Sometimes things of beauty are hidden behind boring titles

So, yesterday I bought a book called, somewhat uninspiringly, Planting Patterns: from the air". I'd spent much of the evening prior to my purchase staring longingly at the cover in the distance and speculating as to how I might knit it up. Yes, really. Once I'd actually picked the work up -- no mean feat: it's more of coffee table than a coffee table book -- there was no going back as the pictures inside, reminiscent of Rothko's canvases, were stunning. I'm now uncertain as to whether I should write poems about them or continue with the knitting idea.

It's an entire book of aerial photographs of fields in Switzerland and France for the most part, including pasture and greenhouses and even saltworks. They've all been very carefully shot to line up with the rectangle of the page which enhances their geometry. Some are quite bizarre. For example, a bare field littered with the hoops and poles for a planned poly-tunnel looks like the result of serious digging on the part of some mad palaeontologist, a litter of huge bones against the bare earth. Another poly-tunnel example has the arches erected, but almost invisible; the shadows instead resemble an arrangement of fish-hooks.

There are pictures of success -- harvest and the gathering in of crops -- and failure too -- frost-damaged brassicas, failing wormwood. Yes, wormwood. I'd never really thought about how field of wormwood might look. No green fairies inside.

I dumped the book in front of Looby Loo this evening and suggested she might find it interesting. Her immediate rejection of the notion (it is after all mandatory to say no to anything. Parent suggests) was instantaneously transformed into a gasp of delight as she opened a page at random.

I'd never have imagined that fields could be quite that interesting and beautiful.