Passions — a blog

Horticulture Cover

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August 2009 Horticulture coverI got an e-mail this afternoon from a gardener in Ontario, Oregon that I’d visited last month. She’d just received her Horticulture magazine for August. Jean wrote, “Got my issue of Horticulture yesterday and was reading it this afternoon and just now noticed your photo MADE THE COVER!!! Fantastic!! It’s a beauty too with the sweetbriar rose. … Congratulations on a lovely piece of photography with great distribution!”

I always like covers. They pay better than inside and are great showcases for my work. In this case, the photo was made in June 2004 while I was working on the wildflowers book. I found this sweetbriar rose along the road in the small town of Richland, Oregon. Richland is about halfway between Baker City and Halfway. The cover photo was the first frame I shot when I found the specimen plant. I continued shooting, and ultimately chose another version for my book.

When I’m photographing plants I almost always look for several different ways to see them. I aim to blend the art of photography with my knowledge of plants. Some photos lean more toward the art side and some more to the science, but I usually have both elements in mind while I’m working.

This is a mid-day photo. That’s not when I usually like to work, but the clear blue sky makes a nice clean background for the blossom. I shot with a 100mm macro lens on a Canon D60 digital camera. Its 6 megapixels were plenty for a full-page magazine reproduction.

If you’ve got the magazine, you’ll find more of my work filling pages 25 (gas plant) and 56 (Acer carpinifolium).

Fresh!

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Raspberries with Blue GlassThis is about as fresh as you can get. Natalie picked a large bowl of red raspberries in our garden after dinner tonight. As she brought them in I thought they’d make a nice still life.

I chose an antique pressed-glass bowl from the family heirlooms and carefully poured some raspberries in. I placed it on our white UK pvc tablecloths and added some of our collection of blue glass in the background for contrast.

I cleared a space to work on the table and played with placements until I got something I liked. This frame was made with my 100mm macro lens, set pretty wide open. I also shot a few frames with my 90mm tilt-shift lens to control depth of field. Since the photo was made after 8 pm on a cloudy evening, I did a custom white balance on the tablecloth. I used a handheld small reflector to add a little fill light on the bowl of berries, but this is basically just very soft window light exposed for about 4 seconds.
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Award Winners

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This is the first year I’ve entered the Professional Photographers of America International Print Competition. I came away from the very competitive judging with two award-winning prints that will join the PPA General Collection and be exhibited at Imaging USA in Nashville, Tennessee next January.

Forest Primeval“Forest Primeval” was photographed on an ethereal misty morning visit to the Whatcom Land Trust’s Stimpson Family Nature Preserve near Lake Whatcom. It depicts a majestic old-growth western red cedar surrounded by skunk cabbage and ferns in a lush forest scene. Fog in the background gives the landscape a sense of mystery and depth.

A light rainy was falling on this moody day. The rain helps to saturate the colors and the overcast sky creates a very large soft light source. That helps to open up the shadows and reveal detail that would be obscured on a sunny day. While sunshine and warm air certainly make for pleasant hiking, our northwest rain forests don’t look quite right unless it’s a rainy day.

I’ve been a supporter of WLT for a long time and contributed photos for both the original Whatcom Places book in 1997 and the revised Whatcom Places II book ten years later in 2007. In preparation for the second book I visited several Land Trust preserves to photograph. It was on one of those visits that I found this wetland forest below the loop trail. I made several variations on the theme, but ultimately chose this one as my favorite.
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Gardens Galore

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Lilies on Patio
June is a spectacular time in northwest gardens. Many communities schedule garden tours during the month, often as a fundraiser for a local non-profit organization. These lilies, in large containers flanking the entrance to a nice home outside Mount Vernon, Washington were among the sights to delight the senses on the Skagit Symphony’s Gardens of Note tour on Sunday, June 28.

