We finally got our first day of summer on July 7, right on schedule. It was the evening of the Birchwood Garden Club July members-only private garden tour, a delightful opportunity to visit four very nice Bellingham gardens. If you’re not a member of an active garden club, like Birchwood, you’re missing out on seeing gardens you otherwise wouldn’t get to see. Thank you, Sheri Lambert, for organizing the tour.
The four gardening families that welcomed us included Ira Penn and Dee Dee O’Connor, gardening on Alabama Hill; Lynette Jensen and Joan Wayne, each gardening on south hill; and garden designer Susann Schwiesow, gardening in Edgemore. Each garden is unique, appropriate to the site, representative of the personalities of the owners and designers, and a joy to explore. There were plant surprises and nice design elements in each garden.
As has become my custom on garden tours, I did all my photography with my iPhone 3G. This very sunny evening with strong contrast pointed out the limitations of the camera. Everything is completely automatic except for where you hold it to compose the image. Auto everything works pretty well in even light, but with bright highlights and deep shadows the camera tended to overexpose, washing out the bright spots and opening the shadows more than I like. Auto white balance doesn’t always know what to do with flowers and foliage, either. The tradeoff is that the camera is small, light, and already in my pocket.
I processed all the images in Adobe Lightroom 3, adjusting brightness and contrast, sometimes tweaking color balance, and applying a vignette to emphasize the center area. I spent less than a minute on each photo. I’ll be talking about the process and showing the technique in a program at the Garden Writers Association annual symposium in Dallas this September.
Coming up next weekend is the Whatcom Horticultural Society’s 2010 Tour of Private Gardens. There are five gardens on this year’s tour. They’re all different and worth a visit if you’re in the area and interested in gardening. Since I take care of the WHS website I was on the pre-tour for volunteers yesterday and shot a series of images for a video slideshow.
Yesterday was the first really warm and sunny day we’ve had this spring. Not exactly the best light for photographing gardens, but sometimes a photographer’s just gotta deal with the conditions. I shot all of these with my Canon S70 pocket camera and then ran them through Adobe Lightroom to dodge, burn, and generally adjust the contrast a bit. The video was created with Animoto.
Details about the tour, including pricing, directions, and ticket sources, is on the Whatcom Horticultural Society tour web page.
Dirty Dan Harris is credited with being the founder of Fairhaven, one of the four communities on Bellingham Bay that merged in the early 20th century to form Bellingham. The fine citizens of Fairhaven celebrate this bit of history each April with a two-day festival of seafood, music, and all-around fun on the Fairhaven Village Green. I spent the day photographing. Here’s a quick video slideshow, with music by The Gallus Brothers who were performing live during the event.
You can see a handful of photos at a more leisurely pace over on the Fairhaven website.
It’s always fun to hang out at an event like this. I ran into lots of people I knew, and even recognized some of them. I’m a bit conspicuous with a big heavy camera and lens hanging from my neck. I shot a lot with my 70-200mm, using a little on-camera fill flash to put highlights in eyes and brighten things up a tad under the overcast skies.
If you haven’t been to Dirty Dan Days, put it on your calendar for next April if you don’t see this in time to get down there this (Sunday) afternoon for the chowder cookoff and piano race.
Here’s a video from Sunday, with lots of happy people enjoying the chowder cookoff, dancing in the sun to the Gallus Brothers, and the world’s only piano race.
I’ve put the photos from the videos online in two galleries for viewing at your own pace: Saturday photos and Sunday photos.
Natalie announced after lunch today that she wanted to go for a hike and suggested the Stimpson Family Nature Preserve near Lake Whatcom. We hadn’t been out there for a while and the 3-mile loop trail makes a nice walk on a wet day. The rain stopped and the sun came out so we had a pleasant early afternoon walk.
It’s still pretty early in the season, so not much fresh was coming up, but these evergreen sedges were thick in several of the pocket wetlands near the top of the ridge. If you’re a wetland specialist and know what they are, please leave a comment and let me know. I’m still pretty poor at identifying sedges.
One plant that had started to grow is Stinging Nettle, Urtica dioica. When they get just a little bigger it will be time to harvest some (but not from the Stimpson Preserve) and cook them up for a tasty spring vegetable. Some folks say you can eat them raw if you curl the leaves just right to avoid the little spines that inject a chemical soup that gives the plant its name, but I’ve never been successful at it. For details on the chemicals in nettle sting see Be Nice to Nettles Week.
Nettle sting lasts for a remarkably long time. Hours later as I write this my thumb still tingles from very lightly brushing against a single leaf this afternoon. Spores from the abundant Sword Fern will often take the sting away, but for some reason I didn’t think of that this afternoon and just put up with the annoyance.
Out near the trailhead where there was more sun the Indian Plum was starting to open, but I only noted flower buds and no open blossoms. Perhaps at lower elevations the first blossoms are out, but I haven’t seen them yet this spring. Skunk Cabbage was starting to grow in the wetlands, too, but it will be close to a month before it’s in full bloom. Maybe a little earlier this year since January and February have been so warm.
One of the first things you come across at the Stimpson Preserve is a large beaver pond, which is really a shallow marsh. There’s an overlook along the trail. This was the view today, with the sun backlighting the dry sedge foliage out in the water. Again, I don’t know the species.
I photographed today with my Canon S70 pocket camera. I braced it against a tree trunk and zoomed in for the brown sedges in the pond. For the nettle I used macro mode, wide angle, and came in close with the focus point set on the leaves at the top of the frame. The wet marsh at the top of the post was also a wide-angle shot, with the camera held as steady as I could for the 1/13 sec shutter speed in the dark woods. I would have liked to have a tripod for that one, but I almost never carry one with my little camera.
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.
One plant that had started to grow is Stinging Nettle, Urtica dioica. When they get just a little bigger it will be time to harvest some (but not from the Stimpson Preserve) and cook them up for a tasty spring vegetable. Some folks say you can eat them raw if you curl the leaves just right to avoid the little spines that inject a chemical soup that gives the plant its name, but I’ve never been successful at it. For details on the chemicals in nettle sting see 
On our walk to Little Squalicum Beach last weekend Natalie and I looked at more than just the willow buds I included in the 
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.