Last Saturday I made a trip up the North Cascades Highway to scout out locations to take my Pocket Camera Wildflower Photography class at North Cascades Institute on Tuesday. The trail I used the last time I taught the class, Heather Pass and Maple Pass, was reported to still have a lot of snow. So I chose the Easy Pass trail, which climbs reasonably gently for a couple of miles through wonderful forest and then breaks out into the subalpine and alpine splendor.

Since I was teaching pocket camera photography, I only carried my Canon S70 with me to photograph the flowers. My idea was to create a video slideshow to introduce my students to the trail they’d be hiking and to show what can be done with little cameras.

The class has now come and gone, with 15 delightful students who learned a lot. I learned from them, too. The North Cascades Learning Center on Diablo Lake is a great place to have a class, with comfortable facilities, a splendid setting, and outrageously good food. The evaluations are coming in and they’re looking good. I hope to be able to teach the class again next year.

In addition to hiking to Easy Pass, we also hiked and photographed on Sauk Mountain, one of my all-time favorite easy-access wildflower hikes. Following our Tuesday hike and photo session everyone chose three favorite images and we had a group critique with their photos on the big screen. Some of the students had some very nice photos to share.

The slideshow was created in ProShow Producer, a Windows-only program. I used the random effects tool, and then manually adjusted image movement and transitions when the auto feature produced something that I didn’t like. All the images were processed in Adobe Lightroom 3 before bringing them into Producer.

The Painted Hills in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in north-central Oregon are an out-of-this-world landscape. Layers of colorful bentonite, formed from ancient volcanic ash, change color with the light and moisture content. Each spring they pick up golden highlights from two endemic plants. The taller of the two, Golden Bee Plant or Cleome platycarpa, is an annual with a bright tuft of flowers at the top. The other, John Day’s Pincushion or Chaenactis nevii, is also an annual. Continue reading →

Try saying the title three times fast. If you’re not up on your botanical Latin maybe the words don’t quite roll off your tongue.

Anyway, what do these have in common? They’re all members of the rose family, Rosaceae, they’re all in bloom right now, and they all have tasty edible fruit later in the season.

The Amelanchier alnifolia, commonly called Serviceberry or Saskatoon, is a large shrub with masses of flowers with shaggy white petals. It’s native on both sides of the Cascades, smells sweet, and is showy along roadsides right now. My friend David Perry collected some for a bouquet over around Spokane a week or so ago and wrote about it on one of his blogs, A Fresh Bouquet. David is an exquisite photographer with a keen eye and discerning taste. If you’re not following his blogs you should be.

There are other species of Serviceberry in other parts of the country. I learned the name of this plant, pronounced “sarvisberry,” as a kid in West Virginia. Out there the species is Amelanchier arborea. Whatever you call it, the flowers will be followed by small dark purple fruit around mid-summer. I usually leave them for the birds, but they’re edible and often used for jams and jellies. Continue reading →

A couple of weeks ago I was over to Ellensburg for the semi-annual board meeting of the Washington Native Plant Society. It’s an all-day business meeting dealing with important affairs of the organization, but not near as much fun as getting out and poking around among the plants.

The next day Don Knoke, one of the most knowledgeable plant guys in the area, led a field trip along the Old Vantage Highway with stops at Whiskey Dick Wildlife Area and a couple of places in Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park. We ambled among the grasses and sagebrush, meandered across the lithosol, and threaded our way among the plants on the sandy dunes along Wanapum Reservoir on the Columbia River.

This photo was made near the Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park visitor center at Vantage, just a hundred yards or so off the road toward the river. Showy Phlox, Phlox speciosa, and Carey’s Balsamroot, Balsamorhiza carreyana, are what’s blooming here. In mid-April you’ll find Showy Phlox carpeting the hillsides in many places throughout central Washington. It truly lives up to its name. Carey’s is just one of several species of Balsamroot. Just over the hill to the west of Ellensburg you’re more likely to find Balsamorhiza sagittata which has somewhat fuzzy leaves and distinctly hairy bracts below the blossoms. Continue reading →