Tamarisk

Wandering around the garden this afternoon with the 31mm extension tube and the 85mm lens on the camera, I was struck by how pretty the tiny pink flowers of Tamarix ramosissima pentandra were looking. It was a silly idea to try to photograph them really, because it was quite breezy and the long slender stems of the shrub were whipping about - in the end I just lined up the camera at an appropriate distance and took a lot of shots, hoping that in all of them some of the flowers would be in focus.

Then I noticed a tiny iridescent green spider on one of the branches. I used to be quite scared of spiders, but when the Offspring were small I was determined not to pass this on to them - so I kept telling them how useful and interesting spiders are, and in the end discovered that the affirmation had worked on me too. I'm hopeless at identifying them though - I daresay this one is quite common, but I'd never seen one before and I really wanted to get a photo of it. Unfortunately it was frightened of me (or the camera, possibly - the front element of the 85mm is quite a large piece of glass), and kept trying to hide among the flowers. In the end I did manage a few reasonable shots; this isn't actually the best one of the spider, but it's not bad, and I chose it because I like the tamarisk blossom against the sky.