We’re about a week away from the official beginning of spring, but here in the northwest it’s felt like spring for several weeks now. We’ve had a warm winter so trees, shrubs, and other flowering plants are farther along than usual for this time of year. That’s a pleasant change from 2009 when it stayed cold and tulips were still blooming mid-May.
I went up to VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver yesterday and spent several hours meandering and photographing. Flowering cherries were just about at their peak. The video at the top of the post includes my favorites.
It was a partly cloudy day with some sun breaks and I shot with both my 70-200 and 24-105 lenses using only natural light. All of these were processed in Adobe Lightroom before importing into Animoto to make the video.
Last night as I was taking the compost out in the dark a wonderful sweet odor drifted around the corner toward the back door. The Winter Daphne, Daphne odora ‘Aureomarginata’, had to be the source as nothing else on the back side of our house has such a fragrance, especially at this time of year.
We’ve been watching the flower buds expand and turn pink for several weeks now, but just this week have the first precocious blossoms begun to open. We can enjoy the variegated foliage and light pink flowers from our kitchen window, enticing us to step outside and breathe deeply of the delightful floral aroma. It’s a good place to practice yoga breathing exercises.
Our early crocus, which I think are Crocus dalmaticus, aren’t nearly as fragrant as the Daphne, but they make up for it in sheer volume. We’ve had these very early blooming Crocus for years, and they’ve spread almost everywhere in the garden. I’m always digging up their little bulbs whenever I cultivate or transplant something, so they get dispersed from the tip of my shovel blade. They set copious quantities of seed, too.
These crocus started blooming for us more than a week ago but I just got around to photographing them today. More flowers are open on sunny days than under clouds like we have this afternoon, but even the closed buds provide a wash of color over otherwise brown beds. We’ve established them in a very narrow bed between our picket fence and the sidewalk. It’s no more than 6 inches deep and this time of year nearly filled with these diminutive purple flowers, almost like a little stream at the base of a cliff.
I wandered the garden this afternoon in a light rain with my pocket camera in hand, set to ISO 400 and ‘cloudy’ white balance because it was so overcast and dreary. I put it in close-up mode and steered the autofocus spot to where I wanted the blossom to be in focus. That’s a very handy feature and I think it does a better job than the old trick of focusing in the center and then reframing when working this close to the subject. There wasn’t much light so I was careful to brace the camera to reduce shake since I don’t have image stabilization in this camera. Check the corners for distracting junk, take a deep breath, and gently squeeze the shutter release. Repeat at will.
The Northwest Flower and Garden Show in Seattle is one of the premier garden shows in the world. Every February thousands of gardeners descend on the Washington State Convention Center to find inspiration in the show gardens and purchase plants and other garden stuff from the rows of vendors.
The show is under new management this year, but walking around the exhibit area the feeling is the same as in previous years — a gardener’s delight. If I counted correctly there are 23 show gardens for 2010 and I think they’re all in the video.
Several show gardens used our northwest native Beach Strawberry, Fragaria chiloensis in vertical gardens. There were two gardens with chickens, including a unique “clucker clunker” pickup truck coop. Water, stone, and structural bare trees are always popular garden themes. New this year was a green roof, complete with a couple of solar panels. Ever-playful Judith Jones of Fancy Fronds constructed a giant board game you could walk through.
If you’ve never been to the show, it runs through Sunday, February 7. Or plan ahead for 2011.
I’ve been going to the show for enough years that I run into lots of old friends and acquaintances. Of course part of that is the annual northwest Garden Writers Association gathering in the evening, which is always a good time with friends from throughout the region.
I saw lots of people photographing the show. It’s a challenging environment because the lighting is theatrical. That is, the gardens are in pools of light and the background is very dark. Overall light levels are pretty low as well. I shot the photos in the video with my Canon 5D set to ISO 1600 and white balance on tungsten. My lens was a 24-105 IS with the stabilizer turned on. I looked for something to brace the camera on whenever I could and frequently waited for people to get out of my frame. I prefer to work from a tripod, but in the show environment with thousands of people it’s just not possible. These shots aren’t for publication since the show hires a photographer and provides images to the press. Those photos are made in the middle of the night when there’s no one else around.
The Witt Winter Garden at the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle is one of my favorite places to visit in late January and February. The plant collection features early-blooming shrubs, many of which are fragrant. On a nice afternoon when the sun is low in the sky the light radiates through the massed Witchhazels and the sweet scent of Sarcococca and Hamamelis fills the air.
Of course, not everything that’s blooming is a shrub. This patch of hardy cyclamen, Cyclamen coum, blooms reliably at the base of a Stewartia monadelpha every winter. I think I’ve been photographing it since 1998. Something about it keeps bringing me back, even though the patch hasn’t changed much over the years, just slowly getting bigger.
This is a great plant for the winter garden. It self-seeds without being invasive. I’ve seen it carpeting a lawn near Medford. In the summer it goes dormant, disappearing completely until the foliage re-emerges in late autumn. Plant it together with the fall-blooming cyclamen, C. hederifolium, for a longer season of bloom and contrasting foliage textures. continue reading »
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.
Our early crocus, which I think are Crocus dalmaticus, aren’t nearly as fragrant as the Daphne, but they make up for it in sheer volume. We’ve had these very early blooming Crocus for years, and they’ve spread almost everywhere in the garden. I’m always digging up their little bulbs whenever I cultivate or transplant something, so they get dispersed from the tip of my shovel blade. They set copious quantities of seed, too.
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.
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.