Labour day weekend! Well not really, I did a brief appearance at work on Monday but it’s been a lot of time off anyway. So let’s see… On Saturday we drove to Gröntjärn, thinking that for sure we would see some pale pasque flowers. Yes we did, only problem was that they’re still budding. Gotta wait until next weekend then.

I did get to start the macro season on Sunday though. Finally! I’ve really been starving to see some flowers other than coltsfoot, problem with living in a new place is that I don’t know where all the flowers are. I’m sure there’s some hepatica around here, just no idea exactly where. But it doesn’t really matter, I’ve had enough of hepatica as well. So happy days when I found some golden saxifrage just down from the house! There’s a small brook that runs on the other side of the field which is behind my house, and the saxifrage was growing in large numbers there. I spent a full hour with them, it was very satisfying to be seeing the world through 150mm again!

On Monday on the way home, I made small detour to the Djupbäcken nature reserve near Färila. The description says that the pale pasque flower grows there, and it specifies the spot ”where the path comes into the reserve from the north”. The big storm we had on Boxing Day was very evident in this nature reserve as well, so I was constantly climbing over or crawling under the fallen trees, but I definitely found the place where the ”path comes into the reserve from the north”. No pale pasque flowers though. I looked for juniper bushes because experience tells me that the flowers like junipers. It took me a while, but finally I found three junipers. Count them. Three. No pale pasque flowers. Just to be sure, I zigzagged the area twice, and then zigzagged it again but covering an even larger area. No pale pasque flowers. Now, I have some experience in searching for pale pasque flowers and I was pretty good at it, if I say so myself. Needle in a haystack good. So either I’ve totally lost my mojo or there are no pale pasque flowers here any more. Look at it this way. The sign that says that the flowers grow there is about… maybe 20 years old? 20 years ago there were hundreds of pale pasque flowers in the location near Rullbo in Loos. Now there’s only a couple of leaves left of them. So I’m gonna go out on a limb here and declare Djupbäcken a dead location.

I got to use the macro lens again though. In the evening I spotted a bonfire from my kitchen window (the Swedes light up bonfires on Labour Day eve, we Finns spare ours for the midsummer) so I took the macro lens on the deck and shot some frames.

The Labour Day itself was unusually sunny and warm (it feels like it’s always cold and rainy on 1st May) so I went cycling and exploring new places. The trip turned out to be a lot more complicated than I had anticipated so I’m gonna save that story for another blog post!