I’m learning that gardeners and homeowners in North Carolina’s Piedmont region value their shade. I spent today photographing and enjoying three woodland gardens in and around Raleigh.

The photo to the right is from Suzanne Edney’s entrance garden. She’s a garden designer who moved to this property on the edge of Apex with her husband about 19 years ago. The previous owner had scraped the forest understory bare, essentially gardening with a bulldozer. In the intervening years Suzanne has planted a diverse collection of understory trees, shrubs, and perennials. She’s encouraged the native moss to grow in some of her paths.

In essence, on most of her extensive property she has created a managed woodland. Only in the front of the house does the garden resemble a more formal garden. That’s the part you’re seeing here.

This is very much a foliage garden, planted to provide vistas from inside the house. In her design work Suzanne told me that she insists on viewing each client’s property from the windows so she can envision the future view once the garden is established. She’s done that in her own garden so that there is an enticing view from each window in all seasons.

I started my day in Rita Mercer’s garden. It’s also a woodland garden, neatly maintained under the mixed hardwood and loblolly pine canopy. As I worked I constantly heard acorns falling from the oaks. I never got hit, but was glad I was wearing a cap. In September, Rita’s garden is primarily a foliage garden, but I could imagine it coming to life each spring starting with masses of hellebores and continuing with rhododendrons and azaleas.

Early autumn color came from a few tropicals and native shrubs in what she calls the “hanger garden” because it’s next to their airplane hanger. This brilliant blue-purple is the tender Tibouchina grandiflora, more commonly known as Glory Flower. That’s a wooden arbor over the path leading back to the house soft-focus in the background.

At the bottom of her hillside garden is a sunny pond with statuesque grasses and shrubs along the edge of the cul-de-sac. It stands in contrast to the rest of the garden which is in full shade nearly constantly. Photographing in such deep shade was a challenge, even on a bright and sunny morning. I found myself using long exposures and ISO 400 most of the time. If I were still shooting film it would have been nearly impossible.

I finished the day in Amelia Lane’s garden. She’s in a 1960s suburb. The front yard has a typical lawn, but bordered with a fan palm that complements one of her many native dogwoods. The back yard is a managed woodland. Like Suzanne, Amelia started with a nearly blank slate about 19 years ago and started planting and laying out paths. This photo is of a striking variegated lacecap hydrangea. Amelia says it doesn’t bloom very well in her shade, but the foliage makes up for it.

The hydrangea is growing around a concrete ball, one of many that Amelia has made and placed around the garden. At one point I was surprised by a “black hole globe.” It’s like a shiny gazing globe, but matte black. In reality, it’s an old bowling ball that’s had several years to weather.

All three of these gardeners were gracious hostesses. It was fun to visit and photograph their gardens and talk with them. I feel like I’ve made three new friends. I’ll be out in three more North Carolina gardens on Tuesday.

Farmers markets have some of the best-looking, tastiest, and freshest produce around. It doesn’t matter where you live, you’re going to get the good stuff when you buy direct from the farmer. This morning the Raleigh (North Carolina) farmer’s market got temporarily swamped by 600 garden writers on bus tour. We descended upon the farmers, talked, photographed, and bought produce. The hot peppers above are a variety called Long Horn.

One of the southern vegetables that just won’t grow in our cool Pacific Northwest gardens is okra. Some folks really like these long tender seedpods and others think it’s disgusting. I’m in the group that likes it almost anyway you can prepare it. That includes breaded in cornmeal and fried, stewed with tomatoes, and incorporated into a jambalaya. I’ve also had young and tender okra pods raw. Several market vendors had okra available for sale. I watched one lady pick up a pod and snap the end off, apparently testing its tenderness. She ended up not buying from that farmer.

The market is an open air affair, sheltered from the weather by a substantial roofed structure with a concrete floor. It’s owned and operated by the state of North Carolina, is open daily, and is one of several around the state.

Now that autumn has arrived pumpkins and gourds are ripe. Families are starting to put up fall decorations in anticipation of Halloween. These miniature pumpkins were part of a colorful farm display at the market. Several vendors had pumpkins, both little ones like these and big ones suitable for jack-o-lanterns. In between are the sweet pie pumpkins.

