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.
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
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
A week or so ago one of the garden magazine editors I work with regularly sent an e-mail saying she was looking for photos of gardens with flea market stuff in them for a story. A couple of days later she wrote again, saying they were going to do a whole special magazine on the subject. I searched my files and put together a preview gallery for Diane, and then got to work trying to find some new material.
The Birchwood Garden Club met last Wednesday night, and I asked whether anyone knew of gardens that might fit the bill. One lady, who I didn’t know well, mentioned her friend in La Conner and said she’d give her a call. Cutting to the chase, I visited Chris McCarthy’s garden on Friday afternoon and spent a couple of hours making some new images.
Chris was a little hesitant for me to shoot on Friday afternoon since I’d initially approached her to “just take a look.” But the light was nice, filtering through the trees, and she had some nice stuff in her garden. I also convinced her that I was good at cropping weeds out of the frame and that we could just pluck the dandelion seed heads that were in the way.
This hand rising out of a pot on the back porch, seemingly caressing the emerging foliage of some balloon flowers, was one of the first images I made while Chris weeded the next shot. Continue reading
Try saying the title three times fast. If you’re not up on your botanical Latin maybe the words don’t quite roll off your tongue.
Anyway, what do these have in common? They’re all members of the rose family, Rosaceae, they’re all in bloom right now, and they all have tasty edible fruit later in the season.
The Amelanchier alnifolia, commonly called Serviceberry or Saskatoon, is a large shrub with masses of flowers with shaggy white petals. It’s native on both sides of the Cascades, smells sweet, and is showy along roadsides right now. My friend David Perry collected some for a bouquet over around Spokane a week or so ago and wrote about it on one of his blogs, A Fresh Bouquet. David is an exquisite photographer with a keen eye and discerning taste. If you’re not following his blogs you should be.
There are other species of Serviceberry in other parts of the country. I learned the name of this plant, pronounced “sarvisberry,” as a kid in West Virginia. Out there the species is Amelanchier arborea. Whatever you call it, the flowers will be followed by small dark purple fruit around mid-summer. I usually leave them for the birds, but they’re edible and often used for jams and jellies. Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago I was over to Ellensburg for the semi-annual board meeting of the Washington Native Plant Society. It’s an all-day business meeting dealing with important affairs of the organization, but not near as much fun as getting out and poking around among the plants.
The next day Don Knoke, one of the most knowledgeable plant guys in the area, led a field trip along the Old Vantage Highway with stops at Whiskey Dick Wildlife Area and a couple of places in Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park. We ambled among the grasses and sagebrush, meandered across the lithosol, and threaded our way among the plants on the sandy dunes along Wanapum Reservoir on the Columbia River.
This photo was made near the Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park visitor center at Vantage, just a hundred yards or so off the road toward the river. Showy Phlox, Phlox speciosa, and Carey’s Balsamroot, Balsamorhiza carreyana, are what’s blooming here. In mid-April you’ll find Showy Phlox carpeting the hillsides in many places throughout central Washington. It truly lives up to its name. Carey’s is just one of several species of Balsamroot. Just over the hill to the west of Ellensburg you’re more likely to find Balsamorhiza sagittata which has somewhat fuzzy leaves and distinctly hairy bracts below the blossoms. Continue reading
I had a great group of students in my class at the WNPS Study Weekend May 23. We waited out the morning rain with an indoor discussion of dozens of technical details to help each person learn more about the capabilities of their camera and how to take best advantage of them. Then we headed out to a nearby trail and made photographs. I worked with each person individually to help them improve their composition and technique. It’s very satisfying to watch as someone tries something new and improves their photo skills. Feedback from my students was universally positive. Continue reading
Dirty Dan Harris is credited with being the founder of Fairhaven, one of the four communities on Bellingham Bay that merged in the early 20th century to form Bellingham. The fine citizens of Fairhaven celebrate this bit of history each April with a two-day festival of seafood, music, and all-around fun on the Fairhaven Village Green. I spent the day photographing. Here’s a quick video slideshow, with music by The Gallus Brothers who were performing live during the event.
You can see a handful of photos at a more leisurely pace over on the Fairhaven website.
It’s always fun to hang out at an event like this. I ran into lots of people I knew, and even recognized some of them. I’m a bit conspicuous with a big heavy camera and lens hanging from my neck. I shot a lot with my 70-200mm, using a little on-camera fill flash to put highlights in eyes and brighten things up a tad under the overcast skies.
If you haven’t been to Dirty Dan Days, put it on your calendar for next April if you don’t see this in time to get down there this (Sunday) afternoon for the chowder cookoff and piano race.
Here’s a video from Sunday, with lots of happy people enjoying the chowder cookoff, dancing in the sun to the Gallus Brothers, and the world’s only piano race.
I’ve put the photos from the videos online in two galleries for viewing at your own pace: Saturday photos and Sunday photos.
Using native plants in your garden is becoming more and more popular, and for good reason. They’re hardy, adapted to your climate, and resistant to many diseases and insects. Plus, we’ve got a lot of really gorgeous and desirable plants that are native to our part of the world.
Several days ago one of my gardening friends who lives a few miles outside Bellingham invited me out to see and photograph her early spring garden. These western trilliums, Trillium ovatum, are what greeted me as I came up the long gravel driveway toward her home. This patch has obviously been growing here for many years and is slowly spreading. They’re in a woodland habitat, but get morning sun.
If you’re fortunate to have this plant in your garden, which I do, look around at the base of the big plants for the babies. Note how the first-year plants only have a single leaf, two-year olds have two leaves, and those three and over have the typical three leaves of an adult plant. It may take more than three years from seed for a trillium to flower so your patience will be rewarded.
There’s no gardening rule that says you have to use either all natives or all exotics in your garden. Here Sherri has planted lungwort, Pulmonaria sp., in the same bed with the trilliums. I like the contrast of the speckled foliage and blue blossoms of the lungwort with the dazzling white trillium blossoms behind.
One of the keys to garden design is to mix complementary colors and textures together. I think this pair combines very nicely. Both are perennials with foliage that will look decent through most of the summer if they don’t get too hot or too dry. The blossoms will disappear but that’s OK. We’ll enjoy them now and move on to some other part of the garden later in the season.
One of our nicest native groundcovers is redwood sorrel, Oxalis oregana. It isn’t truly native here in Whatcom County, but it is a northwest native that grows very well here when planted. In fact, it can become invasive if you don’t watch out. In this photo it’s the plant toward the back at the base of the big Douglas-fir. The other two prominent plants here are wood anemone and a Corsican hellebore.
Again, Sheri has combined natives and non-natives in the same bed, taking advantage of contrasting textures, leaf shapes, and foliage colors.
These photos were made fairly late in the afternoon under overcast skies, with more wind than I would have liked. I cranked the ISO up to 400 to get a higher shutter speed. Some of the newer high-end cameras have low enough noise to go even higher, but I start to notice the noise with my Canon EOS 1Ds Mk II when I go above 400. Even so, coming from shooting Fuji Velvia at ISO 50, being able to use ISO 400 reliably is a blessing. That’s a three-stop improvement, which can make all the difference needed to stop plants blowing in the breeze from blurring in the frame.
