Regular random: five minutes with some lavender, a bee and the hope of new beginnings

/ Su Leslie

Close up shot of bee on lavender stalk. Image: Su Leslie, 2017

Lavender lunch. Image: Su Leslie, 2017

Signs of spring are everywhere this week; from new growth on the fig tree to plum blossom and a huge increase in the number of bees around. This one was very busy enjoying lavender.

Lavender lunch. Image: Su Leslie
Coming in to land. Image: Su Leslie, 2017
Lavender lunch. Image: Su Leslie
Lavender lunch. Image: Su Leslie
Lavender lunch. Image: Su Leslie

The images for this week’s Five Minutes of Random (the #RegularRandom challenge) were all shot at Savage Memorial Park on Bastion Point in Auckland.

Savage Memorial is the burial place and monument to Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand’s first Labour Prime Minister — and one of the country’s best loved leaders. He died in office in 1940, having led the government that established our country’s welfare state — now largely dismantled by successive neo-liberal governments.

Tomorrow there will be a general election in New Zealand. Growing inequality, increasing poverty, declining child health and the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world are all issues that have come to the fore in this campaign, and there is real hope that by tomorrow evening we may have a new government. One committed to the values of compassion and justice that informed Savage’s Labour government in the 1930s.

Spring is, after all, the season of hope.

Five Minutes of Random (the #RegularRandom challenge) is hosted by Desley Jane at Musings of a Frequently Flying Scientist. 

If you’d like to join in:

  • choose a subject or a scene
  • spend five minutes photographing it – no more!
  • try to see it from many angles, look through something at it, change the light that’s hitting it
  • tag your post #regularrandom and ping back to Desley’s post
  • have fun!

33 thoughts on “Regular random: five minutes with some lavender, a bee and the hope of new beginnings”

  5. Beautiful shots, Su. I love lavender and planted a few plants this year. Several of them did very well, but I may need to move the other two. I also planted a few perennials that look much like lavender and they did very well, so it was a good year for flowers. All the best with the election.

    janet

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    • Thank you Anabel. It’s 124 years (on Tuesday just gone) since women got the vote here, and it has been a timely reminder of the society we used to be (and perhaps could be again). The election seems too close to call, but it is heartening to know that many young people have registered to vote in the last week alone. My son and his flatmates queued for several hours to to register and cast advance votes.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  11. I am surprised to see lavender flowering at the beginning of your spring, here it is midsummer before it comes into bloom. Heard on the radio that you got a hung parliament, which never bodes well. Politicians seem so out of step with ordinary people these days and election campaigns get far too nasty and personal each party backstabbing the other, when all we want to know is how they propose to govern the country!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a comment