2008 Year in review (Part 2)

You might want to start with Part 1.

July

July started with a rare vacation away from home, to my brother’s lake house to celebrate my Dad’s 80th. On the boat with my sister Cheryl and wife Elly …

cheryl, craig, elly

With Cheryl and Alex after a good morning of striper fishing.

striper catch

Back home, it’s midsummer and there are lots of great serendipitous plant combos to enjoy, in the wet garden …

wet garden

… and front garden.

wet garden

Enough plant material to do bloom day scans in four different color schemes.

wet garden

Out in the garden, lilies

wet garden

The rusty favorite, Digitalis ferruginea

wet garden

Exploring backlighting.

wet garden

Lots of gaudy flowers to shoot. Hibsicus at Cornell Plantations …

weekend pix

Filipendula.

weekend pix

Lily

Plus my 15 minutes of fame in USA Weekend.

August

Jade rolling under a double rainbow ’bout sums up my feelings about August.


Larger image.

They say things start slowing down in the garden in August. Can’t say I’ve noticed that. There’s lots growing around the patio, but still not much time to sit.

sunday walkaround

Still plenty of flowers to shoot, including Daylilies, purple …

sunday flowers

… and yellow …

bloom day aug 2008

Rosa ‘Princess Di’ …
bloom day aug 2008

… buttonbush …

sunday flowers

…globe thistle …

sunday walkaround

… water lily …

sunday walkaround

One of the bloom day scans for the month.

bloom day aug 2008

I also defended heucheras.

heucheras

August has nice sunsets, too.

sunset

September

OK. The pace does start to slow in September. But it’s still one of the best times of year in these parts, if not the most floriferous.

The colors are more subtle, like this anemone.

purples and violets

My favorite bloom day scan featured grasses, not blooms.

sept bloom day scans

I featured my four (that’s a stretch) water gardens in the month’s Garden Bloggers Design Workshop.

water garden stuff

And on a rainy day, I discovered blingee.

blingee from scans

October

October is the month of frost and fall color. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t still some flowers around, like my fall favorites, anemones.

secret garden anemones

Abutilon pictum ‘Thompsonii’

some warm colors

Grasses carry the weight in October.

grassy border

Fall colors start coming with Polygonatum odoratum ‘Variegatum’

Polygonatum odoratum 'Variegatum'

Ivy outside campus store.
campus color

First frosts provide great photo opps …
Asian pear in the veggie garden.

2008 frost

Pitcher plant

2008 frost

Backlit grasses usher in brown season.
fall pix

November

Fall color is where you find it, like this pitcher plant …

Sarracenia purpurea and Vaccinium macrocarpon

… and this bittersweet and borrowed scenery.

borrowed scenery

When there’s less to see looking down, you appreciate more the view looking up.

skywatch

January came in November [impressions | the real thing]


jan in nov impressions

I visited the Winter Garden at Cornell Plantations as the light was waning.

winter garden

December

Check out the student projects from Cornell’s Art of Horticulture class.

Glowing greenhouses make leaving work after dark a little less depressing during these SAD-inducing months.

ugly mix

And I’ve now got a passable scan for December for my planned 2010 garden scan calendar.

december 2008 scans

Thanks for visiting and commenting. Best wishes for the New Year.

2008 Year in review (Part 1)

The obligatory (and hopefully entertaining) look back …

January

Not much happening in the garden, so it was a good time to think about ordering seeds and plants (unfortunately, they’re more than 5 cents a pack these days, unlike these old packs) and sharing stories about the great bowling ball accident of 2003.

castor bean seed packet

While there were no blooms (or scans), there was surprisingly much to photograph on a very warm January garden bloogers bloom day.

The ridge in January

February

February is for forcing
.

forced bulbs

And time to fiddle around with PhotoShopping that month’s bloom day scans and chase away the merry blues with Manu Chao.

bloom day scan feb

Had a sunset picture grace a CD cover.

