Foggy Garden February 9, 2010

On first look today, our world was enrobed in a down-to-the-ground cloud. It was the thickest fog I can remember in ages. School looked super spooky:

Back at home, I thought how blah and sad the street garden looked, as it has since the deep December freeze killed off so many things that often overwinter and I didn’t plant enough winter interest to keep it looking good all year.

Then I decided to take a closer look to see if I could see something beautiful, something interesting, something worth noticing, signs of spring to come or summer past. In just a few minutes of slowing down and looking closely, here is some of what I found in my seemingly nondescript landscape.

Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ seedheads

Purple sprouting broccoli sticking out its wet “tongue”

Lemon balm seeds (need to get rid of those pronto!) against Mexican feather grass tendrils

Crocus awaiting the sun’s kiss to open up shop for the day

One giant dewdrop and a million little ones on a lupine leaf

Gossamer strands, evidence of a spider’s presence on iris seedpods

and coneflower too

Then this, which would have been enough on its own to banish the gloom of the day

The first tulip! Don’t scream, yours aren’t behind. This tulipa greigii came up first here last year, before the snowdrops and crocus had stopped blooming, so it must be in its nature to be the earliest bird.

Even in the less spectacular garden seasons, there’s probably always something to notice – even if it’s “just” spiderwebs on a dead flower or, in another climate, bird tracks in the snow. We just have to slow down enough to find it.

Tiny Treasures February 8, 2010

I owe a big thanks to David Perry of A Photographer’s Garden Blog – without his post about and spectacular photos of the female flowers on his contorted filbert tree, I would never have known to look for them in my own garden. I bow to David’s far-superior eye, camera, framing and description and hope you will check out his blog if you haven’t already – he’s a master.

My “Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick” tree, planted by the previous gardener, has brought me much enjoyment every winter as its ridiculously curvy branches are covered in a busy array of grouped catkins. How can I have never noticed the “girl” flowers before? Well, because they are so absurdly tiny, probably less than 1/8″ across and sparsely scattered around the tree, placed kind of oddly at the spur where the catkins emerged. They look to me like fuchsia-colored baby sea anemones. Do they bloom for longer than a week? I can’t imagine so, but maybe they do. Their appearance has coincided with the end of the witch hazel’s blooming season, so the timing could not be more perfect.

Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’ – if you live in Zone 4-9 and don’t have one already, you might want to start saving your birthday money so you can see this happen next spring… (Note: I think this is how all filberts act, not just contorted ones, so you don’t have to save so many pennies if you just want a straight-branch one!)

Gracias, David, for helping me see what was right in front of me.

Orchidmania February 7, 2010

You could see a certain look come over people’s faces the moment they saw Blooming Ecstasy, the orchid display garden at the NW Flower & Garden Show this week. It was a bit of a glazed look, mixed with longing, plus a little bit of disbelief and a small helping of madness. Even those like me who have never been bitten by the orchid bug were hard-pressed not to gasp over each succeeding marvel. The volunteers from the Northwest Orchid Society who staffed the show beamed proudly over their progeny, as many mental notes were made to look for these at the sale booths later on.

I will do my best with botanical names here, but I didn’t write any down and my photos didn’t show all of the tags. Please feel free to correct any you see here that are incorrect or un-named. (Note: if you are reading this via Blotanical and the images are getting cut off to the right, I apologize – if you click on this link, it should give you the full, wide versions. Thanks!)

This was the brightest orange flower in the entire garden show, I think. (Many of the tags included abbreviated names, maybe to save space.) This one was termed Epicat. ‘Butterfly Kisses’:

Encyclia cochleata X lancifolium – they looked to me like skirts for the flower fairies:

This one was a much deeper purple than my camera could register in the odd light. Still, it was one of my favorites so I wanted to include it here. The top part looks like a clematis, but then the bottom busts out with those crazy colors.

I loved the “Smell Me” tag on this one. Of course I had to obey. Undeniably sweet!

This foliage plant was almost as riveting as the orchids. Someone will surely know its name? Probably a common houseplant, again not one of my specialties.

Hot hot hot pink:

So delicately spiky:

Crazy stripes:

Tiny cascades of flowers on Dendrochilum fragrans:

I think this one’s tag said Paphiopedilum sukhakulii ‘Jeannette’ – maybe a type of Ladyslipper? Coming upon a patch of native Ladyslipper orchids in the wild is one of my most treasured hiking moments.

Guess Jay Leno decided to escape from the spotlight in LA and come on up to the garden show:

What about you, have you succumbed to Orchidmania?

