Archive for June, 2008
One of the plants on my list to find and photograph has been Opuntia fragilis, fragile prickly pear cactus, which grows on both sides of the Cascades in Washington and other places in the Northwest. I’d seen it, or at least thought I had, in a couple of places but never found it in bloom until this month.
I say I thought I’d seen fragile prickly pear because that’s how a bunch of it in Yakima Canyon keyed out in Flora of the Pacific Northwest. The photograph above is from the Umtanum Recreation Site about halfway between Ellensburg and Yakima where the cactus grows next to the campground. However, I’ve since learned that these plants are actually Opuntia columbiana, grizzleybear prickly pear. The pads are flatter than O. fragilis and some authors say it’s a hybrid species. Others write it as Opuntia x columbiana, indicating that it’s a proposed species. Still others call it O. erinacea var. columbiana. No wonder I was confused. I found a web Primer on Washington Native Cacti that helps to sort them out. See more photos of the Yakima Canyon cactus on my Kittitas County June 19 page on the Pacific Northwest Wildflowers website.
Since my photos from Yakima Canyon weren’t what I thought they were, I headed out again yesterday afternoon in search of the real thing. I went to Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve near Coupeville on Whidbey Island armed with GPS coordinates interpolated from WTU Herbarium botanical foray records from 2004. The species is somewhat rare, classified in Washington as a species of concern, so exact locations aren’t published. I had looked for O. fragilis at Ebey last month and didn’t find it, but this time I located it where I’d seen it several years ago just above the logs at the back of the beach. The specimen didn’t look very healthy and wasn’t in bloom. Since the steep sandy slope is somewhat eroding, although held in place by grasses and other plants, I thought there must be more plants straight up the hill.
I left my pack and tripod on the beach and headed up, keeping a sharp lookout for cactus, especially for the showy yellow flowers. This photo is from the first clump I found, about 50 feet above the beach. Notice how fat and rounded the pads are. O. fragilis doesn’t form very large clumps and they aren’t very tall, so the browning grasses on the hillside kept the cactus mounds rather well hidden. As I looked up the hill I spotted several more cacti in bloom. At that point I returned to the beach for my camera pack and tripod and went to work.
When I find a plant of interest I try to photograph it from several angles, showing foliage (or pads in the case of cacti), flowers, details, and a habitat view. I used three different lenses on this plant — a 90 tilt-shift, 24-105 for wide views, and a 100 macro. An overcast sky made nice soft light, but the habitat view wasn’t as interesting as if the sky were clear and the water reflecting blue. See the whole set on my Ebey’s Landing page.
I also found other plants I associate more with the dry east side of the mountains, including tapertip onion (Allium acunimatum) and harvest brodiaea (Brodiaea coronaria). It seems counterintuitive to have a desert just above the beach, but Ebey’s Landing is in the Olympic rain shadow. Weather data for Coupeville shows about 20 inches of rainfall annually and the soils on the bluff at Ebey are sandy and well-drained.
June 27 2008 | Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
I’m working furiously to get caught up on captioning after a very busy spring out photographing both gardens and native plants. I think I’ve finished with May and a quick database query shows 2,947 photos captioned for the month. That’s a lot of shooting time, and a lot of time spent in front of the computer figuring out what plants I shot and entering captions in my database and into the digital file metadata fields.
This little Columbine, Aquilegia bertolonii, was photographed at the end of the month in a garden near Bellingham that has lots of interesting species, including rock garden gems, Rhododendrons, and a large number of dwarf conifers.
In May I photographed in eight private gardens and two public gardens. I visited seventeen locations for native plants across Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. I may not make it to quite as many locations in June as we’ve had some miserable weather early in the month and I’ve been chained to the computer. Most of the native plants are now online at Pacific Northwest Wildflowers and the rest of them will eventually make it into the galleries there. I’m farther behind in getting the gardens online, but the east-side gardens are at Inland Northwest Gardening.
Occasionally I get e-mails from someone who’s seen either my garden or wildflower photography and wants to know what some plant is that they’ve seen. I do my best from the JPEGs they send and sometimes have a good idea what it is they have. Other times I’m completely baffled, particularly when it is something found far from my personal experience. With garden plants it’s particularly hard because there are so many named cultivars besides the species. Sometimes I can only get a plant to family or genus. It’s a lot easier to identify plants in the field when you can see all the pertinent characteristics. Most people don’t photograph plants with an eye to identification later.