Read and reviewed Tulipomania. Added my two cents (and a ton of pictures) to the Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop – Color in the Garden edition.

March

I love March, if only for its excitement. There are the forced bulbs in flower

forced bulbs

The first of the spring ephemerals

crocuses

Then back to winter, hell and high water.

Fred and bottle tree

By Easter, plenty of signs that spring is on it’s way …

Iris

Then more snow. There’s a reason they’re called snowdrops, you know.
snowy snowdrops

April

Speaking of snowdrops, April brought the open house at snowdrop collector Hitch Lyman’s garden.

snowdrop

And the spring ephemeral peak at my place. Crocus …

ephemerals

Puschkinia.

scilla i think

Hyper-spring also brings scilla …

scilla siberica

… and erythronium.

trout lily

And by the end of the month, a bazillion daffodils, these at Nina Bassuk and Peter Trowbridge’s annual open house.

daffs

May

Spring continues full bore. Purple primrose …

mertensia

Thalia daffs

angelic daffs

Sakuraso primrose

Sakuraso primrose

…an iris from Marcia’s garden

marcia's garden

… and many more in this bloom day scan.

may scan with hard light effect

In the world of art, Quilter Lisa Ellis used one of my canna images for this work of art …

canna quilt

… Cornell students built this Turfwork! project

Turfwork! from the air. Photo by Peter Cadieux

… and Durand Van Doran built this fabulous floral gate — roots and all — in Minns Garden outside the building where I work.

Minn's garden gate

And we are reminded that there’s nothing new under the sun.

June

Some theme posts in June, because there’s so much to cover you’ve got to do some lumping. One on openings

openings

,,, another on chartreusey stuff …

chartreusey

… too many blooms on bloom day to fit onto one scan …

june scan

… actual bloom day pictures to go with the scans …

goatsbeard (Aruncus)

East Digitalistan

not digitalistan

… and decent images of aruncus (finally!) …

aruncus

summer songs


Mussolini was a-shavin’ whistlin’ tarantella,
Stalin was keeping eye on barbeque.
When their fish line bell started to jingle,
Mussolini caught a-nothin’, Stalin caught two.

On the art front, Cornell graduation turf art

cals sod sculpture

I tried to push back on the bland reporting on leaf casts in the garden media, and reported on the infamous Memorial Day jello contest.

As we head into the second half of the year, these alliums in Minns Garden outside the building where I work are all ready for 4th of July fireworks.

painted alliums

Part 2 starts here …

More info on Gandhi in the Grass

Several folks asked me for more info on the Message from the Earth living art installation in the Mann Library lobby back for the holidays. If that’s you, see this Cornell Chronicle article I wrote.

gandhi in the grass

I got this message from Christine, a co-worker who spearheaded this project. (On the left in the picture with Marcia Eames-Sheavly and Howard Raskin from Mann Library.)

On a side note, it was interesting to see peoples reactions today as we took it all down. One woman asked me with great concern in her voice “What are you going to do with Gandhi now?”. I replied that we were going to compost him! She definitely wasn’t satisfied with that answer, protesting that we must help him to continue to stay alive. She offered her own grow lights from home, saying that we should put him outside, give him more light and water, and try to revive him. I gently told her that it was too late, that his roots were already dead. And then reminded her that composting him is very much in line with his teachings of the earth as a cycle, what comes from the earth, goes back to the earth…. At last, she seemed satisfied with that understanding!

I love how people developed such a connection with this….

Holiday music: Christmas in the trenches

Merry Christmas from the Family is the holiday song that makes me laugh. Christmas in the Trenches is the one that makes me misty and then some. John McCutcheon turns a true story into a real tear-jerker with a message.

Two versions: Straight recent live performance …

and older live performance with back story and period pictures.

Was a big McCutcheon fan back in college days. Good to see that this favorite is still popular, at least on the YouTubes.