What Lies Beneath

The North Georgia and North Carolina mountains are rhododendron havens. If you ever purchased a Rhody to plant, you were probably told to dig a very wide and very shallow hole. On this trip I found myself beside several walls where the road had sliced through the rock and the rhody forest could be seen clinging to a shelf of rock at the surface of that hill. The tangled colony of rhododendron  is rooted in a dripping mat of moss and detritus just a few inches thick. The water appears to be a near-constant drip, slipping between mat and slab. Think about 'that' next time you are trying to build a place for your rhody's in the landscape.

In this image, I loved the way the rock broke into rectangles, the rusty staining of it, and the old elegance of the Rhody's clinging for dear life.The photo was adequate, but I find that when I really like the design elements in a photo, I hunger for texture and interpretation that would appear in a painting. I use filters and adjustments to satisfy that appetite.