The Garden Writers Association annual syposium includes garden visits as well as this stop at the farmers market. We’ve been to the Doris Duke garden on the Duke University campus in Durham, Juniper Levels Botanic Garden at Plant Delights Nursery south of Raleigh, and the J C Raulston Arboretum at North Carolina State University. We’ve seen a huge number of interesting plants, way more than I can share here in a single post. Tomorrow our morning bus tour will include a community garden and three other gardens in the Raleigh-Durham area. Will it be plant overload? I don’t think so for our dedicated group of plant nerds. Photographing on a bus tour is challenging, but I continue to work with a tripod and assortment of lenses. I just have to wait a bit longer for the background to clear. At least no vendor issued bright yellow hats this year.

Gardens can be enjoyed many ways, but one of the nicest is to create a view from inside the house out into the garden that can be appreciated in any weather and any season. The living room of this home looks out onto an abandoned pickleball court in the back yard. With a broad expanse of concrete it’s not particularly attractive.

The homeowners and gardeners planted a Coral Bark Japanese Maple, Acer palmatum ‘Sangu Kaku’, against the house at the basement level below the living room. As it grew, May Lou trained the maple into a narrow fan shape. It stays close to the house, and the branches arch gracefully to the sides to filter the view.

From the outside the maple looks good against the house, but you don’t really get a sense of how much good work it’s doing for the interior view. In late summer the golden green foliage is attractive. Come winter the bare stems will be bright red and if we’re lucky, dusted with a light snowfall. In between the leaves will turn a nice shade of red-orange in autumn.

The rest of the garden around this 1960s Bellingham home also has a Northwest-Japanese feel. The bones were there when the current owners purchased it in 1998, but it had been neglected after a few years of service as college student housing.

This entrance gate is one of the new additions to the garden, but it looks like it has always been there. As you pass through the gate you cross a wide wooden bridge to the front door of the hillside home.

These photos were made this morning for a gardener profile which will appear in the next issue of the Whatcom Horticultural Society Journal. I shot with my all-purpose 24-105mm lens. For the interior shot I added an off-camera flash at 1/4 power with a warming gel, aimed toward the blue chair in the left corner by the window. Otherwise I used natural light, taking advantage of the overcast morning.

The home and garden went on the market this morning.

On the Birchwood Garden Club summer members tour last Wednesday several of my gardening friends asked where my camera was. I wasn’t carrying my usual monster, tripod, and pack full of goodies. I reached in my pocket and pulled out my iPhone.

Sometimes it’s nice to wander around unencumbered by a big load, to be able to socialize with friends while enjoying a nice garden, and to play with the creative aspects of a camera that has certain limitations. In photo classes one of the standard assignments is to shoot a series with only one lens (zooms don’t count).

This was an evening tour and I was running late. I didn’t get to the first garden until about 6:30 and by the time we finished visiting the last garden it was 8:30 on an overcast evening. That was darn near dark, but the last garden made good use of light colored foliage to brighten up a couple of beds that probably looked their best in the evening instead of during the middle of the day.

We had fun, and I got to see a couple of gardens that were new to me. I’d like to go back to some of the gardens with my full toolkit, but it won’t be the same experience as it was on Wednesday night.

According to Weather Underground, it’s 96° at the Bellingham airport this afternoon. That’s four degrees warmer than the previous record, set in 1960.

I’ve been optimizing a group of images for Garden Picture Library this afternoon. This one, of the floating bridge at VanDusen Botanical Garden, was made around Christmas last winter when we had serious snowfall and cold temperatures. For all my northwest friends who are sweltering today, maybe this will help you “think cool.”

I know that about 6 months from now when we’re suffering under dreary drizzly skies we’ll think back on these hot summer days and wish we could have saved a little of the heat for winter. Is some researcher working on a “heat battery” we could charge in the summer and use in the winter? I guess a ground source heat pump is the closest thing available.

In olden days they’d cut blocks of ice from ponds in the winter, pack it in sawdust in an insulated shed, and haul it out in the summer when it was needed.

Think cool!

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

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.

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.