Last month I was down in Portland for the annual Garden Writers Association symposium. I took time on the morning afterward to spend a few hours exploring and photographing in the International Rose Test Garden. There are a huge number of roses in the garden, many of them looking very nice in late September. But one stood out to me that day — a shrub rose called ‘Raven’.

What struck me was the pattern of the petals. Neither too full nor a single, I liked the way the individual petals curved around and formed nice patterns in each blossom. The bushes were covered with lots of these very dark red velvety flowers.

I’ve never seen ‘Raven’ in the garden center, but it’s one I’d definitely seek out if I decide there’s room in our garden for a new rose.

Now that we’re almost to the end of October, the roses are about finished. But it’s nice to think back and remember some of the blooms from earlier in the season.

Toad Lilies are bulbs that bloom late in the season, adding a little color during that transition period between summer and autumn here in the Northwest. There are several species and varieties, but from the ones I’ve seen, they’re mostly shades of purple, with up-facing blossoms on stems that are about waist high or a little higher.

This blossom was one of many in a lush clump of Candelabra Toad Lilies, Tricyrtis macropoda, along the path at the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden this afternoon.

I was on my way back to the car at the end of the day when I saw gentle backlight coming through the blossoms and decided I had time for a few more photos since I was already going to be late for dinner. I made several variations on the theme, horizontal with multiple blossoms, horizontal with just a single blossom, and then verticals with one blossom. I liked this one with a tiny spider crawling across a strand of silk, although I have another variation with neither the spider nor the silk. Fortunately it was a dead calm afternoon as the light was fading, the flowers are on tall stalks, and I was working close with a 100mm macro lens.

I think a little boldness in the garden is a good thing. This pair of old red chairs, from a garden in Eugene, Oregon (that I also found on https://emfurn.com/), establish that bold can be stylish and fun.

I found these chairs along the south side path in a tiny city lot garden jam-packed with plants. The owner told me she has some 250 varieties of roses, but you’d never know it in September when they’re out of bloom. A big eucalpytus stood at the corner of the house by the entrance gate, much taller than she ever expected it to grow when it was planted. This was definitely a personal garden, not one designed and installed by some fancy designer. It grew organically around the whims of the owners over many years. I like that.

The photo is from my Canon S70 pocket camera, hand held on the Garden Writers Association bus tour to Eugene on September 23.

The last week has been a whirlwind of garden touring. While I may not have visited a full sixty gardens there sure were a lot.

I started last Thursday with an afternoon in Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Park where the lush tapestry of annuals and a modicum of perennials were in their late summer glory. The photo here is of gloriosa daisies with sweet potato vine, shot with my 90mm tilt-shift lens cranked over for a selective focus effect rather than to keep the entire subject sharp. The soft overcast light was very welcome.

On Friday I headed down to Portland, Oregon for the annual Garden Writers Association annual symposium. Saturday we toured several northeast Portland gardens. David Perry and I photographed each other photographing the gardens for the intro slide show to our Sunday morning presentation on making magic with your point & shoot camera. It was a lot of fun working quickly and hand-held. David and I shot some of the same subjects, but saw them completely differently. We each got lots of pats on the back for our program and we saw people putting our suggestions to use when we headed out for the afternoon’s tour.

Sunday afternoon we visited Iseli Nursery and Terra Nova Nurseries, both wholesale growers with well-designed display gardens and fantastic plants. The rain held off until we got back on the bus. Isley specializes in dwarf conifers and Japanese Maples; Terra Nova is best known for introducing exciting Heucheras and other perennials to the marketplace.

Monday our busses took us to the Portland Classical Chinese Garden, the Portland Japanese Garden, the International Rose Test Garden, and the Oregon Zoo where we had dinner. Tuesday we went to several private gardens in Eugene. This morning I went back to the rose garden to make some specimen photos and worked until the wind picked up and I decided I needed to start north to get through Seattle before the traffic got too bad.

I was in Seattle earlier this week and stopped by the Washington Park Arboretum to see what I could find. It was what most people would call a glorious day, full sun under a brilliant blue sky and pleasant temperatures. Fall color hadn’t started happening yet and very little was in bloom. In short, the conditions were less than prime for my kind of photography.

I wandered down to the end where they’re constructing the new Pacific Rim Connections garden, which still had a fence around it and wasn’t open yet. But across the road I was struck by the pattern of the shadows a large Madrona tree was casting on the lawn. That’s not the picture here, but it’s what got me started down a different path that day.  I made several images of the shadows on the grass, then headed up Azalea Way back toward my truck.

Along the way I noticed the light coming through the leaves of a large tree. When I aimed my camera the lens was set for a much closer distance and I saw something similar to the photo here — just a soft pattern of branches and greens. I experimented with several variations of focus and aperture. This is the one I liked best out of the bunch.

It seemed odd to use one of my sharpest lenses to shoot a totally out-of-focus photo, but that’s what I did. Sometimes I have to remember to play and not to get hung up on what’s “right” and what’s “wrong” in photography. Thanks, David for reminding me of that a few days earlier.

Most of the time I’m photographing with a big and heavy digital SLR.  The quality is incredible and I love the results.  But it’s a heavy thing to lug around.  Sometimes it’s fun to go light and just carry a pocket digital camera.  In my case, it’s a Canon S70 that I bought in 2005.

There are some things that the little camera does very well and others that are more challenging. This shot, of Fairy Wands seeds, is one of those things that’s more difficult to do with a pocket camera for a couple of reasons. First, it focuses closest at the widest setting of the zoom lens. Second, the sensor is pretty small. Both factors generally lead to great depth of field so blurring the background is hard to do.

For this shot, I used the manual focus mode and set it for as close as it would focus, which is only 2-3 inches from the front of the lens. I used aperture priority and set it for f/5, about the middle of the range. Then I moved in until the seedpods looked sharp on the LCD on the back of the camera. Since I was moving and the wind was blowing the seeds around I shot a bunch of frames to get a good one. I find it very hard to confirm sharp focus with the LCD. At least today it was cloudy so the display was more visible.

The photo was made at the Bellevue Botanical Garden perennial border.

I’ve been spending too much time on my butt in front of the computer the last few days, mostly selecting photos to send to magazine editors for upcoming stories. In the end, there should be some sales, but right now I’m tired of sitting. In the old days I got some exercise in the process of pulling slides to send out since my light table is in the next room from the shelves of slides. Now I mostly just sit and wiggle the mouse. I still have to look at a lot of images to select those that best fit the request. Some of these wantlists run two or three single-spaced pages, so it gets tedious. It’s a good job for a rainy and windy day, which we’ve been having several of lately. With luck I’ll get caught up with all the requests before the weather improves and I can get back out shooting again. Requests always seem to bunch up. I’m pulling images for September issues currently, which includes some winter bulbs photographed in February and early March. When the originals are on film then I have to scan and optimize them, add metadata, and file them in my storage directory structure before I can add them to a digital submission. No one seems to want film any more.

I did enjoy the Saturday afternoon Whatcom Horticultural Society advance tour of the gardens that will be open on June 21 and 22. I shot a few photos for the WHS website and put together a short slideshow that I posted to YouTube. It’s linked on the WHS site. The six gardens are all quite different and worth visiting if you’ll be in Bellingham that weekend. The photo is from one of the tour gardens.