In my garden, the month of May brings the familiar song of the cardinal high up in my black walnut tree, the flurry of house sparrows making nests in the cedar hedge and the buzz of queen bumble bees emerging from their winter nests to forage for pollen. Most of the early bulbs have now faded away and it is prima donna season for shimmering white daffodils and tulips in a rainbow of warm hues. My fairy crown for early May is a celebration of mid-spring abundance featuring tulips in peach, pink and lilac; ‘Geranium’, ‘Stainless’ and ‘Thalia’ daffodils; peachy ‘Gipsy Queen’ hyacinth still in flower; blue-and-white grape hyacinths (Muscari aucheri ‘Ocean Magic’); wine-red snakeshead fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris); a truss of magenta ‘PJM’ rhododendron; the delicate red blossoms of my Japanese maple (Acer palmatum); and the first tiny, blue flowers of perennial Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla).
Now is also the time when I rummage through my cupboards searching out small vases, shot glasses, votive candle holders and favorite mugs to hold these long-awaited blossoms to bring the joy and fragrance of spring indoors.
My front garden flanks the city sidewalk – no fence, no obstacles for neighbours and passersby who wish to stop and gaze or capture the flowers with their cell phone. And it’s never more popular than now, when the bulbs bloom in riotous profusion in what will be a towering prairie months later – no single-color blocks for me!
I’ve never understood gardeners who turn down their noses at tulips. Yes, they’re gaudy! Isn’t that the point? We need color after a long winter.
The ‘Shogun’ tulips continue to open while the big Fosteriana tulip ‘Orange Emperor’ starts to flower as well. I mentioned how much I love orange, right?
Each autumn, I add to the assortment, but old favourites include the big Darwin Hybrids ‘Pink Impression’….
… and ‘Apricot Impression’…
…. and the elegant lily-flowered tulip ‘Ballerina’.
Other tulips in my spring repertoire that have hung around for more than a few seasons are the luscious double ‘Lilac Perfection’….
…. and the double fringed tulip ‘Crispion Sweet’.
Fragrance in daffodils is important to me, as are longevity and a tendency to multiply. I love the spicy scent of the old Tazetta cultivar ‘Geranium’, with its clustered, shimmering-white flowers with orange cups, like a hardy paperwhite.
And the Triandus hybrid daffodil ‘Thalia’ – sometimes called the orchid narcissus – is another winner. Its dainty, white flowers with their reflexed petals are lovely in spring nosegays, especially with blue grape hyacinths.
Here is ‘Thalia’ in the garden; you can see how it multiplies. And you can also see my favourite little Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’ still in bloom behind.
I do have a fondness for white daffodils (as well as ‘Golden Echo’), and I love those with salmon-pink trumpets, like ‘Pink Charm’, below.
Finally, there’s the Large Cup daffodil ‘Stainless’ with pure white flowers, on the left below.
The hyacinths from my last fairy crown fade in colour but stay in flower for a long period. Because I love plant combinations of blue and orange, I mix the bulbs of peach-orange ‘Gipsy Queen’ hyacinth and blue-and-white grape hyacinth Muscari aucheri ‘Ocean Magic’ together with delightful results!
That little grape hyacinth is a stunner in tiny bouquets, too. Here it is with Narcissus ‘Thalia’, Muscari latifolium and Anemone blanda ‘Blue Shades’.
Snake’s head fritillary (Fritillaria meleagaris) is an elegant dark horse in the mid-spring garden with its pendulous, checkered, wine-red flowers. The specific ephithet meleagris means “spotted like a guinea fowl” so another common name is the guinea hen flower.
Though it’s not featured in my crown, another bulb blooming in my garden at this time is summer snowflake, Leucojum aestivum ‘Gravetye Giant’ (which, despite its name, is a spring-bloomer). I don’t have nearly enough of these elegant flowers.
We often think of Japanese maples (Acer palmatum) primarily as specimen trees, but stand near one in flower on a sunny day in spring….
…. and try to count the native bees buzzing around the tiny, pendulous, red blossoms, like this spring-active Andrena bee. That’s the little dangling red jewel over my right eye in the fairy crown.
My old tree is planted in a south-facing site in front of our living room windows where it is protected from the cold, north wind – and serves as my leafy curtain from May through November. Here it is outside my 2nd-floor window (and that’s my husband strolling out in a spring shower.)