The week before, Whatcom Horticultural Society held their tour in Bellingham with six wonderful gardens. June 13 and 14 I toured gardens in Washington’s tri-cities of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco for the Academy of Children’s Theater. The Boise, Idaho tour was the same weekend, supporting the Idaho Botanical Garden. I missed the Yakima tour, which supports the Yakima Area Arboretum.
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Yellow Coralroot

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Yellow Coralroot, Corallorhiza trifida, is one of four species in this genus found in the Pacific Northwest. It’s also the one that has been eluding me for several years. Back in 2003 and 2004 when I was chasing wildflowers all over Washington and Oregon I spent parts of several days hunting for it in places where I’d been reliably informed that it grew. Each time I came up empty and in the end Phyllis and I left it out of Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest.
Yellow Coralroot
On June 20 I finally found it along the Goat Mountain trail in the North Cascades at about 3500′ and created the photo here, as well as many others. Yellow Coralroot grows in moist forests and can live in deep shade because it is myco-heterotrophic and derives most of its nutrients from a fungus. Other coralroots share this non-photosynthetic way of getting their food.

The place where most of the specimens were growing was a depression on a relatively flat bench part way up the mountain, just before the trail starts climbing again. If you know the trail you’ll recognize the spot. Other plants growing in the area were tiarella and oak fern. I’d passed this spot several times on previous hikes, but never in mid-June when the coralroot was blooming. Once my hiking companions and I saw the first ones we spotted many more scattered through the woods along the trail for next 1/4 mile or less.
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Tweedy’s Lewisia

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Tweedy's Lewisia
The Wenatchee Mountains in central Washington are home to several endemic species — plants that are found nowhere else in the world. Tweedy’s Lewisia, Cistanthe tweedyi or Lewisia tweedyi, is one of those endemics. It’s actually a little more widespread than some, but the largest populations are in the Wenatchees.

Tweedy’s is one of the showiest of the Lewisias, with multiple large salmon-cream flowers and thick succulent leaves. It blooms in mid-June in the mountains. You’ll find it scattered throughout its range, but almost always growing out of rock outcroppings and often on serpentine. Continue reading →

Native Oddity

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Four-petaled Trillium

Occasionally mother nature does something odd, like put four parts on a plant that usually has only three. This four-petaled western white trillium (Trillium ovatum) is one such oddity. Trilliums usually have parts in threes — flowers, leaves, sepals. Like four-leaf clover, four-petal trilliums are quite rare. I think I’ve seen one sometime in my past, but can’t recall just where and when. Whether, like clover, they bring good luck is open to question. But I’ll take the optimistic view and say “yes.” Continue reading →

Lingering Spring Bulbs

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Tulips are usually finished blooming around here before mid-May, but this has been a cooler than normal spring.

Tulips & Forget-me-nots

These pink tulips, planted with masses of blue forget-me-nots, were blooming today in Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Park. Other flower beds had different colors of tulips, and there were also pink and white forget-me-nots. In the small quarry garden there was a veritable river of blue surrounding one of the dwarf conifers. Upon looking closer, this sea was dotted with red-striped yellow tulips. The gunnera in the large quarry garden was bordered by purple tulips.

It was a rather dull, overcast day, ending with light rain that got progressively harder. The brilliant colors of the tulips and other flowers practically glowed in the soft light. Queen Elizabeth Park was teeming with people, most of whom were speaking languages other than English. It’s one of the more popular tourist destinations in Vancouver, but also popular with locals.

After I’d exhausted the possibilities in QE, I headed across town to VanDusen. More tulips were blooming there, as well as many of the rhododendrons along the walkway of the same name. Both gardens have Dove (or Handkerchief) Trees (Davidia involucrata) and they were at their peak bloom today. The tree gets its name from the very showy white bracts that frame the blossoms. It can be challenging to photograph because they’re hanging in the shade below the branches. Conveniently, one branch at QE was nearly at eye level and I was able to frame it against a dark conifer background.

