Archive for July, 2009
According to Weather Underground, it’s 96° at the Bellingham airport this afternoon. That’s four degrees warmer than the previous record, set in 1960.
I’ve been optimizing a group of images for Garden Picture Library this afternoon. This one, of the floating bridge at VanDusen Botanical Garden, was made around Christmas last winter when we had serious snowfall and cold temperatures. For all my northwest friends who are sweltering today, maybe this will help you “think cool.”
I know that about 6 months from now when we’re suffering under dreary drizzly skies we’ll think back on these hot summer days and wish we could have saved a little of the heat for winter. Is some researcher working on a “heat battery” we could charge in the summer and use in the winter? I guess a ground source heat pump is the closest thing available.
In olden days they’d cut blocks of ice from ponds in the winter, pack it in sawdust in an insulated shed, and haul it out in the summer when it was needed.
Think cool!
July 29 2009 | Gardens and Photography | No Comments »
You can’t get much more alpine than this!
The Deming Glacier flows south off of Mt. Baker, bending around beneath the steep cliffs of the Black Buttes before flowing out into the Middle Fork Nooksack River. It’s the most dramatic example of glaciation in Washington’s North Cascades that I know of. I’m always impressed when I get up on the side of Mt. Baker to look down on the Deming.
Saturday I got there pretty much by accident. I started out to scout a route into the Twin Sisters range, but there was a “road closed” sign blocking my way. Since I was already on the south side of Baker I decided to head up to Schreiber’s Meadows and hike the Scott Paul trail on Baker’s south flank. I’d never hiked it, but heard the views were great and I knew it would take me to the edge of the glaciers.
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July 27 2009 | Native Plants and Photography | 2 Comments »
Here’s a great midwest and eastern prairie plant, Liatris spicata, blooming exuberantly today at VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia. It also goes by the common names of Gayfeather or Blazing Star. I believe this is the variety ‘Kobold’ ‘Floristan’ based on the plant tag in this bed in years past.
The species is native to every state east of the Mississippi River, as well as Missouri, Arkansa, and Louisiana. According to the USDA PLANTS database there are a large number of species of Liatris native to various parts of North America. I’ve seen the genus in the wild in Nebraska and New Mexico but there are none native to Washington.
Today was the first time I’ve been up to VanDusen since May. It turned out to be a full-sun blue sky day by the time I got there about 2 pm. Bright midday sunshine doesn’t make for my favorite conditions to photograph gardens or plants, but I made the best of it. Sometimes it’s nice to work with more challenging light and to show sunloving plants under their preferred growing conditions.
This plant portrait was made with my 24-105 zoomed full wide and with a polarizer to cut the glare on the foliage. The other trick I use in full sun is to try to keep the light coming from the side or toward the camera. Here it’s sidelight. I made several compositions from this patch of gayfeathers since it was at peak bloom, working both wide and tele lenses and both side and backlight.
It got warm during the day and I didn’t feel particularly inspired as I wandered around the garden, but I ended up with over 200 exposures for the afternoon. Sometimes its just a matter of keeping going and continuing to look and observe. I didn’t have any preset ideas of what I was looking for in the garden today, which is really a nice way to work.
July 24 2009 | Gardens and Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
I’d heard for years that glacier lilies (Erythronium grandiflorum) will bloom through the snow, but I’d never caught one in the act until this past weekend. This fine example was at the edge of the receding snow pack in the meadow below Copper Pass in the Okanogan National Forest. Many more of the lilies were pushing their way up through the snow and showing their bright yellow buds.
Apparently glacier lilies, and other members of the species, generate enough heat as they sprout from their corms to melt the surrounding snow. This extends their growing season by a few days, which can be critically important in the high altitude meadows where they are prolific in the summer. In just a few short days these beautiful lilies will push up at the edge of the melting snow, flower, and set seed.
Not far from where I photographed this flower were other glacier lily plants that had already set seed and their leaves nearly withered away to nothingness.
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July 20 2009 | Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
I got an e-mail this afternoon from a gardener in Ontario, Oregon that I’d visited last month. She’d just received her Horticulture magazine for August. Jean wrote, “Got my issue of Horticulture yesterday and was reading it this afternoon and just now noticed your photo MADE THE COVER!!! Fantastic!! It’s a beauty too with the sweetbriar rose. … Congratulations on a lovely piece of photography with great distribution!”
I always like covers. They pay better than inside and are great showcases for my work. In this case, the photo was made in June 2004 while I was working on the wildflowers book. I found this sweetbriar rose along the road in the small town of Richland, Oregon. Richland is about halfway between Baker City and Halfway. The cover photo was the first frame I shot when I found the specimen plant. I continued shooting, and ultimately chose another version for my book.
When I’m photographing plants I almost always look for several different ways to see them. I aim to blend the art of photography with my knowledge of plants. Some photos lean more toward the art side and some more to the science, but I usually have both elements in mind while I’m working.
This is a mid-day photo. That’s not when I usually like to work, but the clear blue sky makes a nice clean background for the blossom. I shot with a 100mm macro lens on a Canon D60 digital camera. Its 6 megapixels were plenty for a full-page magazine reproduction.
If you’ve got the magazine, you’ll find more of my work filling pages 25 (gas plant) and 56 (Acer carpinifolium).
July 14 2009 | Gardens and Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
