Archive for January, 2010
On our walk to Little Squalicum Beach last weekend Natalie and I looked at more than just the willow buds I included in the previous post.
This one is Black Cottonwood, Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa. The buds are quite a bit larger than the willow buds and slightly resinous. That is, when you feel them they’re a little bit sticky. You can see that the terminal bud, the one at the end of the twig, is considerably larger than the others. There’s no scale in the photo, but these are substantial buds — over 12mm (1/2 inch) long. Another point in the key is that the lowest bud scale is directly above the leaf scar.
Black Cottonwood is common along streams and in moist areas of lowland forests west of the Cascades. The name, cottonwood, comes from the masses of white cotton-like fluff attached to the minute seeds later in the spring. Sometimes the ground will be covered with cottonwood fluff, looking a lot like a thin covering of snow. But for now we just have to enjoy the buds on low branches of this tall tree.
The background here almost looks like a painted studio background, but it’s just a bunch of dry grasses and shrub stems very out of focus behind the cottonwood twig. The twig is close to the camera and the background is much farther away.
Perhaps the most common deciduous tree in our lowland forests is Red Alder, Alnus rubra. It establishes quickly on disturbed sites and is an important species because it is a nitrogen fixer. That is, it takes nitrogen from the air and with the cooperation of symbiotic fungi on its roots, adds it to the soil in a form other plants can use.
Red Alder is another early blooming tree, but these buds are still closed tight. You can see the dry “cones” from last year behind the catkins. They’re not true cones like you find on conifers, but they resemble them.
Alders, like other members of the birch family, bear separate male and female flowers on the same tree. The catkins here will be male flowers, which open bright yellow and will hang 2-3 inches long. The smaller female flowers will become the cones. You can see the female buds just above and behind the male catkins.
Both of the willow and alder buds were photographed with a 100mm macro lens. For the cottonwood my camera was on a tripod and I carefully controlled the composition, working with a broken branch that I placed in a convenient location with a neutral background. The alder was photographed on the tree while I was standing on the steep hillside. I don’t usually employ autofocus with my macro lens, but with both me and the branch moving around I couldn’t keep up focusing by hand. I shot a lot of frames and tossed out the ones that weren’t sharp. That’s not my usual procedure with plants, but sometimes it’s the only thing that works.
January 28 2010 | Bellingham and Native Plants and Photography | 2 Comments »
The Pacific Northwest is home to many species of willow. Some are shrubby, some grow to be fairly substantial trees, and some can be either a shrub or a tree depending on where they’re growing.
This afternoon I photographed the winter twigs on three species. At least I think I identified three separate species. The list is long, as given on the Washington Flora Checklist. I hope I’ll be able to find, identify, and photograph all of them this year.
My afternoon jaunt, with Natalie accompanying me, was to Bellingham’s Little Squalicum Beach. We hadn’t been down there for several years and this felt like a good time for a visit. The tide was going out, the light was golden in the late afternoon, and we had a little fun with a winter twigs key.
The first willow we encountered was Pacific Willow, growing here at the base of the bluff at the back of the beach. It’s pretty distinctive, with bright yellow twigs that glow in the sunlight.
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January 23 2010 | Bellingham and Native Plants and Photography | 4 Comments »
It’s January 19 and spring is starting to pop. We’ve had several warm days recently, with high temperatures around 50 and some mixed sun and rain. On my walk to the post office this afternoon to mail a couple of fine art prints to customers I perambulated along the Whatcom Creek trail and spied these bright yellow blossoms.
Shining Oregon-grape, Mahonia aquifolium, is one of our two native members of the genus here in Bellingham. It’s the earliest to bloom, although not as early as some of the garden Mahonias with even bigger and more spectacular flower clusters. The leaves sometimes take a beating when we have really cold days, but they’ll be replaced with fresh foliage when spring really arrives later on.
Hazelnuts, aka Common Filberts, also bloom very early in the spring. Well, maybe it is still officially winter. This is the non-native Corylus avellana. It is cultivated commercially around here, but has also naturalized into the wild all over the place.
Common Filbert is hard to distinguish from Beaked Filbert, our native species, unless you catch them in fruit. But Common Filbert starts blooming in December and Beaked Filbert doesn’t usually get going until March. For more details on distinguishing them see Botanical Electronic News #389 and scroll down to a comparative table.
Both Filberts bear separate male and female flowers on the same plant. What you’re seeing here are the male flowers, full of pollen. The female flowers are tiny and look like little red bristles. You might not even see them unless you’re looking for them.
I made both of these photographs with my Canon S70 pocket camera, shooting RAW. It can be a little tricky to get the autofocus to make the part of the photo you want to be sharp actually in focus. I used the camera’s macro mode, set by the button with the little tulip symbol, and the lens zoomed all the way out. That’s the standard way to do closeups with most pocket cameras. The trick is to “steer” the autofocus point. On the Canon I pressed the SET button and then used the direction buttons around it to move the focus point (the green box) to my main subject. It takes a little practice to get the hang of it.
Because I was working so close, I couldn’t really put my subject in the center, focus, and then reframe because the distance to the lens would change and I’d lose sharpness. I was in aperture priority mode and stopped down to f/6.3 for these if I remember correctly. For the Hazelnut I hold onto the branch and the camera together to keep the distance from changing in the breeze.
Both of these photos have had a little processing in Adobe Lightroom.