Shooting Stars
I eventually started to get pretty wet, but finished the afternoon photographing some rather stunning clumbs of Shooting Stars (Dodecatheon meadia). This species is native to the eastern and midwestern United States and is often grown in gardens. In addition to the pinkish-purple here, they also come in near-white. This clump is particularly vigorous, obviously happy with the care the VanDusen gardeners are giving it.

I worked all day with two lenses — the all-purpose 24-105mm and the 70-200mm. Part of the time I stopped down significantly with a moderately wide lens to get maximum depth of field and other times I wanted to separate the background from the subject so used a large aperture with a long focal length. Choosing between the two techniques is really a matter of seeing the subject and thinking about the story to be told and how an editor might want to use the photo in print. There’s no magic formula, just keeping the mind open to different possibilities.

One other detail: these photos are straight from the camera with no post-processing. Breeze Browser generated the web versions from the JPEGs embedded in the Canon raw files.

Fantastic Fritillaries

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Our Koma Kulshan chapter of the Washington Native Plant Society hiked up through the new Baker Mountain Ranch Preserve on Lummi Island last Saturday to begin a plant survey for the Lummi Island Heritage Trust, which recently acquired the property. There were 13 of us in the party, more than the LIHT prefers, which meant many eyes to spot the flora and make identifications. Most of the plants were common so books didn’t have to come out of packs very often.

Chocolate Lilies

At the end of our hike, where the Baker Mountain Ranch Preserve adjoins DNR land, are a couple of small balds. These are areas with thin rocky soil, facing west, that bake in the summer sun. Plants that grow here bloom early before the soil dries out. The choice find on Saturday was a spectacular clump of Chocolate Lilies (Fritillaria affinis). They’re not rare, but they only grow in specific habitats so you have to know where to find them. The photo here wasn’t made on our Saturday trip, but shows what the plant looks like. There are more photos on my Pacific Northwest Wildflowers website.

Chocolate Lilies grow from bulbs. They’ll slowly multiply, like daffodils in your garden, if left undisturbed and the growing conditions are right. However, each plant doesn’t necessarily bloom every year, so you may think your favorite lilies have disappeared when in fact they’re just taking a year off.

We also found nice patches of Oregon Fawn Lily at the edge of the bald, along with Rosy Plectritis, Spring Gold, and Menzies’ Delphinium. Bright orange Harsh Paintbrush dotted the steep cliffs in a couple of places and was also along the trail near the top. Camas and Oregon Sunshine weren’t in bloom, but easily recognizable. We pulled lots of the invasive Scots Broom from one site and packed it out so the plants couldn’t take root again somewhere else.

Another plant of interest was Douglas Maple (Acer glabrum var. douglasii). On the BRP it completely replaces Vine Maple, which is the common understory tree in Bellingham and elsewhere on mainland lowland forests around Puget Sound.

In all, we listed about 135 plants. There were others that we could see but not identify until they come into flower later in the season, including some orchids we’re very curious about. We plan to return in early July.

Cover Appeal

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It’s always nice to have my work featured on a magazine cover. Here’s the April issue of This Old House.

This Old House April 2009 Cover

A similar image runs full page inside as the lead photo for the story about patio pavers. Both were made on an early May visit to this delightful Coeur d’Alene, Idaho garden. I’ve made two additional visits, one in July and another in January when several inches of snow covered everything.

The home and garden are on a small lot on the old fort grounds not far from the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene. Being close to the lake, Patti enjoys a slightly warmer microclimate than gardeners just a few miles away. She’s stuffed her garden (without feeling crowded) with a great plant palette, complemented with appropriate hardscaping.

Large deciduous trees provide ample shade from the summer sun, and made the garden a joy to photograph on this spring morning. Soft filtered light is almost always flattering to a garden. For that matter, it’s flattering to most subjects. This photo was made with all natural light. No reflectors, diffusers, nor strobes were needed. It’s a matter of looking for, and seeing the light, then taking advantage of it. I always carry light modifiers, but they often stay in my bag.