When you’re tiny and looking to get pollinated this early in the season you’ve gotta put on a show. At least that’s one way to look at this Common Filbert, Corylus avellana, blossom. All that feathery red stuff is part of the female flower. Dangling in the background are the long male catkins which soon will be releasing drifts of pollen to be carried across the void.
You can see other bits of red, more female blossoms, on other twigs here. That big fat bud at the base of the flower is actually the ovary. It’s going to turn into a tasty nut, fine food for a squirrel or human, later in the season.
Common Filbert is one of the first trees or shrubs to bloom around here. It’s actually an escapee from cultivation. Our native species, Beaked Hazelnut or Corylus cornuta, won’t start blooming until March. The two species look very much alike when they’re in flower. Actually, they’re hard to tell apart any time except when they’re in fruit. And then you have to beat the squirrels to them.
Here are the male flowers on the same plant. Each dangling catkin has many individual blossoms. Last year’s foliage is still on some of the branches, weathered to a nice shade of brown.
These photos were made this morning along the Whatcom Creek Trail in downtown Bellingham between Grand and Dupont. The trail has lots of nice native trees and shrubs, mostly planted in a restoration project about ten years ago. I also noticed swelling buds on the Indian Plum, another plant that blooms very early. But it’s going to be at least another week and maybe two before its flowers start to open.
I walk this route frequently on my way to the Post Office or other downtown errands. Today I just headed out to clear my head, carrying my Canon G12 in my pocket. I shot in the cold fog with natural light and used macro mode and manual focus to get close and keep my subject sharp. The trick was to set the focus as close as possible and then move the camera back and forth until the blossoms were sharp. Like most pocket cameras, the macro mode works best when the zoom is at its widest setting. That means camera position is critical to keep distracting elements out of the background.
My photographer friend David Perry blogged about Tiny, magenta girl-flowers about a year ago. Check out his take on sexy Corylus.
Oregon-grape is another shrub that can start blooming very early, although not all specimens are as early as this one along the same trail. In our back yard it will be at least a month before the Oregon-grape begins to blossom.
What have you seen blooming? My friend Janet Loughrey posted a series from Portland yesterday on her Facebook that included Crocus naturalized in a lawn. Some of my native plant society colleagues down in Oregon have been reporting first blooms of Grass Widows and Salt-and-Pepper Lomatium in the Columbia Gorge.
Resist the temptation. Do not get in a hurry to cut down those spent flower stems when the blooms fade.
Dry flower heads, seedpods really, can be almost as interesting as the flowers were. And many of them are attractive to small birds that come foraging for a mid-day snack.
This container, sitting on a wall in the Denver Botanic Gardens over Thanksgiving weekend, has what I think are Burnet seedheads. At least those elongated pods look a lot like Burnet. But maybe I’m wrong. Doesn’t really matter because they’re interesting sitting there, all dried out, but worshiping rainshadow sunshine.
They’re photographed against the sun and the rich blue sky. The light coming from behind rims each head, turning them into glowing miniature pom-poms. I chose a low camera angle to keep the background uncluttered. In my ideal world the jets would have been grounded. I suppose I could made the contrails disappear with a little retouching. continue reading »
Last Saturday I made a trip up the North Cascades Highway to scout out locations to take my Pocket Camera Wildflower Photography class at North Cascades Institute on Tuesday. The trail I used the last time I taught the class, Heather Pass and Maple Pass, was reported to still have a lot of snow. So I chose the Easy Pass trail, which climbs reasonably gently for a couple of miles through wonderful forest and then breaks out into the subalpine and alpine splendor.
Since I was teaching pocket camera photography, I only carried my Canon S70 with me to photograph the flowers. My idea was to create a video slideshow to introduce my students to the trail they’d be hiking and to show what can be done with little cameras.
The class has now come and gone, with 15 delightful students who learned a lot. I learned from them, too. The North Cascades Learning Center on Diablo Lake is a great place to have a class, with comfortable facilities, a splendid setting, and outrageously good food. The evaluations are coming in and they’re looking good. I hope to be able to teach the class again next year.
In addition to hiking to Easy Pass, we also hiked and photographed on Sauk Mountain, one of my all-time favorite easy-access wildflower hikes. Following our Tuesday hike and photo session everyone chose three favorite images and we had a group critique with their photos on the big screen. Some of the students had some very nice photos to share.
The slideshow was created in ProShow Producer, a Windows-only program. I used the random effects tool, and then manually adjusted image movement and transitions when the auto feature produced something that I didn’t like. All the images were processed in Adobe Lightroom 3 before bringing them into Producer.
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.
The Painted Hills in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in north-central Oregon are an out-of-this-world landscape. Layers of colorful bentonite, formed from ancient volcanic ash, change color with the light and moisture content. Each spring they pick up golden highlights from two endemic plants. The taller of the two, Golden Bee Plant or Cleome platycarpa, is an annual with a bright tuft of flowers at the top. The other, John Day’s Pincushion or Chaenactis nevii, is also an annual. continue reading »
When you’re tiny and looking to get pollinated this early in the season you’ve gotta put on a show. At least that’s one way to look at this Common Filbert, Corylus avellana, blossom. All that feathery red stuff is part of the female flower. Dangling in the background are the long male catkins which soon will be releasing drifts of pollen to be carried across the void.
Here are the male flowers on the same plant. Each dangling catkin has many individual blossoms. Last year’s foliage is still on some of the branches, weathered to a nice shade of brown.
Resist the temptation. Do not get in a hurry to cut down those spent flower stems when the blooms fade.