The “It” Trees of the Garden Show February 4, 2010

I took so many pictures at the Northwest Flower & Garden Show today, I’m not sure where to start. I’ll try to do a few posts, grouping some of my favorites thematically. Since I’ve been thinking and posting a lot about trees lately, that seems as good a place to start as any.

Every year at the show, there seem to be a few plants that repeat in many of the show gardens. Is it like the Paris or Milan high-fashion collections, where one year everyone seems to have agreed on miniskirts and the next on military coats? I have no experience in the world of show garden design, so it is a mystery to me how certain things seem to flow in common through many of the designers’ final products.

I always feel sorry for these trees, some of them pretty mature, ripped out of their natural habitats and shoved into some sawdust in an an artificial indoor landscape so that a few (thousand) of us can ooh and ah over them over a four-day period. What happens to them afterward? Are they consigned to the compost heap? I hope not! Maybe they are specially cared for and replanted in some special spot, their moment in the spotlight over but a long and happy life ahead.

This year, these were the trees that seemed to be everywhere, the stars of the show. How many will end up being planted in attendees’ gardens, I wonder?

River birch, the hands-down winner for unusually beautiful bark

Witch hazel, here hovering over black mondo grass

Contorted filbert – this one was pruned into an “up-do”

Tree fern – okay, technically not a tree, but they were all over the place! Hard to grow in the Pacific Northwest, even with a lot of wrapping and care, from what I’ve heard.

Magnolia grandiflora, this one was the cultivar ‘Southern Charm’

Pinus contorta ‘Chief Joseph’ – this one really surprised me, showing up as it did in at least three gardens that I saw. It is a rare and expensive tree (for more about it, see this post from last year’s Garden show), and I bet it’s going on a lot of people’s wish lists after this week.

A few other trees stood out for their uniqueness instead of their ubiquity:

Asian pear

Weeping Norway spruce (known in my family as the Snuffleupagus Tree)

Unknown Japanese maple

Cypressus macrocarpa ‘Saligna aurea’ had amazing, filigreed golden tendrils

Not all of the trees at the show were real:

BTW, we did get in to hear Fergus Garrett’s lecture on training the eye to make good plant combinations. Inspiring and well worth all the standing around and being herded like ruminants that was required to secure a seat.

More to come…

Goin’ to the Show February 3, 2010

The rilly, rilly big shew! It’s here again – the Northwest Flower & Garden Show kicked off today, February 3, 2010, after nearly expiring when the original owners said they weren’t continuing following last year’s installment. Happily, a buyer was found, and the show is going on! I will be attending with my mom tomorrow, and hope to have some fun photos to share later in the week.

As always, I look forward to the wacky show gardens, seeing some unusual and rare plants, the amazingly informative and inspiring seminars (Fergus Garrett of Great Dixter is lecturing on training your eye to make good plant combinations – I hope to score a ticket to that one!), and all the non-profit booths dispensing free advice on things like fruit tree care, bee-keeping, and seed saving.

(Photo of conifer garden courtesy of NWFGS site)

Are you going to this or any other garden shows around this time of year? What do you hope to see and learn?

Going on a Picnik February 1, 2010

Prompted by an “assignment” at David Perry’s Photographer’s Garden Blog, I tried messing with the color saturation on a photo I’d taken recently, of one of my few but beloved pieces of garden sculpture.

Igor, as he is called, is a tiny house protector/gargoyle who sits beneath a cutleaf Japanese maple just opposite our living room windows. He is introspective fellow, all curled up in summer as in winter. Currently, his mood is mirroring mine, so I decided to give him his own photo feature today.

First, the original photo, taken with my new camera, whose niftiness I am still discovering (note to self: must read manual someday!), at dusk on a gray January day. I use the low-light setting a LOT – it was my main reason for choosing this camera, the Canon S90.

Doesn’t he look like he’s using that leaf as a blanket? I think I spread some witch hazel leaves in that spot last fall, hoping to camouflage bulb plantings from marauding squirrels. I wouldn’t have thought the leaves would come in handy as gargoyle bedding.

David’s assignment, to take a photo during a low-light time and then dial up the saturation on the computer, prompted a test of the free software Flickr partners with, Picnik. Since they’re a Seattle company, they must know about adding color to grayed-out photos, right? So, I will forgive them their cutesy spelling. Here’s the “blue” version of Igor’s nap.

Probably a little on the garish side, but it was fun to toy around with the saturation and spectrum. I’m sure PhotoShop is way more sophisticated, but it’s also pricey and geared more towards Macs. I have a cheapo PC and no budget for photo software so free will just have to do!

