After reading a nice little book by Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory – Biopower and Vegetable Life (2016), which consists of a preface, four chapters (on Foucault, Aristotle & Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari and their ideas on vegetation), and a coda What difference does it make? I decided it was time to get out for a change. On the last day of March I followed a walking path on the slopes of the hills east of Puerto Rico on Gran Canaria in order to find some shrubs to sit with. And there were indeed plenty of them. At the bottom of the small valley, where the path crossed something that at some point might have been the bed of a brook I could get off the path, both above and beneath it, and made some attempts at performing for camera. The first image, above the path, is nice as a view, but there I placed myself much too close to the camera and become the main focus of attention:
 

 
The second attempt, below the path, is more interesting, because the shrubs are bigger and the branches produce interesting shadows. They are actually two different shrubs, a Tabaiba on the left and a Balo further down on the right, as I later learned:
 

 
The third image is perhaps the most fascinating, partly because the Euphorbia or Cardón as they are called here are so peculiar, partly because I managed to place myself more subtly with the plants:
 

 
These three images were my first attempts this Easter, oddly yellow in tone. I hope there will be more.
And there was to be more, for sure. On Sunday 1 April I made a new trip to the valley. First I sat with some flowering Tabaibas:
 

 

 
And on the way back I saw a Balo next to a rock providing some inviting shade, in a romantic image I had seen in so many fairy tale illustrations that I simply had to enter it. But too tired I miscalculated the distance, placing the camera much too close:
 

 
On Monday 2 April I made a third trip, with the aim of finding some Cardóns, which I remember grew higher up in the valley. And there were plenty of them. But first I sat with a Balo:
 

 
The Cardóns are quite amazing when watched closely, parts of them really old and withered, and then some parts growing new shoots directly from their fleshy but spiky trunks. They are not really inviting, but more evoking respect, I would say, hard to make acquaintance with but with a strong character:
 

 

 

 
Walking down the riverbed I decided I might make one more trip tomorrow to sit with some of the Balos I passed on the way. And in the park on the way back I posed on a bench under a Mimosa tree in order to remind myself to enjoy the places purposely made for humans, too, instead of always insisting on making everything so tiresome and exhausting and unnecessarily complicated: