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Toad Lily

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Toad LilyToad Lilies are bulbs that bloom late in the season, adding a little color during that transition period between summer and autumn here in the Northwest. There are several species and varieties, but from the ones I’ve seen, they’re mostly shades of purple, with up-facing blossoms on stems that are about waist high or a little higher.

This blossom was one of many in a lush clump of Candelabra Toad Lilies, Tricyrtis macropoda, along the path at the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden this afternoon.

I was on my way back to the car at the end of the day when I saw gentle backlight coming through the blossoms and decided I had time for a few more photos since I was already going to be late for dinner. I made several variations on the theme, horizontal with multiple blossoms, horizontal with just a single blossom, and then verticals with one blossom. I liked this one with a tiny spider crawling across a strand of silk, although I have another variation with neither the spider nor the silk. Fortunately it was a dead calm afternoon as the light was fading, the flowers are on tall stalks, and I was working close with a 100mm macro lens.

Red Chairs

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Red Chairs

I think a little boldness in the garden is a good thing. This pair of old red chairs, from a garden in Eugene, Oregon (that I also found on https://emfurn.com/), establish that bold can be stylish and fun.

I found these chairs along the south side path in a tiny city lot garden jam-packed with plants. The owner told me she has some 250 varieties of roses, but you’d never know it in September when they’re out of bloom. A big eucalpytus stood at the corner of the house by the entrance gate, much taller than she ever expected it to grow when it was planted. This was definitely a personal garden, not one designed and installed by some fancy designer. It grew organically around the whims of the owners over many years. I like that.

The photo is from my Canon S70 pocket camera, hand held on the Garden Writers Association bus tour to Eugene on September 23.

Northwest Moonwort

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Northwest Moonwort

Moonworts are among the more primitive ferns.  They’re sometimes called grape ferns because of the grapelike clusters of spore-producing bodies seen in this photo. This particular species is Botrychium pinnatum, Northwest Moonwort. It was growing along the Perry Creek trail off the Mountain Loop Highway east of Granite Falls in Snohomish County in July a couple of years ago.

Perry Creek is a Research Natural Area, set aside on Forest Service land to protect both plants and wildlife.  In this case, the protection is primarily for the great diversity of ferns found along the first couple of miles of trail. The little moonworts are only a few inches high and easy to miss while hiking. It really takes a trained eye to find them. I was fortunate on this trip to have an experienced moonwort hunter as guide leading a Native Plant Society field trip. We talked about hunting and what the best spotting scopes were, he recommended to me the check out these spotting scopes reviewed.

Access to Perry Creek is going to change in 2009 when the road to the trailhead is closed and a new one-mile connector trail is built from the Mount Dickerman trailhead. Whether this results in more or less use of the trail remains to be seen. The published reason for the change is the lack of parking along the end of the Perry Creek road and the difficulty turning around there.

Mountain Ash at Dusk

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Mountain Ash Berries

As the sun goes down the colors our eyes perceive, as well as what a camera records, changes. These Sitka Mountain Ash (Sorbus sitchensis) berries were along the paved path at Picture Lake last Saturday. I photographed them about 7:00 pm, which was just a few minutes past sunset.  However, the sun had descended below the adjacent ridge long before, plunging my subject into deep shade.  With a digital camera it’s easy to compensate, but in this case I left my camera’s white balance set to daylight, letting the color go a little blue.

Is this an accurate representation of what my eyes saw? Probably not, but color memory is a fickle thing so it really doesn’t matter.  If the color of the berries was far around the color wheel from red then we’d know something was wrong. But since they’re red then we accept the color as more or less correct.

Mountain Ash is in the rose family. The fruits are reportedly edible, sour but becoming sweeter after a frost. I’ve never tried them. One website even talks of making Mountain Ash Wine. I suppose one can ferment almost any fruit so why not this one. The berries are certainly abundant this time of year, more so than the huckleberries for which so many people go foraging.

Available Darkness

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I went up to Picture Lake yesterday for autumn photos of Mt. Shuksan.  The place was mobbed in mid-afternoon when the light was nice on the mountain, with photographers everywhere.  Many failed to heed the “stay on the trail” signs, trampling a delicate resource.  Shame on them.

Mt. Shuksan at Twilight

I made my sunny afternoon photos, then headed on up to Artist Point for more variations. Did I need more Shuksans? Probably not.  Could I resist a beautiful sunny day under blue skies with early-peak fall color?  No.  So I shot with a variety of foregrounds until the sun went down.  Then I headed back down the road to Picture Lake.

By this time the sun was off the mountain but the sky was still light.  There were two other photographers still working from the paved viewing platform and I eventually joined them for the view of the mountain reflected in the perfectly calm lake. Both of the others were advanced hobbiests, one shooting with a 6x17cm back on a 4×5 view camera and the other an advanced Canon digital body.  They were both planning to stick around to shoot star trails on the moonless night.  I was tired and hungry (you’d think I’d learn to always keep some food in my camera pack) so I didn’t stay that long.

The photo here was made about 7:45 pm, with a 90-second exposure. One of the really nice things about digital is there’s no reciprocity law failure like there was with film.  No extra exposure needed, no weird color shifts. In the original you can see the beginnings of star trails.  I couldn’t see the stars above Shuksan with my naked eyes while I was shooting. Speaking eyes, mine are getting definitely older so I have more trouble focusing than I used to. Autofocus doesn’t work very well in near darkness.  Note for the future:  prefocus the camera before it gets dark and then turn autofocus off.

Six Days and Sixty Gardens

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The last week has been a whirlwind of garden touring. While I may not have visited a full sixty gardens there sure were a lot.

Gloriosa Daisies and Sweet Potato Vine

I started last Thursday with an afternoon in Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Park where the lush tapestry of annuals and a modicum of perennials were in their late summer glory. The photo here is of gloriosa daisies with sweet potato vine, shot with my 90mm tilt-shift lens cranked over for a selective focus effect rather than to keep the entire subject sharp. The soft overcast light was very welcome.

On Friday I headed down to Portland, Oregon for the annual Garden Writers Association annual symposium. Saturday we toured several northeast Portland gardens. David Perry and I photographed each other photographing the gardens for the intro slide show to our Sunday morning presentation on making magic with your point & shoot camera. It was a lot of fun working quickly and hand-held. David and I shot some of the same subjects, but saw them completely differently. We each got lots of pats on the back for our program and we saw people putting our suggestions to use when we headed out for the afternoon’s tour.

Sunday afternoon we visited Iseli Nursery and Terra Nova Nurseries, both wholesale growers with well-designed display gardens and fantastic plants. The rain held off until we got back on the bus. Isley specializes in dwarf conifers and Japanese Maples; Terra Nova is best known for introducing exciting Heucheras and other perennials to the marketplace.

‘Strike it Rich’ RoseMonday our busses took us to the Portland Classical Chinese Garden, the Portland Japanese Garden, the International Rose Test Garden, and the Oregon Zoo where we had dinner. Tuesday we went to several private gardens in Eugene. This morning I went back to the rose garden to make some specimen photos and worked until the wind picked up and I decided I needed to start north to get through Seattle before the traffic got too bad.

Too Much Sun

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Tree Pattern

I was in Seattle earlier this week and stopped by the Washington Park Arboretum to see what I could find. It was what most people would call a glorious day, full sun under a brilliant blue sky and pleasant temperatures. Fall color hadn’t started happening yet and very little was in bloom. In short, the conditions were less than prime for my kind of photography.

I wandered down to the end where they’re constructing the new Pacific Rim Connections garden, which still had a fence around it and wasn’t open yet. But across the road I was struck by the pattern of the shadows a large Madrona tree was casting on the lawn. That’s not the picture here, but it’s what got me started down a different path that day.  I made several images of the shadows on the grass, then headed up Azalea Way back toward my truck.

Along the way I noticed the light coming through the leaves of a large tree. When I aimed my camera the lens was set for a much closer distance and I saw something similar to the photo here — just a soft pattern of branches and greens. I experimented with several variations of focus and aperture. This is the one I liked best out of the bunch.

It seemed odd to use one of my sharpest lenses to shoot a totally out-of-focus photo, but that’s what I did. Sometimes I have to remember to play and not to get hung up on what’s “right” and what’s “wrong” in photography. Thanks, David for reminding me of that a few days earlier.

Roadside Weeds

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I’ve been out bicycling a lot of miles around Whatcom County this year. While it’s mostly a speed thing challenging myself to see how fast I can go, I’m also observing what’s in bloom along the side of the road. It changes every few weeks, although there are few flowers, like Queen Ann’s Lace, that stay in bloom for a long time.

Japanese KnotweedRight now the showiest plant in bloom is one of our nasty invasive weeds, Japanese Knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum). There’s some question about the taxonomy, so what we have may well be Bohemian Knotweed (Polygonum × bohemicum), a hybrid species. Regardless, it’s a tall showy plant with drooping panicles of white flowers that forms large masses at the side of the road.  It prefers moist places like ditches and streambanks and spreads by underground rhizomes. It’s very difficult to eradicate as any tiny bit of root will start a new plant and spraying common herbicides seem to only slow it down. The preferred method of attack is to inject herbicide directly into the stems, which is very labor intensive.

I’ve noticed that along some of the county roads it has been mown down, which might help keep it in check. At least seeds won’t set and spread the plant that way. Last winter the plants that hadn’t been cut drooped over onto the shoulder and partially blocked the way along one of the busier parts of one of my regular routes.

Japanese Knotweed is an example of a plant that was originally introduced as a garden specimen and got away. For more information about it and the other big knotweeds see this page from the Whatcom County Noxious Weed Board.

Common ToadflaxAnother pretty roadside weed, not nearly as widespread around here, is Common Toadflax (Linaria vulgaris). It’s only a foot or so tall and covered with attractive yellow flowers. I saw a patch of it along Slater Road near the railroad tracks yesterday. It’s not on the Washington noxious weed list, but its cousin Dalmatian Toadflax is.

Of course, not everything blooming along the road is a weed. I also saw quite a bit of the fall-blooming Pacific Asters on my rides this past weekend. My long ride was a loop out Mt. Baker Highway, down Mosquito Lake Road to Acme, down to Park Road and over to Lake Whatcom, then south past Cain Lake to Alger, and home by way of Lake Samish and Lake Padden. You can see the route on Map My Ride.

Elmer’s Ragwort

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Yesterday morning I took a break from captioning and stepped out in our side yard.  Mt. Baker was visible and the clouds looked like they might stay away, or form nice photogenic framing for the mountains. So I bagged office work, packed a lunch, and headed up the road to Artist Point and the trail to Ptarmigan Ridge.

By the time I got there, the clouds were covering the summit of both Mt. Shuksan and Mt. Baker, but I still thought there were some good possibilities for later in the afternoon.  It was about 1 pm when I hit the trail out around Table Mountain. I ran into a couple of friends along the trail, both of whom were on their way back from shorter hikes than I planned. Marie pointed out the wonderful fragrance of the masses of Nelson’s Brook Saxifrage along the numerous snowmelt streams crossing the Ptarmigan Ridge trail. This was one of four or five species of saxifrage along the trail.

Senecio elmeriThe farther out the trail I went the cloudier it got, so mountain vistas were out of the question. I crossed a few short snow patches without taking my ice axe off my pack. Then rounding a corner in the rather barren rocky and gravelly alpine habitat I spied several clumps of bright golden flowers at my feet. I could tell at a glance that they were Senecio, but I didn’t recognize the species.  I pulled out my plant list for the trail and the one book I carried, Mountain Plants of the Pacific Northwest by Ron Taylor and George Douglas, and turned to the ragworts. There was my plant, Senecio elmeri, which was new to me.

Elmer’s Ragwort isn’t rare, but it only occurs in a few counties of northwest Washington and in parts of British Columbia. Ragworts certainly aren’t my favorite flowers, but this one was rather nice. It was growing on very gravelly soil (is there really any soil under all that gravel) and as is typical for plants in that habitat the clumps were well spaced. According to University of Washington Herbarium records it’s been collected several places within a few miles of where I found it blooming.

I continued hiking out the trail until my self-imposed turnaround time of 4:30.  I didn’t make it to the end, where the trail meets one of the glaciers coming off Mt. Baker.  I didn’t have time to hike down to an unnamed lake that looked interesting, either. Such is the hazard of getting a late start. I made it back to my truck by about 7 pm, with a good 45 minutes to spare before darkness. Even though I didn’t get the shots I wanted it was a good day.

Opposites

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Mountain Arnica and LupineColors on the opposite side of the color wheel make great contrasting combinations, like this Mountain Arnica (Arnica latifolia) blossom set against Broadleaf Lupine (Lupinus latifolius). This pair also shows a contrast between the radially symmetrical ray flowers of the Arnica and the pea flowers of the Lupine. Spiky vs. rounded. Sharp foreground vs. soft-focus background.

The Arnica and Lupine combination is prevalent mid-summer in the subalpine meadows of the North Cascades. Pretty much every meadow will have at least some patches of these two, in various combinations. This pair was photographed in the shade along the Skyline Divide Trail on August 15. On a clear day there are spectacular vistas of Mount Baker from Skyline. On this particular day the sky was hazy bright so it photographed nearly white, which isn’t very appealing. I shot the cover of Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest from Skyline a few years ago.

This photo was made with a 100mm macro lens set at f/4 to keep the background soft. I also shot variations at f/5.6 and f/8, but like this softer version best. I don’t often like to line everything up in the center of the frame, but here the subject is very symmetrical and the main focal point is below center so I think there’s a nice balance to the frame.
We’ve had so many cloudy days this August and into September that I may not get back to Skyline while there are still flowers blooming. Maybe I’ll get up there for fall foliage.