Now that stuff is starting to bloom, all you flower nuts need to get out and start shooting. OK, you don’t really need blossoms for creative images as my friend David Perry points out on his blog and Facebook page. Or maybe you’re just drooling over little green blades of crocus like Mary Ann Newcomer over in Boise. Just find some inspiration and go to it.
Oh yeah, that fancy word in the first paragraph was the word of the day for January 19 at thesaurus.com. Perambulate sounds so much nicer than plain old walking.
January 19 2010 | Native Plants and Photography | 6 Comments »
It’s that dark and rainy time of year, but that’s no reason to stay inside. My friend Jennifer Titus created a nice word picture of road turtles on her Facebook page a day or two ago, so that got me to thinking about them. This afternoon I headed up to Cornwall Park for a quick loop around. These turtles are guarding the crosswalk on the trail where I enter the park. They don’t seem to mind getting run over.
Before I got to the park I noticed this refractive pattern in the water draining off Cornwall Avenue. It’s caused by the thin layer of oil carried in the water. I guess it’s the beauty found in pollution from the cars streaming by. I don’t know whether I got any funny looks from drivers as I knelt at the roadside to frame up the shot. I’ve gotten beyond caring much about what passers-by think while I’m creating a photo.
Just a block up the street from us is the First Plymouth Congregational Church. This patch of heather has been part of their garden for about as long as we’ve been in Bellingham — 19 years. It’s come into full bloom in the last week or so and will continue to be in bloom for at least a couple of months.
The grass is ‘Karl Foerster’ Feather Reed Grass. It really looks its best in late afternoon sun in October, but even on a very dull day in January is provides a lot of interest to the landscape.
This is a time of year when gardeners are planning ahead, thinking of spring and all the new stuff we can plant. But a couple of my garden blogging colleagues have mentioned the beauty of winter gardens this week. Saxon Holt in Gardening Gone Wild talks about patterns of bare branches. Andy Wright in Winter Interest in the Landscape talks about using conifers for year-round interest.
In our area lots of people grow winter-blooming heathers and leave their grasses standing tall.
Sometimes it’s not even the plants themselves that provide the winter interest. These holly berries had fallen to the ground in Gossage Plaza park. Their bright red color and pseudorandom arrangement caught my eye.
I was scanning the side of the road down into Cornwall Park looking for the first blossoms of Draba verna when I spied this very nice patch of moss. The Draba will be starting to bloom real soon now, but on this day the moss was more interesting. I have no idea what species these are.
My favorite trail through the park has many old trees. They may not be true old-growth, but they’re certainly approaching it in size and majesty. Mostly they’re Douglas-firs and Western Red-cedars. This one is a cedar.
I thought it might be fun to move the camera during the shot. I set the ISO to 100 and set the f/stop to about 5.6 so I ended up with an exposure of about one second. That gave me enough time to gently rotate the camera while the shutter was open. I started with the camera vertical, held that position briefly so the tree trunk would be a little more visible, then rotated the camera. I made a handful of exposures because there’s certainly an element of luck in creating this kind of photo. This was the most successful of the series.
All of the photos this afternoon were made with my pocket camera, a Canon S70 that I’ve had since 2005. I thought about just carrying my iPhone, but it was busy streaming Natalie McMaster on Pandora and I wanted a little more control than I could get with the phone camera.
I spent most of my day selecting photos for garden magazines and planning for a wildflowers software application. Way too much time on my butt staring at a screen. Getting out and playing around with some images in the woods and along the street made for a nice break. Make sure you get out and play almost every day. It’s good for the soul.
January 14 2010 | Gardens and Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
There’s still not a lot blooming, neither native nor cultivated, so I’ll continue on the theme of bark. It’s something I tend to notice more in the winter than the summer, although none of these photos are truly winter images.
The detail of peeling flowering cherry bark with a nice collection of lichens was growing along Azalea Way at the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle. I don’t know the variety of cherry, nor the names of the lichens. Several of the trees and shrubs harbor lichens and mosses. They thrive in our wet winters.
Some of the most interesting bark peels dramatically, like this river birch (Betula nigra) growing in the garden at Oklahoma State University in Oklahoma City.
River birch is native to most of the eastern United States, including Oklahoma. It thrives in wet habitats in the wild, but in cultivation will tolerate drier conditions. I’ve read at least one report that Native Americans boiled the sap into a syrup, similar to maple syrup, and on occasion used the inner bark as an emergency survival food. I’ve never tried either, and have some difficulty imagining eating bark. But I’ve never been that hungry.
Many of our birches have interesting bark. Probably one of the most recognizable North American trees is paper birch (Betula papyrifera), known in most of its range for bright white bark that peels in horizontal strips. It is native all across the northern United States and almost all of Canada. West of the Cascades where I live you often find it with darker, less dramatic bark that makes it more difficult to recognize.
Trees with interesting bark aren’t just limited to North American natives. This Tasmanian Snowgum (Eucalyptus coccifera), was planted as a dramatic ornamental in the alpine garden at the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden.
I photographed the snowgum in color, and this photo has appeared in print in its original form. This version was converted to black and white in Adobe Lightroom, which gives all the control over black and white that a film photographer had with a complete set of filters. Actually, Lightroom gives even more control than we had with filters and film because one can adjust each of the additive and subtractive primary colors individually. Thus, I could render the blue sky dark like a polarizer would, darken the green foliage, and brighten all the reds and yellows.
Photography is a combination of art and craft, creative decisions and science. It helps to know a little of each. The craft and science are the underpinnings that allow creative realization. The best ideas have little value if they can’t be rendered into a sharable form.
January 10 2010 | Gardens and Photography | 1 Comment »