Picnik can do basic stuff like cropping and red-eye correction, and if you have already imported your photos to Flickr, it’s pretty simple to just modify and re-save, or save a copy. You can see that in this last version, I cropped it a bit and changed the colors somewhat.

I must admit that I prefer my own garden photos largely unmanipulated, maybe because I feel like it’s hubristic to try to improve on nature, and also since I don’t consider myself an artist in any way. But digital photography tools can be so fun and easy to use, it’s tempting to get a little creative every once in a while.

Do you have a favorite photo editing tool? Or do you just try to use your eye and take the shot you really want?

The Race to Spring is ON! January 31, 2010

Ready…

Steady…

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Crocus tommasinianus over the course of about a week. I don’t remember having planted this many, so maybe they are naturalizing. That would be nice, especially if I would remember to divide and move them around a bit for even greater enjoyment next spring.

Skywatch Friday – January 29, 2010 January 29, 2010

Moonrise over witch hazel:

Happy Skywatch Friday! See more skies from all over the world by clicking here.

Weeping Tree January 26, 2010

Or maybe it is we that should be weeping, for this tree whose form is so, uh, unusual.

I am guessing that it is a weeping birch tree (Betula pendula youngii) that has had its branches clipped back uniformly to give it this bizarre shape. Kind of like a medieval monk’s tonsure, never the best look on humans.

Odd pruning jobs on parking strip plants are really standing out to me these days. People are really putting the “fashion don’t”s out there for us all to see!

In a recent post, there was a discussion in the comments field about topping vs. pollarding vs. just plain old hard pruning. I am no expert, but I believe the following photo shows the technique known as pollarding, which is frequently done to encourage new growth from particular trees and shrubs. As I have been wanting to try pollarding on my out-of-control red-twig dogwood, I was interested to see that these had already been pruned. Am I already late? Yikes, time to haul out the loppers and try to be brave, I guess!

This BBC/UK page has a simple plant-by-plant pruning guide for shrubs that respond well to hard pruning, as well as a video of a guy with thick Scottish (?) accent taking his clippers to some dogwoods and willows to encourage new growth. I love how he says “it might seem crrrruel,” my sentiments exactly, which I guess is why I’m having such a hard time getting around to it!

Parking Strip Report – The ‘Nothing Much’ Edition January 25, 2010

Late January is usually a really un-spectacular time for my parking strip garden. So much so that I am too ashamed to include a full shot of it here! I will stick to the few details that have provided a second glance amid the brownish wasteland that otherwise is sadly characteristic of this time of year. When will I learn? ****Must plant more evergreens!***

I didn’t plant a lot of winter veggies this year. They never do much anyway except sit around looking sad all winter and then bolt as soon as it gets warm, so it was interesting to see that some of the open space is being colonized by volunteer chervil from the mesclun mix that was in the same spot last summer. I do love chervil, but hope I won’t be chasing down seedlings all over the garden forever more.

(By the way, I got a new camera for Christmas – Thanks, Mom and Dad! – but haven’t really figured out how to use it yet. I somehow pressed something that made the settings take these strange wide-screen photos, which I guess are kind of arty but not particularly useful for the web. I got it reset eventually, but by then the sun was gone.)

I never covered up my broccoli starts, so whatever survived is tough enough to stay below freezing for over a week! We’ll see if it ends up producing anything edible.

Eek, popping weed is on the march already, thanks to the warm days! Can you see its cute little white flower all set to come up, bloom for a bit, and then release its evil batch of 100% germination seeds?

This senecio should do well in hot, dry conditions, but I think I didn’t water it enough in its first growing season so it is still struggling a bit (you can see yellow/brown patches on some of the leaves, but there has been new growth so I am hoping it will hang in there).

For lack of much else to look at, I have left my dead coneflowers to provide a bit of sculptural height. They would probably look a lot nicer with a little dusting of snow underneath, but the senecio is a next-best backdrop.

This euphorbia wandered over from the neighbor’s and I transplanted it rather rudely a few years ago, down to the parking strip. Further proof of how tough these plants are – it looked a little sad for about two minutes, and then made a full recovery and is now thriving and putting out its pendant flowers. I was afraid of this plant family for so long, due to its toxic sap, but I am just careful around and also have it in a spot where my kid would never get too close. I just noticed that it has produced its own “baby” a few feet away, which I may move or give away before it gets too big.

And, after getting the camera switched back to regular old photo size mode, I noticed what I truly hope is the return of my favorite tulips ever. Looking back at that earlier post, I can see that I had them in three spots, and here I only saw one clump coming up. I will just have to be patient, maybe they will all return for another show-offy time in the early spring garden.

Which plant’s return to glory are you most anticipating this spring?