Category Archives: Flowers

Boolie vs. the Garden, Spring Edition


Delphinium trolliifolium grows in our backyard

Thankfully I took a quick snapshot with my iPhone after planting our new larkspur as the slugs didn't take long to strip it bare.

We have a little slice of the Columbia River Gorge taking root in our backyard in Portland. One of my wife’s colleagues does research on a larkspur species that grows on the western side of the gorge, Delphinium trolliifolium, and gave us one of his research subjects when he was done with it. I’m not sure of the exact nature of his research, but perhaps it’s to see if bigfoot would rather eat larkspurs or decorate its den with them.

Our particular plant was grown from seeds collected at the trailhead to Angel’s Rest, one of my favorite trails in the Gorge, so I was happy to give it a home in a shady section of our yard. The slugs were happy too as they quickly devoured it. It normally blooms in late March to early April so the hungry little gastropods ruined our chance for flowers this year, but there’s hope for the next. I put some slug bait around it and now there is a lot of new growth springing up. I don’t usually put out slug bait, even the new safer kind as I prefer the live-and-let-live approach, but it was the only way to try and save the plant.

The slugs may have done in the lobelia as well that we planted last fall as part of the new hummingbird garden in memory of my mother-in-law, as it hasn’t poked up out of the earth yet. One of the salvias has also shown no signs of life, perhaps the unusually wet winter and spring did it in, but there have been at least some signs of life from all of the other new arrivals. The new dogwood in particular did just fine during the winter and is now leafing out like crazy.

Some of the other new plants are showing signs of late night devourings as well, so perhaps I need to apply the slug bait a little more liberally until the plants are better established. I think most of our garden slugs aren’t native, so there’s that at least.

I was also pleased to see that the handful of ferns I transplanted from the side of the house are unrolling new fronds, I was most worried about the one with delicate lace-like fronds but it seems to be doing the best of all of them. Between the ferns, the trillium doing the best it ever has, the new hostas sprouting up, and the new larkspur hopefully making a comeback, Redwood Corner is starting to take shape.

Milky White

A trillium blooms in Prairie Creek Redwood State Park

Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Oberon in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

An unexpected delight from my visit to the redwoods was finding trillium all across the park, little jewels blooming beneath the giants. Our western trillium blooms white early in the spring and turns purple as it ages, like the flower in the bard’s tale.

A trillium blooms in Prairie Creek Redwood State Park

Tough

An Oregon iris blossoms along the Mill Hill Trail at William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge

The scientific name for this species of iris is Iris tenax, which literally means tough iris. They are also commonly known as the Oregon iris and are native to the Pacific Northwest, they are fairly short for an iris and have narrow leaves.

I first saw these blossoming one spring day in a meadow at William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge and fell in love with them, so I bought one at a nursery and planted it in our garden. Unfortunately, we moved before I ever got to see it bloom and I don’t know if the new owners appreciated its subtle beauty compared to the large, showy irises more commonly seen in gardens.

Skunked and Not Skunked

A skunk cabbage blossoms in Prairie Creek Redwood State Park

I went to more trouble than anyone in the history of the world has ever gone to photograph skunk cabbage.

I love the look of skunk cabbage but I’m also thankful I have such a poor sense of smell — they don’t come by their name by accident. There is a small patch along the Oaks-to-Wetlands Trail at Ridgefield but it’s a bit overrun and despite my best efforts I’ve never been able to get a decent picture.

While hiking in the redwoods, I came across a couple of small patches of skunk cabbage when the trail approached a large meadow. One flower in particular caught my fancy and I knew I had my chance to finally get a decent picture. I took some pictures with the lenses I had with me but since the flower was away from the trail, I wanted to return the next day with the big lens.

After hiking throughout the following morning and into the afternooon, I had a short window to revisit the cabbage before heading down to hike to a small waterfall. The cabbage turned out to be near a trailhead so I took the short route up. But each turn of the bend revealed no cabbage, the patch farther away in reality than memory.

I nearly turned back with each disappointing bend in the trail, worried I wouldn’t have enough time for the next hike. With the heavy lens and the bright sun and the light breeze I wasn’t sure the cabbage would be worth the effort anyway, nevermind the nagging suspicion that there would be a lot of cabbage near the stream from the waterfall that would be better subjects than these.

