Passions — a blog

Sunshine and Storm Clouds

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One of the challenges of any kind of outdoor photography is dealing with the weather. I’m in the midst of a week-long photography session in the Spokane, Washington area at the moment and nearly froze my fingers off this morning while working in a garden under seriously overcast skies.

This week’s overcast is in strong contrast to the weather I had earlier in May while photographing gardens in the Canadian Okanagan. That week I had one day of partly-cloudy skies (meaning the clouds skittered by, giving alternately sunny and bright overcast conditions) and three days of pure blue sky and bright sunshine.

Lilacs border a garden overlooking Okanagan Lake

Lilacs border a garden overlooking Okanagan Lake

Ideal weather for garden photography is a bright, high overcast, with enough sun coming through the clouds for soft shadows, but not so much that the contrast between lit and shaded areas is extreme. Unfortunately, it’s not often that I’m blessed with these ideal conditions. I tend to work early in the morning and late in the afternoon for garden landscapes. Mid-day is a good time to take a break and refresh — unless it’s a cloudy day which often means starting later and working during what should be high noon if the sun were out. It’s difficult to predict, and I’ve learned not to completely believe the weatherman.

Sometimes I just have to make do with what I find. Today, that meant waiting around in the morning for the sky to brighten up enough to be worth going out. I had time to read both the Sunday and Monday newspapers while waiting. Then I took an early lunch break when it started raining on me. The light was definitely soft, but with the combinations of plants in the gardens where I was working I was able to make some nice images. It wasn’t quite the light I would have ordered, but it worked.

Late this afternoon I started shooting in a park-like private garden with an incredible collection of Hostas and some nice small conifers. The sun broke through the clouds briefly and I thought I was going to have about three hours of nice light. However, the storm clouds soon rolled back in, the sky darkened, and rain threatened. I packed up and returned to my lodging to wait for another day. Soon after I left the sky opened and a thunderstorm dropped hail, winds picked up to 30 mph, and the temperature plummeted 10 degrees in 30 minutes at the public radio station I was listening to while driving across town.

Inland Northwest Gardening Website

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The new Inland Northwest Gardening website now has photo galleries for six gardens in south-central Washington I visited and photographed the last week of April.

Cactus Garden

One of the more interesting gardens showcases cold-hardy cacti. Ron McKitrick, who gardens on the outskirts of Yakima, has been collecting and growing cacti for nearly 30 years. He’s traveled throughout the Americas to see these interesting plants in the wild and is now growing and propagating a large number of species. I learned during my visit that cacti are native only to the New World. They’re found as far north as the plains of Montana and as far south as Patagonia.

The first cacti to bloom for Ron are the Echinocereus, Escobaria, Mammilaria, Pediocactus, Sclerocactus, and Thelocactus. Opuntia, Cholla, and other species will be along later.

See this unique garden on the Inland Northwest Gardening website under Yakima. Ron’s website is Hillside Desert Botanical Gardens.

Camas Prairies and Sagebrush Ridges

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Late April and early May are prime time to view Camas (Cammasia quamash) prairies in western Washington. I visited two of them last week. These prairies were a lush contrast to the open sagebrush-studded area where I’d photographed just a few days earlier in central Washington. Follow the links to see galleries of images from all three places.

Camas Prairie
Lacamas Lake Park in Clark County was a new area to me, with several modest size Camas prairies, most ringed by Garry Oaks (Quercus garryana). I also came across a plant combination I’d never seen before — Oregon Fawn Lilies growing with Camas.

Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve, in Thurston County just south of Olympia, is one of the few remaining remnants of mounded prairie in the South Puget Sound area. There’s a paved interpretive trail, as well as two longer loops among the mounds. In addition to Camas, I saw Western Buttercups, Spring Gold, Serviceberry, Kinnickinick, and Early Blue Violets among the grasses. It was a dark and windy afternoon, with rain threatening so I didn’t spend as much time as I might have under more pleasurable weather conditions. Continue reading →

If Its Monday This Must Be Bellevue

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I’ve just finished a whirlwind speaking tour, with presentations in Beaverton, Oregon and Richland, Bellevue, and Vancouver, Washington. In between, I photographed in a large handful of central Washington gardens.

Phyllis came up from Central Point to join me at the Cedar Hills Crossing Powell’s Bookstore on April 24 to talk about places to go and flowers to see within a day’s drive of Portland. We usually present individually, but with no rehearsal we kept our audience thoroughly entertained and informed, easily playing off each other to the crowd.

I took off the next morning for Walla Walla, where I was given the grand tour of gardens. I photographed in one impeccibly maintained garden and will get photos online soon. Then it was on to Richland and Kennewick where I visited and photographed more gardens on Thursday and Friday. Continue reading →

Favorite Balsamroot on Badger Mountain

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I’m in the Tri-Cities area for a few days to photograph gardens and to teach a workshop on photographing wildflowers for the Columbia Basin chapter of the Washington Native Plant Society and Richand City Parks. The workshop includes an all-day field session on Saturday where I’ll work with my dozen students on techniques. There are several possible locations not too far from town, including Badger Mountain which is immediately south of Richland and Kennewick. I’d never been up there until this afternoon.

