Art – Page 13 – Ellis Hollow

Lawn and garden tips …

…from ExxonMobil and Monsanto, via Comics section at DailyKos.

Larger version available via this page.

February bloom day scans: Cyclamen and pelargonium

Yes. I know it’s March already. (Though you wouldn’t know it by looking outside.) I had these scans ready to go a couple days after bloom day, but never found time to get them online until now. Maybe a change in the weather will bring on some ephemerals for March bloom day. But I’m not holding my breath.

‘Planet’ fiddling

Had a few minutes on Friday to take a quick visit to the gallery at Mann Library to check out the Planet Cornell exhibit. The exhibit features works by photo wizards Kent Loeffler (the photographer upstairs for the Department of Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology, see his work here and here) and Claire Smith, where they manipulate panoramic images into free floating spherical worlds. (View some of Kent’s planets here.)

The process is relatively easy. (Here are the directions.) But obviously, I need some practice:

The 360 panorama of Minns Garden:

‘Planet’ with sky to center.

‘Planet’ with sky to the edges.

Think I need to stitch in more sky to make it work, which I’m not sure I can do in PhotoShop. I also fiddled with an old panorama (though not 360) of Fred running through the snow:

See also the post below with a pelargonium planet.

Pelargonium

I did finally find time to do some scans this weekend, but haven’t had time to process them. In the meantime, here are some manipulations from an older scan. (They’re blooming like crazy in the cold bedroom now):

Four square:

Kaleidoscope:

‘Planet’

The original scan from November 2011.

Top 10 pix of 2012

Like Les at Tidewater Gardener who is organizing this best pix meme, I couldn’t keep it to 10. So here is a baker’s dozen of my favorites in roughly chronological order. This exercise made me realize that I didn’t take as many pix this year, but spent a lot of time fiddling with pictures and scans. This year’s resolution is to get the camera out more.

Actually, this is from just before Christmas 2011, but didn’t post until Jan. 2. Early morning sun on a spot where the snow further blurs the border between plantings and the wilds beyond. A close second from the same post was this shot of lettuce ready for harvest on New Year’s.

Snowdrops in Minns Garden, Cornell University, Feb. 2012. The warm, open winter got me out shooting the spring ephemerals earlier than usual. Sheltered spots like this on campus can be a week or so ahead of my blooms at home.

Time lapse I made of the titan arum flowering at Cornell, March. This was probably the highlight of my year. More than 10,000 visited in person. Half a million tuned in via the live feed. The researchers gave me a couple of seeds a few weeks ago and they are nestled into the most watched pots in the house. The seed head is even more beautiful than the flower, in my estimation. You can see it and more pix here.

Crocus, March. I misssed a lot of the early ephemerals working 24/7 on the titan arum. Temps went up into the upper 70s that week and they blew by while I was at work, but was able to catch some of the early action.

Willow, March. Willows are well-suited to my mostly wet ground. Yes, they can be rather plain. But when they flower, I’m in heaven.

And then scan manipulation mania hit: Nectaroscordum siculum ssp. bulgaricum, Salix integra ‘Hakuro-nishiki’. Someone on Pinterest grabbed some of my bloom day scans and fiddled around with them, basically just flipping the images vertically and horizontally and piecing them together. Soon, I started composing the scans with these 4-pane manipulations in mind.

Later on, I found a recipe for making kaleidoscopic images from scans, and piece them together into honeycomb mosaics. This one is a classic optical illusion — not that that’s what I was shooting for — from a scan of bottlebrush buckeye, if I recall correctly.