Heading into my back garden, we find the tiny blue flowers of Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla), a frothy groundcover perennial under spring bulbs. It thrives in part shade and is low-maintenance, ultra-hardy, long-flowering and unbothered by pests or disease. There are many variegated-leaf cultivars, but I am partial to the regular species with its lush green leaves. Here it is growing with rhubarb and European wild ginger (Asarum europaeum).
My back garden has a thriving population of ostrich ferns, which is a nice way of saying they’re very successful invaders. Growing amidst them are lots of mid-season tulips whose names I’ve long forgotten, but I believe the magenta-pink one is ‘Don Quichotte’. Aren’t they pretty?
Not all plants in a garden last indefinitely. Some barely hang on, others fight disease, some struggle with winter temperatures – and that’s the case with my Mezitt-hybrid Rhododendron ‘PJM’. At one time, I had three of these hardy, small-flowered shrubs near my lily pond, but over the years they declined, leaving just one to greet spring with its clusters of outrageously brilliant magenta flowers – and a place of honor in my fairy crown.
Speaking of my crown, I’ll leave with a little bouquet of my deconstructed Fairy Crown #4. What could be prettier than these lovely May flowers?
A fairy crown. A flowery tiara. A chaplet. A corona for Corona-virus times! When I got the brilliant idea to mark another gardening season with a series of “What’s in Bloom” floral wreaths for my head, below….
…I was not inventing something new. People have actually been crowning themselves with flowers and greenery for millennia. Take Dionysus, for example, the Greek god of all things wine and too-much-fun (the Romans called him Bacchus). This is how Caravaggio imagined him, circa 1598, with a Bacchanalian wreath of grape leaves.
During a visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles a few years ago, it was a painting by the Victorian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema that made me peer a little closer. In ‘Spring’, from 1892, the artist had created a procession of celebrants wearing floral crowns wending their way through the streets of Rome. The Getty’s website says: “It is unclear exactly which festival Alma-Tadema meant to depict, but the many references from ancient Rome all indicate a springtime celebration of fertility and abundance, perhaps most resembling Floralia, honoring Flora, goddess of flowers. British May Day traditions were also rooted in the Floralia festival and were revived during the 1800s to celebrate spring and nature in the face of rapid industrialization. On May 1, children decked themselves and their village with flowers, danced, and crowned a May Queen.”
When I was a little girl, I attended a Catholic convent in Victoria, B.C. called St. Ann’s Academy. It was on a beautiful property filled with gardens and orchards that the nuns tended… religiously. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). In my 3rd grade class photo from 1956 (!) below, you can see the massive rhododendrons behind us. Today, St. Ann’s is a Provincial Heritage Site and ‘events venue’ with a small museum. But my point here is that every May 1st, or May Day, we girls would have a procession through the grounds carrying flowers to a statue of Mary while singing “Mary we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May”. Thinking back now (as an atheist), it still seems like the most beautiful idea, the floral crowning part at any rate. Who wouldn’t want to be “queen of the May”?
It was her own Catholic iconography that Mexican painter Frida Kahlo invoked when she painted her 1940 Self-PortraitDedicated to Dr. Eloesser. From the Frida Kahlo website: “Frida’s necklace of thorns is just a single strand, but it draws even more blood. In the background, leafless broken-off twigs profiled against an opalescent sky look like the dead twigs woven into Frida’s necklace in the self-portrait with the hummingbird. No doubt the dry white buds that mingle with the twigs (and that droop from Frida’s headdress as well) likewise refer to her desolation. Although Frida has flowers in her hair and wears the earrings in the shape of hands that Picasso gave her when she was in Paris, she looks like someone dressed for a ball for which she has no escort. Frida’s work from the year in which she and Diego Rivera were separated demonstrates a heightened awareness of color’s capacity to drive home emotional truths.”
My photo project, on the other hand, was dedicated whimsically to the Goddess Flora…..
…. as featured in Botticelli’s famous Primavera, circa 1482, with its 500 identifiable plant species. How many can you identify?
*****
After seeing one of my spring crowns, my son said I was ready to go to Coachella. I had to look up why that would be. Ah…. a music festival in California! Of course, they wear flower crowns there and it’s all groovy, except, most are fake flowers! That would never do. And I did note that some famous floral designers had designed massively ornate headdresses for garden muses to celebrate 2019 Garden Day in the UK. They were lovely, but not really what I had in mind. I just wanted to celebrate the flowering cycle for my garden by…. putting it on my head! It seemed like my inner child was whispering to me, as if Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell had made a perfectly reasonable suggestion about head-wear. So I decided to call it a ‘fairy crown’, and my first edition for April 7th features the earliest spring-bloomers in my Toronto garden, common snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis), purple and orange crocuses, bright-yellow winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis) and the sweet, hard-working little Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’. (Some friends suggested I do the series as “how-to make fairy crowns”, which made me laugh. My crowns last as long as it takes to make a selfie, then proceed to fall apart everywhere.)
