Passions — a blog

Cusp of Spring

Posted on by

Notwithstanding the cold and spitting snow in Bellingham today, the earliest signs of spring are popping up in our garden.  I was out a couple of days ago to prune back a bunch of herbaceous material that had frozen back during our December cold snap. At the same time I noticed that the first of the early crocus were showing color.

Early Crocus

This particular crocus was right along the sidewalk where it gets a little warmer from the sun hitting the pavement. We have hundreds of these early crocus scattered around the garden and most of them are just showing the tips of their foliage. It will be a while before the rest of them start blooming. We’ve also got snowdrops that are showing buds. Some years we’d have more things in bloom by now, but it’s been a colder winter than normal.

At least we’re not still buried under 10 inches of crusty old snow like a gardening friend in Coeur d’Alene reported a few days ago.

Photography Merit Badge Class

Posted on by

I’ve been working with three Scouts from Bellingham’s Troop 3 on the Photography Merit Badge since early January.  We started with the basics of what is a camera and how does it work. We’ve looked at photos to help the boys get a sense of what makes a photo a good one. Saturday afternoon we met at Whatcom Falls Park to make some photographs, using the bridge, falls, creek, and each other as subjects.

With digital cameras its easy to give a quick assignment, have the boys shoot, then do an instant critique from the display on the back of their cameras. Then they can go and improve the pictures that need work. We spent about 2 hours working on the basics of composition:  rule of thirds, leading lines, filling the frame, and so forth.

While the boys were shooting, I was photographing them. Here’s a quick video of some of my photos of the boys.

These were shot with my Canon S70 pocket camera, optimized in Lightroom 2.3, and the animation created with Animoto.

End of an Era

Posted on by

Today I delivered hundreds of pounds of note cards to theWashington Native Plant Society offices in Seattle. Yesterday, the good people from the ReStore in Bellingham picked up another truckload. After 15 years, I’m out of the note card business.

Back in 1993 when I was laid off from my day job, I went into business with a line of note cards. I invested thousands in printing and then tried to peddle them through retailers. After a year I determined I couldn’t make a sufficient living in the paper products business and changed course. Since then I continued to sell some of the cards, but mostly they were taking up space.

That space will now become a more friendly camera room for portraits. I’ve still got some cleanup work to do, but it feels good to have the cards gone. The two groups that took them, along with the Whatcom Land Trust, which took some cards earlier this month, will put them to good use in the coming years. Otherwise they would have fed the hydropulper at some paper mill.

Animating a Glorious January Day

Posted on by

I got a call the other day from one of the young men in Troop 3 asking if I’d spend part of the day with them as they visited and photographed on the WWU campus and in Fairhaven.  I agreed and had a good time wandering around campus in the morning and the historic neighborhood in the afternoon. I carried my pocket camera and had a short animated video in mind while shooting.

Last week I was at the PPA ImagingUSA conference and learned aboutAnimoto. This was an opportunity to play with the free version, which is limited to 30-second videos. It works the same for longer versions, but you have to pay.

Here’s a clip from Western:

And from Fairhaven this afternoon:

Everything in the two videos was photographed with a Canon S70. The raw files were processed in Adobe Lightroom 2.2, then exported as JPEGS and uploaded to the Animoto site to create the videos.

Winter Solstice

Posted on by

Once in a while we get a “real” winter in Bellingham.  This is one of those years. We’ve had several days with lows below 20°F and snow that’s stayed around.

Bridge at Whatcom Falls, winter

Today I drove out to Whatcom Falls Park to photograph the falls and the stone bridge in the snow. We’d had another 4-6 inches of snow overnight and the temperature was still in the 20s so the conditions were perfect. I spent about an hour around the falls shooting from as many vantage points as I could safely get to. One of my favorites is to look downstream at the bridge from the top of the falls, which is the view here.

