She twisted my arm!

Sandy, in her latest post, has some pictures of a unique little tree we found on Wednesday. She also successfully convinced me to share my gnarly tree photo. She didn't really have to try very hard :) This is the best one of the bunch that I took:

Yesterday and today, I had some other visitors in, one of whom you all will recognize. If you pop on over to my father's blog sometime soon, he may have something of Mom's and his visit to share!

One of my favorite things to do when Sandy is around is to take pictures of her taking pictures of things. She gets into some very creative poses to capture her images. Here she is up close and personal with the gnarly tree.

She has some interesting photos of me low to the ground getting some tree pictures, so hopefully she won't take revenge on me!

Thanks Everybody - Its a Beech!

Anybody know what kind of tree these leaves belong to? I am curious to find out.


It may not be a native tree. We found it in the woods, but close to an old stone foundation. So it might've provided shade for the yard in years long passed. Something kept it from being logged, it was by far the largest tree around.


ETA: I don't think anyone will be logging it anytime soon, although some people would probably love to get their mitts on it - the tree is now on state park property :)

A Shadow of What You Once Were

I planned to post this for Halloween, because I thought it looked eerie. However, I got distracted by flowers and dropped the ball on that one :) This scene intrigued me because the shadow of the tree on the barn brought two types of wood into the picture, living and dead. Although dead seems like the wrong word for such beautiful knotty boards, and its only a shadow of the living tree.

My Cousin Chad gave me very good advice on cropping and editing this photo (big thank you!). His latest post tells about his experience with the barn.

War Paint

In reality, these markings indicate a change in the direction of the trail. But in my imagination, this tree is prepared for whatever battle may come its way.

This is an imperfect effect. I know you're not supposed to attempt flowy waterfall pictures without a tripod, but I did it anyway. I tried to fix the focus problems in Photoshop, and that was imperfect, too. But it was still fun to play around with the effect and the software!