After five long months of winter, the return of spring to my Toronto garden is a glorious time. Endorphins rise in me like sap in a maple tree. And while it’s not quite time to retire the snow shovel and winter coat, everything that’s magical about gardening lies in the weeks and months ahead. Each spring I make little bouquets of my first tiny bulbs to create that joyous feeling indoors, too. It’s often still chilly in the garden and cutting a few flowers for the kitchen table lets me explore them up close with my camera – and my nose! And it always starts with sweet-scented snowdrops. I made this image for a project a long time ago, using a crystal shot glass from an antique “gentleman’s travelling bar” that my father-in-law gave to my husband. The caption is dramatic, but not far off reality. By late March, the gardener is parched for beauty; spring lets us drink it in.
But spring teases in our part of the world, thus the common name for snowdrops.
For the past decade, I’ve kept track of the date of the first snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) to bloom in my garden with the earliest appearance being March 7, 2012 and the latest April 16, 2014. That’s a difference of almost 6 weeks, illustrating the vagaries of winter in the northeast. No matter when they bloom, there’s still a chance that a late snowfall will cause them to close their petals and serve as an appropriate reminder as to how they earned their common name. Snowdrops are easy to grow from a small bulb that should be planted in autumn as soon as they become available, since they deteriorate quickly. But I’ve moved flowering clumps around in spring with great success, something that can’t be easily done with other bulbs. They prefer humus-rich soil in part shade, but like to dry out in summer.
But when they flower with all their sweet-scented goodness after the dearth of winter, there is nothing like a pristine clump of snowdrops, which is why the gardening world has so many “galanthophiles” who grow, rave about and trade various species and cultivars of snowdrops.
Though I appreciate that kind of obsession, for me the common snowdrop is perfection, though you must either get down on your knees or pluck a few for a nosegay to truly appreciate the shimmering, white flowers with their green-edged inner tepals. The bonus? They emit a delicate perfume – much easier to savor in a bouquet than in the garden.
Within a few days of the snowdrops opening, the silken, purple “Tommy” crocuses (Crocus tomassinianus) appear. Here they’re joined by an early showing of the Dutch hybrid crocus ‘Pickwick’ whose fellow hybrids usually appear a week or so later.
A few days of spring warmth and sunshine encourage all the crocuses into bloom together. When that happens, my front garden looks like the Easter bunny arrived to sprinkle crocuses, instead of hiding eggs – and it becomes a favourite spot for passersby to click photos. Because my front garden is never ‘tidied’ much in autumn, it’s a trick to get out and cut back the old stems of the prairie perennials from last year while the soil is still frozen so the little bulbs can shine. But they always come up through scattered leaf mulch and stubble – all good food for the earthworms and soil organisms.
Here are four of the Dutch hybrid crocuses, their names lost in the mists of time. When I originally planted the crocus bulbs en masse in the 1990s, many were dug up immediately by squirrels. In fact, a few days later, the garden looked like the craters of the moon. Now I immediately mulch bulb plantings with leaves (even getting some from my neighbours’ boulevards) and water them down so the squirrels don’t have a ‘nose’ for the freshly cultivated soil.
When it’s warm enough to fly (15C-59F), honey bees seek out the pollen-rich crocus flowers. They’re especially fond of Crocus x luteus ‘Golden Yellow’.
Look at this happy vignette, with crocuses joined by Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’.
Of all the spring irises I’ve tried and lost, this little iris is a true survivor, shrugging off harsh winters and late snowfalls to show off her indigo-striped, pale-blue flowers alongside her crocus companions. Hardy, easy and beautiful, she makes good-sized clumps over the years and is an attractive cut flower in a tiny vase. A small caveat: she does tend to get a virus that causes blue splotches on her petals and is transmissible to other members of the iris family. But since I have none growing near her, I don’t bother about it.
Gardeners in the northeast are accustomed to spring sputtering forward slowly and occasionally backtracking to winter (like this year). It’s been known to happen in my garden, and I shared the rhyme below on my Facebook page on April 3, 2016.
