I’m sorry that I can’t make this photo bigger.

We were in the village of Exochori in Greece last year. We were on the road below a high retaining wall above which sits the square in front of the church, and on the wall was this beautiful campanula. We walked up into the square and I leaned over the edge of the wall to take a photo. It’s often hard to convey a sense of the vertical in a photo, whether you’re looking up or down. The wall is about eight feet high and the flower is growing about two feet from the top of it.

It was only when I got home and saw the picture on the computer that I noticed the lizard, and its toes. And if you could see a big version of the picture you would see that it’s looking at me, whereas looking into the camera I’d only seen the flower.

Here’s another picture of a very similar campanula (there are various sub-species apparently and one of their charms is that they’re equally at home on wild rock or domestic wall) near Delphi.

Our view of these pictures is determined by the accident of portrait or landscape. In this wordpress layout which I am unable to alter portrait comes out twice the size of landscape, whereas normally on a screen it’s the other way round.

The stems of the plant lie flat against the rock but are not rooted to it or secured in any obvious way. You can lift a stem up, it’s quite flexible, but whether it’s growing up or down or sideways, when you let go of it it lies back down again the way it was.