Not sure that this deserves its own post but it’s getting one anyway.

Echinacea flowers are distinctive, with their downward facing petals. Not that I would know them, to be honest, but Christine was able to name them when we saw them in Hungary near the end of our holiday.

The image of them stuck in my head and, when Pinterest (again) stuck a picture of them in my feed, I took it as a sign that I should have a go at representing them with paint.

The fact that I noticed them on Pinterest could be an incidence of frequency illusion or the Baader-Meinhof effect, whereby, as Wikipedia explains it, a ‘thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards’.

Or it could be simply a coincidence. I’m not superstitious in the slightest but I’m more likely now than I would have been, say, two years ago, to pay attention to coincidences, and be curious about why they happen. Jackson Brodie, Kate Atkinson‘s private investigator says that a coincidence is an explanation waiting to happen. I tend to agree. There’s nothing mystical about them but, given that the trajectory of one’s life is basically a series of choices, if life presents you with an event that seems to have enhanced significance, then I think it deserves to be looked at a little more closely.

Anyway, here are my echinacea flowers on a teabag. I could say that the cropping of the photo is influenced by Instagram’s square format (I did post it on my Instagram account earlier). That would be untrue however. I cropped it because the top and bottom weren’t very good.

PS. Fixed it. I put a few more flowers at the top and bottom. Looks much better now. Yay!