I did continue on and find the particular patch and the particular flower I was looking for. The leaves had shifted so it made an even more compelling scene than my previous visit and the forest canopy kindly shaded my chosen flower. To top it off, even more of the flower was in bloom. The breeze was moving the plants around so I waited for those brief seconds when all was still.

As it turns out there was a bunch of skunk cabbage on the trail to the waterfall, sitting right beside the trail with no big lens required, but I never found another that was as photogenic as this one. To be honest part of me didn’t want to find one, after going to the trouble to photograph the other, but I looked just the same.

That might not sound like I went to a lot of trouble, and in truth I didn’t, but I’d wager it’s still more trouble than anyone has ever gone to photograph skunk cabbage.

And I’m glad I did.

A skunk cabbage blossoms in Prairie Creek Redwood State Park

Ups and Downs

Today’s photo is the first to go online from my recent trip to Yellowstone and the Tetons. If you know me, it will seem like a strange choice to lead off with since, squint all you like, you won’t see any animals in the picture.

Snow flurries were flying when I hiked the Beaver Ponds Nature Trail in the northwest section of the park. I hadn’t see any animals on the hike, so when I came across this lovely little red plant dusted with snow, I put on some extension tubes, hooked up the remote cable, and took some pictures until I got cold and needed to get moving again. It’s one picture that summarizes the ups and downs of this trip nicely.

The Ups and Downs of the Animals
Don’t get me wrong, I was fortunate enough to get some nice animals pictures, so stay tuned for elk, pronghorn, several birds, and, if you’re quiet and still, a little pika.

But it was still disappointing not to see more bears or moose or any sheep. And not to see more animals on the trail away from the madding crowds and traffic, when you really feel like you get to know the personality of the animals. I can hike in beautiful mountains and not see wildlife without leaving Oregon. I did get to spend a lot of time with elk during the end of their rut and saw more pronghorn than before, plus a few more nice animal encounters, so the trip had its rewarding moments, just not as many as I had been expecting.

Even my favorite red squirrels rarely chattered at me as I hiked in Yellowstone, though thankfully the boomers in the Tetons were up to the task.

With fewer animals out and about, I made a deliberate attempt to capture some of the sights and shapes and textures of Yellowstone, and this picture is one of those attempts.

The Ups and Downs of the Weather
The weather is always going to be variable this time of year, so I wasn’t too surprised that the sunny and warm weather that had been predicted disappeared by the time I showed up. And I actually like clouds during the day when I’m shooting wildlife. But there was ice this time that shut down roads and limited access to the park on a couple of days, plus a snowstorm that made me leave for home a day earlier than planned. The Tetons were covered in clouds nearly the entire time I was there.

On the plus side, the rain was more a drizzling and occasional rain and not like the downpours I saw last year. And the snow was beautiful when it wasn’t shutting down the roads. The aspens were at their peak fall color and were as beautiful as always. And the last day in the Tetons at least let me see the peaks as I hiked in the canyons until exhaustion and snow turned me back down the mountain.

The Ups and Downs of My Equipment
This was my first dedicated photo trip with my MacBook, and it acquitted itself well in all areas but one. The speed when working with RAW files seemed an order of magnitude faster than my old Powerbook, a very welcome development that let me get to sleep earlier each night. The wireless range was much better, particularly important on this trip as I tracked the weather each night. The larger hard disk also came in handy.

But the color accuracy of the screen doesn’t seem as good as the Powerbook’s was, and at one point when looking at some problem areas in animals with dark fur, I actually thought something was wrong with my cameras. When I got back home, I removed the color calibration I had created with Apple’s software program and things got a lot better in the key problem areas (deep shadows as well as the reds of this plant). This screen doesn’t calibrate well with that program, not sure if a hardware calibrator would be better.

The camera equipment worked about like I expected since little was new to me. The only recent acquisition was a ballhead robust enough to support my telephoto lenses. I ended up going with the Arca Swiss Z1 and it worked nicely in the field, although I’m going to have to reapply the blue Loctite since the 500mm lens made the head twist loose on one occasion.

Given the frequent drizzle, I found myself once again wishing that Canon would add weather-proofing to its consumer cameras. And I’d certainly like the better autofocus of its pro line. What I’ve been waiting for the past 5 years is for a digital equivalent of the old EOS 3 film camera.

Fortunately it got announced right around my birthday this summer.

Unfortunately for me it’s made by Nikon.