if a door to another world were opening. Has anyone seen my map to Narnia?
