Words for Wednesday: Texture and Pattern

Donna over at GardenWalk,Garden Talk has another excellent post this week for W4W:

It's all about Texture and Pattern.

Please be sure you see Donna's  post; it is very detailed and informative including a fascinating way to help any gardener decide if their landscaping is as pleasing to the eye as it could be.  There is always something to learn from Donna's excellent posts.

And that leads me to my take on the two words, which, unfortunately, won't be as informative or educational, but here we go:

    I have always been fascinated by Mother Nature's patterns and textures; she surely does do them well.  A few weeks ago, Joel and I were visiting a State Park near Wisconsin Dells and came across a tree which had fallen across a stream.  

I noticed a burl on the fallen trunk  and was amazed by the growth pattern.

I'm not sure of the type of tree this was, but the wood is very beautiful.   Being as this tree is in a State Park, perhaps it will be safe from people wanting to take it home with them.  I don't know how many other people would even notice the burl, but I have an eye for oddities.  (Is that a good thing?)

Fascinating grain pattern; doing some reading on the formation of burls it turns out they are the result of the tree going through some form of stress, be it insect damage, virus or fungus.  Out of the tree's suffering comes a texture and pattern of great beauty.

Walking through our garden the other day, this lichen growing on one of our granite rocks caught my eye:

 The placement on the rock couldn't be any more perfect, it looks like a medallion placed intentionally. Our rock is about 3' tall and the lichen is centered right near the top.  I did another search online and found out this type of lichen might possibly be Xanthoparmelia which is a genus of lichen belonging to the family Parmeliaceae commonly found on the mid-east coast of the United States. (Apparently this is a genus of algae, gosh, you gotta love the Internet, such a font of information.)

.I was fascinated with the texture and the pattern of this Xantho-whatchacallit.  It's really neat.

 

Then there's the ornamental grasses in the garden, from a distance, just a mass of fluffy white soft textures:

A little closer look reveals individual blooms:

And really close up, there are the seeds.  This particular miscanthus doesn't reseed in my garden, but I can see where it could be a problem where the temperatures are more mild. 

I know I haven't even scratched the surface of what could be written about texture and pattern as it relates to gardening or my other favorite hobby, stained glass, where you start with a pattern:

 and use your imagination to try to find the appropriate glass to fit the color scheme:

And hopefully end up with something

vaguely resembling what you are trying to portray.  And though my pictures don't show it very well, some of the glass is textured here, too.  (By the way, the end result is supposed to be grapes on the vine.) 

My thanks to Donna at GardenWalk,GardenTalk for letting me link into this challenging project!