I also photographed the falls from on the bridge, and from streamside downstream from the bridge. I have a nice photo from that vantage point from the snow of Christmas 1996 which was published on a calendar for Towner Press a few years ago. I have a large print of that one available for sale if anyone is interested.

Lighted shrub at VanDusen
After warming up with a bowl of soup at home, I headed north to VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver for their festival of lights. The roads were a bit messy, but I made it without difficulty, only to find a sign on the entrance saying the lights had been cancelled for tonight because of the weather.  I got there about 3:45 and the garden closed at 4:00 pm, so I had only a short time in the garden. They had a few of the lights turned on, so I got a handful of photos before I had to leave.

It was snowing the whole time I was in Vancouver, so the streets and roads were in worse shape on the way home, particularly on the Canadian side of the border. Hopefully I can get back up to VanDusen for the lights while there’s still snow on the ground as the display there is very nice and well worth the trip.

A Walk to Whatcom Falls

Posted on by

Weathered Siding

Winter arrived in Bellingham yesterday, with blowing snow last night and temperatures dropping from our typical mid-30s and low-40s down to the teens. Then the sun came out, so I decided it was time for a walk along the Railroad Trail to Whatcom Falls Park.  The round trip distance is something like 8 miles, which makes for a nice Sunday afternoon stroll. It was definitely too icy for me to want to take a bike ride.

I put my new iPhone in my pocket, set to play music through Pandora, and headed out. Sidewalks and trails were icy in spots, bare in some, and just packed snow the rest of the way. The wind was still blowing, but I was bundled up against it. I started out a bit cold, but by the time I got to Barkley I was toasty warm and took my gloves off.  I carried my Canon S70 camera in my pocket in case I came across anything interesting.

I don’t know the history of the building in the photo above, but I’ve liked looking at it every time I walk or bicycle the trail just east of the I-5 crossing. With the low afternoon sun accenting the weathered wood and peeling paint I just couldn’t resist.

Whatcom Falls

There were lots of people out on the trail — walkers, joggers, a few on bicycles, and a couple of parents pulling little kids on sleds. Dogs of every size accompanied their humans, too.

When I got to Whatcom Falls Park there were several people on the stone bridge enjoying the rushing water of the falls.  A couple of other people were also taking pictures.  I used the bridge as a tripod, resting my camera on the railing so I could use a slow shutter speed and blur the water. There’s always a lot more water flowing over the falls in the winter than in the summer, so they look fuller and more exciting.

This time of year I don’t do a lot of photography, so it was good to get out and exercise my shutter finger as well as my legs.  I don’t think it would atrophy from disuse, but there’s no reason to take that chance.  Periodically I think I should discipline myself to make at least one photo each and every day. I’m pretty focused, but I haven’t made the daily photo a habit. Perhaps that should be my New Year’s resolution.

Darn Near Dark at 3 pm

Posted on by

Well, it’s definitely the dark and rainy season here in the northwest.  It’s not quite 3 pm on this wet afternoon and it’s nearly dark.  Official sunset isn’t for another hour or so, but you couldn’t tell that from looking outside.  Our solar panels aren’t getting enough light to produce anything.  The whole day, we’ve produced a whopping 630 watts of power.  In comparison, on a sunny afternoon we’ll produce that much in about 7 minutes.  It would be a good day to curl up by the fireplace with a good book, if only we had a fireplace. I’ll read this guide by SmartlyHeated, that my brother keeps asking about, maybe I’ll get inspired.

But even in the rain the house finches have been feeding on sunflower seeds from the feeder in the back yard.  And the raindrops glisten on the bare branches of the kousa dogwood. With rhododendrons, daphne, and ferns, the view out our kitchen window always shows something green.

It will be time to put up some Christmas lights on the Korean fir and dogwood soon.

In Defense of Non-conventional Rock Gardens

Posted on by

A guest entry from Panayoti Kelaidis, originally posted on the Alpine-L discussion list. Visit Panayoti’s Botanic Gardens Blog from the Denver Botanic Gardens.

