Last night when Brian and went to the kitchen for an evening snack we looked out the window to the garden and were surprised to see moonlight casting shadows. It was crisp and cold (mid 30s F), which is when we tend to get clear skies in the winter. I set up my tripod, mounted my camera, grabbed my puffy coat and a warm hat, and headed outside. The view above is from our patio, very much like what we saw from the kitchen window.
There’s nothing like planting a mass of the same plant to create a big impact in the garden. This is part of a “river” of broad-leaved penstemon (Penstemon ovatus) with Douglas’s Iris (Iris douglasiana), which we planted last year in our new mostly-native garden near the front of the studio. Continue reading
If it’s February, it must be time for the Northwest Flower & Garden Festival (NWFGS) in Seattle. This year is the show’s 30th anniversary and the theme for the display gardens is “It’s a Garden Party.” The video slideshow runs about 13 minutes. Relax and enjoy.
I’ve been attending the NWFGS for nearly 20 years. It’s always a treat to see what the garden designers come up with. There’s color, fragrance, cool plants, water, texture, and structures — all coming together to pleasure your senses. Continue reading
I like Hostas. They’re a great garden plant, grown mostly for their foliage, hardy, colorful, and easy. Well, they’re easy if you don’t have deer. Since we have deer in our garden, we’re not currently growing any Hostas ourselves.
Earlier in August I had the opportunity to visit two fantastic woodland gardens south of Buffalo, New York that each feature over 1000 varieties of Hosta. I think that’s just a little crazy, but the gardens were a delight. Of course, they don’t just grow Hostas. Even with the great variety of shade of green, gold, and white, Hosta foliage alone won’t carry a garden. But think about how these plants can light up a shady border, form a groundcover, or be an accent.
This video slideshow illustrates some of the many ways Hostas can be used in the garden.
The fine folks in Buffalo, New York certainly do know how to garden. And they share their gardens with friends, neighbors, and garden lovers from around the world. They have a long-running Garden Walk Buffalo on the last weekend in July each summer. This year, several of the gardeners kept their gardens open for some 350 members of GWA: The Association of Garden Communicators as we visited their fine city for the annual GWA Symposium.
This video slideshow, which runs just shy of five minutes, showcases some of my favorite garden views in the Cottage District, Elmwood Village, and Lancaster Avenue neighborhoods. These were all walkable neighborhoods with largish old homes on narrow but deep lots. Most of the gardeners made use of nearly every square inch of space.
For the technically-inclined, I photographed these gardens with a Sony A6300 mirrorless camera and 16-70mm lens, mostly on a tripod. What you can’t see are the busloads of other garden photographers, writers, and on-air talent who were also visiting these gardens at the same time. Patience (and a little “would you please move a little”) goes a long way.
When we moved to our studio property in 2014, we decided we wanted to incorporate many of our wonderful native plants into the garden. Natives are drought-adapted, hosts to native insects that provide food for birds and other animals, relatively low maintenance, and best of all, they’re pretty to look at. When we walk in the woods and see an environment full of plants we’re seeing many years of growth. In a garden setting, starting from scratch, it takes a few years to go from bare soil to lush growth.
It may not have felt much like spring on Thursday, February 23 as I drove to Seattle for the 2017 Northwest Flower & Garden Show. There was a bit of fresh snow on the ground as I drove down I-5 for my annual fix of gardening inspiration. I’ve been going to the NWFGS for 20 years, sometimes as a speaker but more often just to enjoy the display gardens.
In this pair of photos of the daylilies growing by our back door, in the first frame you see all the spent blossoms. That might be OK if the story you’re trying to tell is that daylily blossoms don’t last long and they linger on the stems until they dry up and fall off. But if what you’re after is a nice photo of daylilies blooming, then I think the photo looks a lot better with the spent blossoms removed.
It’s always easier to clean up details like this before capturing the image. Imagine how much time it would have taken in an image editing program like Photoshop to remove the spent blossoms and replace them with plausible background material.
I apply the same principle when photographing people. Let’s get that cat hair off your jacket before I trip the shutter.
As I sit at my office computer I can look out the door to the large and majestic Pacific willow (Salix lasiandra var. lasiandra) in our backyard. It’s one of 38 species of willows found in Washington state and one of the easier ones to identify (willows in general are notoriously difficult to key out).
Our Pacific willow is one of the last trees on our property to lose its leaves in autumn. Today it’s still covered, although there are lots of fallen leaves on the ground, too. Continue reading
Now that our autumn rain has arrived, the forest floor in our woodland has sprung back to life. It’s almost like a second spring even though the trees are beginning to shed their leaves. Underfoot, piggyback plant (Tolmiea menziesii) has greened back up and is busy producing little plantlets atop nearly every leaf. Continue reading
