My most recent trip was filled with a wide variety of experiences and locales. It will take a while to sort through the photos, journal notes and other hasty scribbles to make sense and produce some decent posts, especially since so many photos turned out to be less than even vaguely useful. That may make for several new blog posts under the heading of Pictures in My Mind’s Eye, a category I haven’t added to for quite a while.

As a starter, here are some photos from the moat around the Tower of London which is being filled with almost nine hundred thousand red poppies in remembrance of WWI.

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London

For some reason, when I first heard about this effort, I thought the poppies were real, live ones. It may have been because of the cascade that flows down the wall from a window

blood red cascading down the Tower wall

and possibly also because the projected completion date is so much later in the calendar than the start date. Watching the volunteers assembling and ‘planting’ these ceramic flowers in this Paul Cummins installation made it obvious that filling the moat with real flowers would not have been as vivid and might not have been successful – Mother Nature having a mind of her own. The poppies are disassembled, so the volunteers need to put the pieces together – the stalk, some sort of stopper at the end so the red flower stays put, and a washer to keep the thing from shimmying back down the stick. Then stick it in the ground. Hard to tell if this last bit was the hardest part – after all, the moat has been settled for a thousand years, give or take.

‘planting’ poppies

The project is selling the poppies online for delivery after the exhibit ends on 11 November 2014.