Archive for November, 2008
Well, it’s definitely the dark and rainy season here in the northwest. It’s not quite 3 pm on this wet afternoon and it’s nearly dark. Official sunset isn’t for another hour or so, but you couldn’t tell that from looking outside. Our solar panels aren’t getting enough light to produce anything. The whole day, we’ve produced a whopping 630 watts of power. In comparison, on a sunny afternoon we’ll produce that much in about 7 minutes. It would be a good day to curl up by the fireplace with a good book, if only we had a fireplace.
But even in the rain the house finches have been feeding on sunflower seeds from the feeder in the back yard. And the raindrops glisten on the bare branches of the kousa dogwood. With rhododendrons, daphne, and ferns, the view out our kitchen window always shows something green.
It will be time to put up some Christmas lights on the Korean fir and dogwood soon.
November 29 2008 | Gardens | No Comments »
A guest entry from Panayoti Kelaidis, originally posted on the Alpine-L discussion list. Visit Panayoti’s Botanic Gardens Blog from the Denver Botanic Gardens.
I possess a classic sort of rock garden, chockablock full of androsaces, primulas, saxifrages, gentians galore and all the other card carrying members of the Bona Fide Alpine Plant club. In fact, I suspect I grow as many of these as just about anyone else. I love them of course. I would not want to be without them. You can find most plants in this garden represented in many of the several hundred rock garden books I have accumulated in the course of my lifetime: it’s pretty conventional really. I still like it.
And yet I have another garden where nary a saxifrage grows, let alone a primula, much less an androsace. Here you will find over 100 kinds of miniature cacti, South African succulents, penstemons, eriogonums, ten species of Talinum, oncocyclus iris, juno iris galore, crocuses, strange cushion plants like Satureja spinescens. These are grown in crevices and among rocks just as they might in nature. Probably half the plants in this garden have never appeared in a single rock garden tome. In my heart of hearts, I love both gardens very much, and would be hard put to choose between them: the dryland rock garden has one stellar quality, however. It is utterly novel and fresh in every way.
But what would we make of the blue gramma meadow filled with fritillaria, calochortus and allium? or the twin berms, one filled with tiny carpeting treasures from Western America (the usual steppe rabble) and the other from the Eastern hemisphere: veronicas, acantholimons, tulips and a jillion tiny mints and composites. And hardly a single rock in any of these gardens, which comprise many thousands of square feet? They would hardly qualify as a rock garden technically. They sure as heck ain’t perennial borders.
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November 15 2008 | Gardens | No Comments »
The rainy season has begun and after a glorious and drier than normal October, it’s wet out in the woods. These Black Cottonwood leaves were covering a portion of the trail around Canyon Lake this morning. The Vine Maples lost their leaves nearly a month ago, followed by the Bigleaf Maples. The Red Alders, which aren’t colorful at all, still have a few leaves.
Of course, all the conifers and evergreen ferns are still green. That’s one of the big differences between winter in the northwest and in places that have an almost exclusively deciduous forest. I’ve come to like what we have here and don’t really want to go back to having only shades of brown in the winter forest.
Today’s hike was an easy stroll around Canyon Lake. It’s about 2 miles and nearly level. There were still a few lingering Tiarella flowers. I saw at least one Large-leaved Geum with its bright yellow flower, and there were several of the non-native Herb Robert flowers around as well. Mostly what we looked at along the trail were the myriad of mosses on rotting logs and tree trunks and the large number of lichens. There were liverworts, too, but they look a lot like mosses or lichens if you don’t know any better.
I only carried my little Canon S70 pocket camera today. I’d hauled my big camera along the same trail about a month ago, creating a number of nice images that I haven’t gotten captioned yet. It’s nice to travel light for a change.
November 08 2008 | Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