June 17 2008 | Gardens and Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
There hasn’t been a lot of sunshine in northwestern Washington for the past several days. In fact, it’s been one of the coolest springs on record around here, with very few days when the temperature even got above 60 degrees F. Plants are running about 2-3 weeks behind normal in their spring growth. This Helianthemum nummularium added a bit of sunny yellow to the garden at Tennant Lake Fragrance Garden in Ferndale late this afternoon. That’s about the only sun we saw today.
I went out to Tennant Lake late in the afternoon after spending much of the day optimizing scans and preparing files for customers. I also worked on our phone lines to solve a recurring problem that turned out to be chewed or frayed insulation on several of the wires going to individual jacks. I spliced new ends on a couple of the lines and put everything back together and now our phones should be more reliable again.
The Tennant Lake Fragrance Garden has a nice collection of herbs, but is really a mid- and late-summer garden. This early in the season there wasn’t a whole lot blooming yet and some of the plants were still fairly small. I made a few images and came home.
Earlier in the afternoon I visited Big Rock Garden Park in Bellingham, which is a sculpture garden set among Rhododendrons, Japanese Maples, and a variety of northwest natives. I hadn’t photographed in the garden for many years and the trees and shrubs have definitely gotten bigger in the intervening time. Many of the Rhodies were in full bloom so the garden was near its peak. There are both permanent and seasonal collections of sculpture in the park, which is one of Bellingham’s hidden cultural gems.
It was one month ago that we turned on our new rooftop solar array. For a while, we were generating twice as much electricity as we were using. Then it got cloudy and cold again. We turned the furnace back on with its attendant fan and raised our power consumption. Overall, in the last 31 days we generated 503 KW of power and used 271 KW. That’s about 86% more generated than we used. Many people seem to think that solar doesn’t generate power on cloudy days, but even with no sun breaks today our panels put out about 7.5 KW.
June 11 2008 | Gardens and Technology | No Comments »
I’ve been spending too much time on my butt in front of the computer the last few days, mostly selecting photos to send to magazine editors for upcoming stories. In the end, there should be some sales, but right now I’m tired of sitting. In the old days I got some exercise in the process of pulling slides to send out since my light table is in the next room from the shelves of slides. Now I mostly just sit and wiggle the mouse. I still have to look at a lot of images to select those that best fit the request. Some of these wantlists run two or three single-spaced pages, so it gets tedious. It’s a good job for a rainy and windy day, which we’ve been having several of lately. With luck I’ll get caught up with all the requests before the weather improves and I can get back out shooting again. Requests always seem to bunch up. I’m pulling images for September issues currently, which includes some winter bulbs photographed in February and early March. When the originals are on film then I have to scan and optimize them, add metadata, and file them in my storage directory structure before I can add them to a digital submission. No one seems to want film any more.
I did enjoy the Saturday afternoon Whatcom Horticultural Society advance tour of the gardens that will be open on June 21 and 22. I shot a few photos for the WHS website and put together a short slideshow that I posted to YouTube. It’s linked on the WHS site. The six gardens are all quite different and worth visiting if you’ll be in Bellingham that weekend. The photo is from one of the tour gardens.
June 10 2008 | Gardens and Photography | No Comments »
I’ve been working this week to prepare optimized high-res files for delivery toGarden Picture Library, one of the stock agencies that represents some of my work. These are garden photos from 2006 (I’m a bit behind) that are stored on an external Netgear NV+ Raid 5 storage device. In the process of working with the files, using Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS3, a handful of the image files have been corrupted. I don’t know quite why it’s happening, or when, or whether it’s related to the software or the external storage or the network. And since it only affects a few of the files it’s very hard to track down.
Fortunately, I have backup DVDs of all the images and I knew where to find them. I was able to restore the backup of each affected file, put the metadata back in (the backups were made before the images were captioned and keyworded), and resume working. It was frustrating and tedious but at least I didn’t lose anything but a few minutes time. However, I’ve been relying on the RAID to provide some measure of file security and it’s obvious I really need to have it backed up to other storage as well. The box holds 1.5 terabytes so backing it up is not going to be trivial.
I’m pretty sure there’s a high level of redundancy in the operational and control systems for our power company’s generation facilities, including the new Wild Horse Wind Project east of Ellensburg where this photo was made last month. That redundancy helps assure reliability, which is important whether your business is big or small.
June 06 2008 | Photography and Technology | No Comments »