There once was an iris named Kate
Who sulked when winter stayed late:
“I’m tired of the cold and this foul April snow.
Had I known, I’d have remained well below!”
It happens to crocuses, too, but they have adapted to cold, snowy weather by keeping their flowers closed and their pollen protected.
Winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis), those lemon-yellow flowers in my fairy crown, have evolved a similar adaption to protect their pollen from inclement weather, as you see below.
The odd snowflake aside, spring has now sprung in my garden and the robins are seeking out earthworms once again.
And if you don’t feel inclined to make your own fairy crown, you can always cut a few stems of these tiny treasures to bring indoors and appreciate at nose level. Spring is here at last!
A little grandmother’s indulgence in this blog, the sixth of #mysongscapes of winter 2020. I write this also in memory of my own paternal grandmother, my “nanny”, with whom I had a special relationship throughout the 30-plus years of our lives that we shared.
In the 1960s, as folk music went mainstream, there were songs that I learned as a teenager that stayed with me throughout life. One in particular, ‘Today’, a favourite sung by John Denver, became a lullaby I sang to my own kids. In fact, my daughter also sang this song at the campfire in her years as a camper, then a counsellor, at summer camp. I read the lyrics as a kind of general carpe diem – those blossoms won’t last forever, so seize the day, the relationship, the time we have. As psychologist Dr. Judith Rich said of the song’s lyrics in an essay on Huffington post, “Here’s the single certainty every human being has to come to terms with. We each have a life. And every life has an expiration date. But unlike so many of the products we buy, our expiration date does not come stamped on our foreheads. The human conundrum is living with the knowledge that our expiration date will surely come to pass, yet we do not know when we’ll arrive at the appointed hour.” So when my first grandchild Emma came along, I sang the song to her, too. I think it must be true that your first grandchild has a special place in your heart. She’s the first one to make your heart swell with love, the first one to remind you of the circle of life and the generations that stand one atop the other. She’s the one who combines the qualities of your own child and her chosen one.
All three of my grandkids have had a story read to them and a song sung to them every night of their lives. The first time I put my granddaughter to bed on my own I pulled out my entire lullaby repertoire and went through quite a few before her eyes started to close. And I’m so happy now that I put my camera on top of her dresser that evening five years ago, because those little flowers don’t stay on those vines forever. That 14-month old is now in first grade, reading all the books she can get her hands on and learning how to play chess and hanging out with her two brothers.
Here are the lyrics to Randy Spark’s beautiful 1964 song, written for The New Christy Minstrels.
TODAY, Randy Sparks (1964)
Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine
I’ll taste your strawberries, I’ll drink your sweet wine
A million tomorrows shall all pass away
‘Ere I forget all the joy that is mine, today
I’ll be a dandy, and I’ll be a rover
You’ll know who I am by the songs that I sing
I’ll feast at your table, I’ll sleep in your clover
Who cares what the morrow shall bring
Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine
I’ll taste your strawberries, I’ll drink your sweet wine
A million tomorrows shall all pass away
‘Ere I forget all the joy that is mine, today
I can’t be contented with yesterday’s glory
I can’t live on promises winter to spring
Today is my moment, now is my story
I’ll laugh and I’ll cry and I’ll sing
Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine
I’ll taste your strawberries, I’ll drink your sweet wine
A million tomorrows shall all pass away
‘Ere I forget all the joy that is mine, today
Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine
I’ll taste your strawberries, I’ll drink your sweet wine
A million tomorrows shall all pass away
‘Ere I forget all the joy that is mine, today
And here is John Denver singing it live:
A wonderful thing happened in August 2016, two years later. My granddaughter Emma, now just turned 3, had learned another famous John Denver song from her own mother, this one written by him in 1969. It was a song that my daughter and I sang together when she was a little girl and that my sister Bonnie sang onstage with my daughter Meredith, below, at a family reunion in 1996.
Here is ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, performed with great gusto by Meredith’s daughter Emma, with backup by her mom.
