Scanner art by Craig Cramer, gardening & more
What happens when. ‘Today the first snowdrop flowered.’
… of the season.  Snowdrops and crocuses pushing through on a south slope along Tower Rd. west of the Rockwell Azalea Garden on the Cornell Campus.
It started snowing right after I shot these. By the time I got home, any ephemerals that may have decided to show themselves here were covered.
… but no scans.
It’s been warm here, with many records broken last week at Binghamton, our closest official weather station. .
When it was like this last year, I wrote alarming articles about how global warming will affect your gardening. But now, no one seems too upset.
So Sunday was pretty nice, too. So I went out and took some pictures instead of hovering over the scanner like I usually do.
The ridge in January. Everything is kind of muted and somber with the still-low sun. Not the panic of June. But still many interesting things to see if you look.
Some bulbs poking through already.
There’s still some green around, you just have to look low and among the leaves, like for this Asarum patch.
Digitalis ferruginea, my favorite foxglove in part because of it’s nearly evergreen habit.
The hellebores have stayed green.
As have the lambsears.
And the pulmonaria.
There are some interesting red-browns going on out there, too. Heucheras …
and pitcher plants.
The beaves continue to be busy.
And I couldn’t resist a better image of the floating bowling ball from the midnight bowling ball incident.
This morning, I finally had a chance to get out into the garden with enough light that I didn’t need a flashlight to see what was there. Were it not for the recent cold (seasonable, actually) weather, I thought I might actually be able to scan some things that most reasonable people would actually consider blooms. But all I found really were materials suitable for dried flower arrangements, which I usually put together over the Thanksgiving holiday, anyway.
So, this may be my final bloom day scan until March — unless we have another mild winter and we have snowdrops in January like last year.
Ornamental grass wrapped in thunbergia, lunaria, milkweed, ironweed, motherwort, bittersweet.
Heuchera, clematis, milkweed(?) seeds that happened to drift in during composition.
A few years ago, I attended a lecture by Felder Rushing, who is neck-and-neck with Piet Oudolf in the race for most influential gardener in my life.
At the beginning of his presentation, Felder wanted to point out that not only were we crazy plant people, but we were strange even by standards of gardeners in general. He asked for a show of hands to a series of questions starting with, How many of you grow more than a dozen varieties of a single species of plants? More than half gardeners in attendence raised thier hands
The question that really got me was, How many of you have ever given a tour of your garden by flashlight?
Well, honestly I haven’t. But I wouldn’t hesitate to.
If I wanted to do my usual bloom-day scans, I would have had to use a flashlight because light is pretty scarce around here before and after work. Bloom day scans will have to wait for the weekend.
Meanwhile, I’ve had a bunch frosty and fall-color pix collecting here over the past couple of weeks. So instead of scans, here’s a chance for my usual pix purge.
Really hard frost (~19 F) last Sunday:
Sunrise has hit the far ridge, but hasn’t hit the garden yet.
Frost patterns in the miscanthus.
Frozen monard dots. (Thanks Piet.)
Jade and the plants soak in the sun as it burns off the frost.
Beads of water after the sun melts the frost.
Morning sun on Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum)
Miscanthus floridulus flowered this year, at least 12 feet tall.
At Cornell, ‘We grow the Ivy.’ It turns red in the fall.
Scans this weekend, if I can find some time…
… that Julie over at the Human Flower Project chose one of my images to add to her tribute to the late poet Jon Anderson.
If you like flowers, you’ll love her website.
Oh yeah. Heavy frost last night. The banana tree is mush. It will be a dahlia-packing weekend this weekend.