I possess a classic sort of rock garden, chockablock full of androsaces, primulas, saxifrages, gentians galore and all the other card carrying members of the Bona Fide Alpine Plant club. In fact, I suspect I grow as many of these as just about anyone else. I love them of course. I would not want to be without them. You can find most plants in this garden represented in many of the several hundred rock garden books I have accumulated in the course of my lifetime: it’s pretty conventional really. I still like it.

And yet I have another garden where nary a saxifrage grows, let alone a primula, much less an androsace. Here you will find over 100 kinds of miniature cacti, South African succulents, penstemons, eriogonums, ten species of Talinum, oncocyclus iris, juno iris galore, crocuses, strange cushion plants like Satureja spinescens. These are grown in crevices and among rocks just as they might in nature. Probably half the plants in this garden have never appeared in a single rock garden tome. In my heart of hearts, I love both gardens very much, and would be hard put to choose between them: the dryland rock garden has one stellar quality, however. It is utterly novel and fresh in every way.

Mexican Hat in Blue Gramma Meadow

But what would we make of the blue gramma meadow filled with fritillaria, calochortus and allium? or the twin berms, one filled with tiny carpeting treasures from Western America (the usual steppe rabble) and the other from the Eastern hemisphere: veronicas, acantholimons, tulips and a jillion tiny mints and composites. And hardly a single rock in any of these gardens, which comprise many thousands of square feet? They would hardly qualify as a rock garden technically. They sure as heck ain’t perennial borders.
Continue reading →

Fallen Leaves

Posted on by

Fallen Cottonwood Leaves

The rainy season has begun and after a glorious and drier than normal October, it’s wet out in the woods. These Black Cottonwood leaves were covering a portion of the trail around Canyon Lake this morning. The Vine Maples lost their leaves nearly a month ago, followed by the Bigleaf Maples. The Red Alders, which aren’t colorful at all, still have a few leaves.

Of course, all the conifers and evergreen ferns are still green. That’s one of the big differences between winter in the northwest and in places that have an almost exclusively deciduous forest. I’ve come to like what we have here and don’t really want to go back to having only shades of brown in the winter forest.

Today’s hike was an easy stroll around Canyon Lake.  It’s about 2 miles and nearly level. There were still a few lingering Tiarella flowers. I saw at least one Large-leaved Geum with its bright yellow flower, and there were several of the non-native Herb Robert flowers around as well. Mostly what we looked at along the trail were the myriad of mosses on rotting logs and tree trunks and the large number of lichens. There were liverworts, too, but they look a lot like mosses or lichens if you don’t know any better.

I only carried my little Canon S70 pocket camera today.  I’d hauled my big camera along the same trail about a month ago, creating a number of nice images that I  haven’t gotten captioned yet.  It’s nice to travel light for a change.

Autumn Larch

Posted on by

Larch in Autumn GardenOur native Larch is a tree I don’t see in gardens very often. All summer it’s a soft green, but in the autumn it turns brilliant gold for a short period before dropping its needles for the winter.

This larch is in Cynthia Krieble’s Ellensburg, Washington garden. It’s right out front where everyone passing by on the sidewalk or street can see it in a border of mixed conifers, drought-tolerant perennials, and grasses. Other plants visible in the photo include red-twig dogwood, Russian sage, and a juniper. Cynthia is an artist who gardens like she paints, mixing colors and textures in a varied palette. You can see some of her work at Linda Hodges Gallery.

I made the photo this afternoon when the sun peeked out from the thin, high clouds that moved in today. At this time of year the sun never gets very high in the sky, so even mid-afternoon light is low and dramatic. Backlighting enhances the texture and color in the needles. With the sun at my back the larch, while still attractive, was not nearly as exciting.

This was my fourth visit to Cynthia’s garden. Photos from the others are at Inland Northwest Gardening.