Wow, where is the summer going? It seems like just yesterday that I joined with dozens of other Birchwood Garden Club members to visit three more unique and interesting Bellingham gardens on a warm summer evening in the golden sunset light. It’s actually been a couple of weeks, August 4 to be precise.
First up was Jennifer Wall’s garden, which is actually in the Birchwood neighborhood. She purchased the home, with an existing garden, a couple of years ago and has been on a journey of discovery to see what was there. Now she’s adding her own personal touches and style to the place. People were oohing and aahing over her plant choices and asking lots of “what’s this?” questions.
Then we caravaned down Chuckanut Drive to the edge of Mud Bay where we enjoyed Donna and Allen Buehler’s waterside garden and the view out over the bay at high tide. Lots of containers here, and outdoor entertaining spaces.
Finally, a few miles further down Chuckanut to a garden that backs up to Larrabee State Park. The Susan and Landry Corkery garden features an extensive collection of trees that blend with the native vegetation. Myriad paths twist, turn, and invite getting lost among the foliage. The Corkerys say they have 66 varieties of Maples, 50 Japanese Maples, 23 Magnolias, 8 Pines, 7 Oaks, and 275 Rhododendrons.
As usual on a garden tour, I just carried a pocket camera. This time is was my Canon S70, which provides more control and choices than the iPhone I carried on the July Birchwood tour. All of the images in the slideshow were processed through Adobe Lightroom and the show itself was produced in Animoto.
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.
The Skagit Symphony Orchesta’s annual fundraising garden tour, Gardens of Note, was held last weekend. This is the second year I’ve headed down to our neighboring county to check out some wonderful gardens and I wasn’t disapointed. Here’s a condensed visit to the gardens.
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.
Last weekend I made a 1000-mile road trip to see a bunch of plants. Most were in the wild, but I stopped in Yakima to see my friend Ron McKitrick’s Hillside Desert Botanical Garden.
Ron has the most incredible cactus garden you’ll find just about anywhere. He’s been growing cactus, which are native only to the Americas, for decades and has filled his back yard with these prickly beauties.
The photo here is of one of the most spectacular clumps in the garden, a Scarlet Hedgehog Cactus. You might know it as Echinocereus triglochidiatus var. octacanthus. But then again, cactus taxonomy seems to be in flux and the name may have changed. Anyhow, that’s what Ron calls it. You might find it growing in the wild in any of the southwestern states, but not up here in Washington. continue reading »
Last weekend I made a 1000-mile road trip to see a bunch of plants. Most were in the wild, but I stopped in Yakima to see my friend Ron McKitrick’s