My neighbor Lynn finds bee pix boring. But I can’t get enough of them. I love the little orange bundles of pollen they pick up from the verbascum.
Weekend pix: Bees on verbascum
Category: Biennials
Biennial plants I grow.
Plants I should have put together
When I saw these shots from scattered spots around the garden on the thumbnails page, I wished that I’d put them all together in one place in the garden, too. The whites and purples work well together.
Verbascum. (Don’t know the species, but it’s seeding around nicely.)
Closer view
Cerinthe major
Purple-flowered tradescantia
White-flowered tradescantia
Purple-spotted foxglove
Another view.
A shrub whose name escapes me.
The verbascum I opened with, along with some Verbena hastata coming on. If the Verbena speeds up and/or the verbascum slows down, could be a nice pairing.
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 …
With Cheryl and Alex after a good morning of striper fishing.
Back home, it’s midsummer and there are lots of great serendipitous plant combos to enjoy, in the wet garden …
… and front garden.
Enough plant material to do bloom day scans in four different color schemes.
Out in the garden, lilies …
The rusty favorite, Digitalis ferruginea
Exploring backlighting.
Lots of gaudy flowers to shoot. Hibsicus at Cornell Plantations …
Filipendula.
Lily
Plus my 15 minutes of fame in USA Weekend.
August
Jade rolling under a double rainbow ’bout sums up my feelings about August.
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.
Still plenty of flowers to shoot, including Daylilies, purple …
… and yellow …
… Rosa ‘Princess Di’ …
… buttonbush …
…globe thistle …
… water lily …
One of the bloom day scans for the month.
I also defended heucheras.
August has nice sunsets, too.
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.
My favorite bloom day scan featured grasses, not blooms.
I featured my four (that’s a stretch) water gardens in the month’s Garden Bloggers Design Workshop.
And on a rainy day, I discovered blingee.
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.
Abutilon pictum ‘Thompsonii’
Grasses carry the weight in October.
Fall colors start coming with Polygonatum odoratum ‘Variegatum’
Ivy outside campus store.
First frosts provide great photo opps …
Asian pear in the veggie garden.
Pitcher plant
Backlit grasses usher in brown season.
November
Fall color is where you find it, like this pitcher plant …
… and this bittersweet and borrowed scenery.
When there’s less to see looking down, you appreciate more the view looking up.
January came in November [impressions | the real thing]
I visited the Winter Garden at Cornell Plantations as the light was waning.
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.
And I’ve now got a passable scan for December for my planned 2010 garden scan calendar.
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.
While there were no blooms (or scans), there was surprisingly much to photograph on a very warm January garden bloogers bloom day.
February
February is for forcing.
And time to fiddle around with PhotoShopping that month’s bloom day scans and chase away the merry blues with Manu Chao.
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 …
The first of the spring ephemerals …
Then back to winter, hell and high water.
By Easter, plenty of signs that spring is on it’s way …
Then more snow. There’s a reason they’re called snowdrops, you know.
April
Speaking of snowdrops, April brought the open house at snowdrop collector Hitch Lyman’s garden.
And the spring ephemeral peak at my place. Crocus …
Hyper-spring also brings scilla …
… and erythronium.
And by the end of the month, a bazillion daffodils, these at Nina Bassuk and Peter Trowbridge’s annual open house.
May
Spring continues full bore. Purple primrose …
…an iris from Marcia’s garden …
… and many more in this bloom day scan.
In the world of art, Quilter Lisa Ellis used one of my canna images for this work of art …
… Cornell students built this Turfwork! project …
… and Durand Van Doran built this fabulous floral gate — roots and all — in Minns Garden outside the building where I work.
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 …
,,, another on chartreusey stuff …
… too many blooms on bloom day to fit onto one scan …
… actual bloom day pictures to go with the scans …
… and decent images of aruncus (finally!) …
… 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 …
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.
Weekend pix
Some images from the weekend, which included a very short tour of Cornell Plantations with some old family friends in town for a visit. Plantations is worth a visit if only to see the container collections right off the parking lot.
Some hot hibiscus blooms at Plantations.
And some nice lilies.
Every year this border right outside the education building is a little different. And every time I marvel at the skill that goes into its design and execution.
A favorite vignette from the border, including ricinus and beets.
Another view of the containers.
Some scenes from around the home garden. Red astilbe.
The back sunny border.
Allium, artemisia and jewelweed.
Some blooms. Ligularia.
A hybrid hazelnut I got from Phil Rutter close to 20 years ago.
A bunch of filipendula closeups. Cotton candy.
