Scotia Barrens Tartan Plaid: Berries, Captured!

It was a home Penn State football day, and so my husband and I went up for game-day hoagies. (As it turns out, the hoagies were better than the game, but I digress some.) After we got two Italian hoagies and tucked them into the cooler, my husband dropped me off at Mahala Street, and I walked from there back through the Scotia Barrens to home.

There were seven vehicles total between the two parking lots I saw, three trucks at the far end and a variety of four vehicles at this end. Which means there were at least SEVEN more people in the Barrens in addition to me. Can you believe I didn't see a single one of them? But in their honor, I wore a bright blaze orange hoodie with shocking purple gloves. NOBODY will mistake ME for a deer and shoot me! (Not by mistake, anyway.)

At this end of the Barrens, not far from my favorite pond, there are berries galore. There are huge bushes of red ones, and then these, the blue ones that form little balls, many of which resemble some sort of chemistry molecule. BTW, I uploaded a photo to a plant ID site and it says they are a variety of greenbrier.

I played around with the berries, using the red bushes in back to create a nice, colorful bokeh. (Oh, yes, all these photos may look like happy accidents, don't they? But make no mistake about it, there is a keen and calculating photographic intentionality living behind these eyes!)

I ended up with this shot, in which the blue berries looked like they had been captured and imprisoned by the green spiky stems. In fact, as I mused upon it, I thought the whole shebang looked like a brand new wilderness version of a Scottish plaid, something red and green, perhaps not unlike Clan MacGregor.

So here is our photo for the day, which features some innocent blue berries on spiky green stems, against a background of shockingly red berries. Let's just call this the Scotia Barrens tartan, shall we?

I am seizing this opportunity to use a soundtrack song by the woefully undercelebrated Bay City Rollers. Let's let this image be a Rock and Roll Love Letter!!!!