Rosy Balsamroot and Lupines

The trail begins at the end of the road in a new housing development, then climbs 800 feet in about 1.3 miles. A “friends” group has been working on the trail so it’s in good shape. The vegetation is predominately grasses with flowering plants mixed in here and there. The trail passes through a lithosol area (thin, rocky soils) which has the endemic Rosy Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza rosea) pictured here. The soil must not be quite as thin as some lithosols, because there were lupines and bluebunch wheatgrass growing nearby — both species that usually want a little more soil to be happy. Continue reading →

Planting Day

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Natalie and I have been working on her mother’s new garden about a mile from our house. We started when she first bought the house with a few shrubs and conifers after Betty had a raised berm and rock-filled dry stream built in the front yard. Those early plantings, now in their third growing season, are looking very nice.Native Shrubs Ready for Planting

Earlier this spring, Natalie and Betty worked up a plan to add many more plants to the front garden, and a layer of taller small trees to the back of the border in the back yard garden. They placed an order with Plantas Nativa in Bellingham, who delivered a truckload of plants a few days ago.

Today we spent the better part of the day placing and planting everything. The photo shows just a small part of what we started with — Shining Oregon Grape (Mahonia aquifolium), Kinnickinick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), Salal (Gaultheria shalon), and Evergreen Huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum). We also planted a couple dozen Sword Ferns (Polystichum munitum) and maybe a dozen Low Oregon Grape (Mahonia nervosa) in the front garden. By lunchtime we were finished with the front and pronounced it good. It will take a little time for the plants to establish and start to fill out, but the end result should be a relatively low maintenance, mostly native garden that is a joy to behold both from the street and from Betty’s large living room window. Continue reading →

Paddling to Chuckanut Island

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Friday afternoon was warm and sunny — perfect for skipping out of the office and going for an afternoon paddle along the shore south of Bellingham. I put a note on the WAKE kayak group listserv and got a prompt response from Ed Alm. We agreed that a 3 pm put-in at Marine Park gave us enough time to get ready.

It turned out that we put in at low tide, in fact a little lower than minus 2 feet. Since there’s not much current along the shore, the tide didn’t matter and neither of us had checked it in advance.  The benefit of going out on the low tide was that more of the shoreline rocks were exposed.

Chuckanut Rock

We paddled quickly south from Marine Park, hitting 5.5 mph according to Ed’s GPS. Once we reached the interesting rock formations along the shore of Clark’s Point we slowed to a very leisurely pace and paddled very close to the cliffs to see what was hanging around.  There were dozens of ochre sea stars (Pisaster ochraceus) in almost every crack, as well as a couple of marine invertebrates we couldn’t identify — something rather long, orange, and tube-like. Continue reading →

Waterworks Canyon

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This past weekend I was on the east side of the Cascades for a Washington Native Plant Society state board meeting in Ellensburg. We had a productive session all day Saturday, but six-hour meetings are trying even when everyone is on the same track and the discussion is genial. The cure? A day tromping in the field to see what’s blooming.

Sunday, Walt Lockwood and I headed down to Yakima and west another 15 miles to the mouth of Waterworks Canyon. It’s a fairly small canyon tending north-south that drains into the Naches River. The land is on the Oak Creek Wildlife Area, administered by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. There’s a small parking area on the north side of the highway about a quarter mile west of the junction of WA 410 and US 12. [N 46° 44.921′ W 120° 47.874′]

Carey's Balsamroot & Showy Phlox
Carey’s Balsamroot & Showy Phlox on rocky hillside [Balsamorhiza careyana; Phlox speciosa]. Waterworks Cyn, Oak Cr Wildlife Area, Yakima Co., WA

The mouth of the canyon is just over 1600′ elevation. After passing through the gate, we were soon greated by spectacular displays of Carey’s Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza careyana) and Showy Phlox (Phlox speciosa), particularly on the east-facing hillside that was bathed in early morning sunshine under a brilliant clear blue sky. Continue reading →

Trilliums

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One of my favorite wildflowers, dating back to my childhood, is the trillium. I grew up in central West Virginia and in the spring one hillside along the road to my grandparents home was always covered with large white trilliums, Trillium grandiflorum. When I moved to Washington state I learned that our native trillium here, which looks quite similar to the eastern white trillium, is Trillium ovatum. Both of them can be grown successfully in Northwest gardens.

Western trillium among redwood sorrel in a garden

I photographed in a Tacoma-area garden recently where there were a couple of patches of trilliums planted. In this photo, they’re mixed with redwood sorrel, Oxalis oregana, and a non-native fern. This planting is practically inside the house where it can be easily enjoyed. Elsewhere in the garden was a larger patch of trilliums, which had been self-seeding and establishing a rather nice large patch of flowers. The gardener pointed out to me that first-year trillium seedlings have a single leaf, second-year seedlings have two leaves, and not until their third year do they develop their typical three leaves. Continue reading →

Red-flowering Currant

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One of the prime Northwest native flowering shrubs that’s in bloom right now is red-flowering currant, Ribes sanguineum. It’s a good shrub for the garden, as well as being found at woodland edges in the wild. It has a wide range in the Northwest and is a good early food source for hummingbirds.

Red-flowering Currant in garden border

In this Bainbridge Island garden, red-flowering currants have been planted in several areas around the edge, including in this mixed border. Some native plant gardening enthusiasts are sticklers for only growing natives while others, like this gardener, believe that its OK to mix and match. The currant will stay in bloom for two or three weeks in the spring, and flowers will be followed by rather tasteless blue-black berries mid-summer. The attractive foliage will become a backdrop for other plants that bloom later, like the ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum planted at its base.