Archive for the 'Photography' Category
January 1st, New Year’s Day, I donned shorts and boots and headed for Oyster Dome. That’s the prominent rock outcropping rising a couple thousand feet above Chuckanut Drive at the south end of the Chuckanuts or the north end of Blanchard Mountain. It’s a popular hike, despite being steep and muddy. I went for exercise and to rekindle old friendships with the inhabitants of the winter forest.
The view from the top out over the San Juan Islands is spectacular. I made this photo handheld with my little Canon G12 pocket camera, planning to stitch the frames together later in Photoshop. continue reading »
January 02 2012 | Fitness and Native Plants and Photography | 2 Comments »
The latest Rock Garden Quarterly arrived in my postal mailbox today with a bunch of my photos from Deception Pass State Park to help promote the upcoming Western Winter Study Weekend. There’s a link to this blog, so I figured I’d better get busy and write something new for the hoards of visitors coming my way.
I’m working on selecting photos for the new Trees and Shrubs of the Northwest book due out in 2013. Today was Polemoneaceae day, or in plain English, a day of selecting pictures of Phlox.
The beauty at right is Yreka Phlox, Phlox hirsuta. It’s a certified rare plant that only grows in a few locations on the outskirts of Yreka, California. I photographed it back in the spring of 2004 when I was working on the wildflowers book with Phyllis Gustafson. It’s one of the plants that ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor and got left out of the first book. Ellen and I plan to include it in the trees & shrubs book. continue reading »
December 20 2011 | Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
A couple of weeks ago I ended up with an hour or so to wander around Fairhaven, where my studio is located, when a client failed to show up for an appointment.
I gave myself the assignment to photograph bricks. I ended up straying a bit from the theme and included a few other textures, but with all the brick in this old commercial neighborhood I was able to keep myself busy and come up with some interesting views of the subject. continue reading »
September 01 2011 | Bellingham and Fairhaven and Photography | 2 Comments »
Western Wahoo, otherwise known as Western Burning Bush or Euonymus occidentalis, is an uncommon shrub in the forests of southwest Washington. In fact, it’s considered a sensitive species and the online herbarium records withhold the exact locations of the specimens.
In Oregon, Western Burning Bush is scattered in northwestern counties and occasional elsewhere west of the Cascades. A friend pointed me to a roadside population along Oregon Route 6 northwest of Forest Grove.
Wahoo is more common in California where it’s found in several counties, mostly in the northwest and along the central coast. But it’s not common anywhere in the region.
Wahoo grows in shaded forest habitats as a rather straggly understory shrub. It would be easy to miss it if you weren’t looking for it. Which is exactly what I was doing last Tuesday. continue reading »
July 15 2011 | Native Plants and Photography | 1 Comment »
I’ve been logging a lot of road miles this spring while seeking trees and shrubs for a new book. But it’s not all work and no fun.
This afternoon, after wrapping up a three-day photography workshop for the Siskiyou Field Institute in Selma, Oregon, I headed south on US 199 toward Gasquet, California. It’s only about 40 miles and I was on the lookout for several trees and shrubs. One of my scouted locations was on the old highway over Oregon Mountain, now a little-traveled back road with crumbling asphalt and wilderness-like conditions on both sides.
As I came around one of the switchback corners I spied a pair of huge western white pine trunks and decided to stop for a photo. Almost immediately I noticed the unusual and uncommon California ground-cone growing at the base of the trees. Technically, the ground-cone was under a scraggly madrone. That’s the host plant for this parasitic flowering plant with no leaves and no chlorophyll.
I moved a fallen white pine cone next to the ground-cone to show how much this plant resembles a pine cone. It’s a very cool plant, but one that I think would be nearly impossible to grow in a garden. As I drove on down the road I found another pair of ground-cones right at the edge of the old asphalt.
Even up close, ground-cone looks a lot like a pine cone. The individual flowers themselves are nearly hidden inside the purplish bracts.
You can see more photos of this plant (but not as fresh as the one I photographed today) on the PNW Flowers website. The photos there were made just a few miles west, on the outskirts of Grant’s Pass, Oregon back in 2004.
Just on the Oregon side of the border, splayed out across the grassy expanse under a power line, I found masses of Siskiyou Iris, Iris bracteata. There are scattered clumps of these yellow gems all over the southern Oregon Siskiyou region right now, but I’d never seen so many in one place. These were just outside the tiny burg of O’Brien and right at the side of US 199.
Siskiyou Iris are very growable in gardens. We have a couple of plants in our Bellingham garden, where they bloomed a week or so ago. Color is variable, from pale to deep yellow. They’re part of the complex of iris often referred to as Pacific Coast Iris.
The shocking roadside flower discovery late in the day, and along a narrow stretch of highway with no place to pull over, was a clump of California lady-slipper orchids and several clumps of Siskiyou lewisia. Both plants were growing from cracks in a cliff above the road along the Middle Fork Smith River. I had to content myself with merely enjoying a fleeting glance at them as I drove by.
Be sure to keep your eyes open, and your botany ID skills sharp, as you drive around. You never know what you might discover in an unexpected place.
When you stop to photograph roadside gems, be sure to find a safe wide spot to pull over and watch for traffic. I made these images with my 100mm macro lens, my favorite for photographing flowers. Clouds had rolled in and I worked in a light rain while shooting the ground-cone.
June 05 2011 | Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