LEAVING ON A JET PLANE, John Denver (1966)
All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go
I’m standin’ here outside your door
I hate to wake you up to say goodbye
But the dawn is breakin’, it’s early morn
The taxi’s waitin’, he’s blowin’ his horn
Already I’m so lonesome I could die
So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you’ll wait for me
Hold me like you’ll never let me go
‘Cause I’m leavin’ on a jet plane
Don’t know when I’ll be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go
There’s so many times I’ve let you down
So many times I’ve played around
I tell you now, they don’t mean a thing
Every place I go, I’ll think of you
Every song I sing, I’ll sing for you
When I come back,I’ll bring your wedding ring
So kiss me and smile for me Tell me that you’ll wait for me Hold me like you’ll never let me go ‘Cause I’m leavin’ on a jet plane Don’t know when I’ll be back again Oh babe, I hate to go
Now the time has come to leave you One more time, let me kiss you Then close your eyes, I’ll be on my way Dream about the days to come When I won’t have to leave alone Therefore, Miller thinks most cases may be caused by viagra on line tension. These centers provide modernized classrooms and curriculum augmented by effective practical training. levitra pills Controlling or treating the underlying medical cause is the issue with cheap viagra davidfraymusic.com sperm production. Those who are suffering from such difficulty can now be happy as brand viagra from canada .org.uk offers sure help against such a tormenting condition. About the times, I won’t have to say
Kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you’ll wait for me
Hold me like you’ll never let me go
‘Cause I’m leavin’ on a jet plane
Don’t know when I’ll be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go
But, I’m leavin’ on a jet plane Don’t know when I’ll be back again Oh babe, I hate to go
Though John Denver wrote it (and, experienced pilot that he was, sadly died in 1997 when his own small experimental plane crashed off California), it was Peter, Paul & Mary who made this song famous.
******
EMMA
And now, because it’s my blog and I’m the boss of me and also the editor of me, here’s a little album of my first grandchild to go along with this sing-song. What nana doesn’t love sharing a picnic blanket with her granddaughter?
Speaking of tasting strawberries, this was a first taste of her other grandmother’s fruitful harvest, the grandmother with the beautiful Alberta farm.
A first birthday, a home-baked cupcake.
It wasn’t always easy to keep her in one place, but occasionally we could pose together quietly.
She learned to chat with Siri pretty early in life.
Books! That girl loved books and loves them even more, now that she knows how to read the words and understand the story.
We had a long talk that winter morning over her make-believe fruit and cheese. What is real? What is pretend?
When she came to visit nana and poppa, the playground at the bottom of the hill was always a big draw.
It was cold that day. We needed our warm hats.
I was there when mommy and daddy brought home another little brother. He was so very tiny.
April, and spring flowers were finally in bloom. She brought a little bouquet of scilla to nana.
She was four years old when nana asked her to pretend to water her garden while she photographed it. (It would have been better if there was water in the watering can.)
Another snowy winter day and she and Oliver made a beautiful snowman in nana and poppa’s back yard.
That fall, when I came to pick her up from school, she wanted to climb to the very top of the bleachers in the park. And she wanted me to come up there with her.
On Lake Muskoka, she and her brother climbed that rock like billy goats, then told each other funny stories on top.
Last May, I made her a crown of dandelions, sweet violets and grape hyacinths.
She might not know it yet, but she comes from a maternal line of flowery crown wearers.
When I babysat that late summer day, I suggested a game of scavenger hunt to her and her brothers but then I remembered that not everyone knew how to read the clues. So I drew them… different ones for each grandchild.
This Christmas, she mastered the art of talking to her brother on their brand new two-way radios. “Roger that…. over and out.”
When I first listened to Paul Simon’s ‘There Goes Rhymin’ Simon’, released in spring 1973, I was swept away by the rollicking cadence of ‘Kodachrome’, the first song on the album. It was obviously metaphorical, but I loved the bouncing rhythm and the irreverent opening…. “all that crap I learned in high school”. And it was Simon without Garfunkel, a big change from the 1960s and their hits, ‘The Sound of Silence’, ‘Mrs. Robinson’, ‘The Boxer’.
Kodachrome They give us those nice bright colors They give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away
1973 was a bit of a heartbreak year for me. A long relationship had ended and I was in a new job, in a new apartment near the beach in Vancouver, with four white parsons tables that my carpenter dad built for me, a mustard-gold Sears sofa, dozens of plants (it was the 70s after all), a brand-new attitude, and a brand-new turntable and Pioneer receiver (far right in the old photos below). I played Paul Simon so loud on my new stereo that my downstairs neighbours often took exception and knocked on the ceiling, which of course was the essence of (One Man’s Ceiling is) Another Man’s Floor, from that album.
I still love listening to my music loud, and I still adore this album, though now I have the CD, of course. Sometimes, on the 2-1/2 hour drive north to our cottage, I just keep it in the changer and let it play over and over. Kodachrome, Tenderness, Take Me to the Mardi Gras with its New Orleans gospel vibe, American Tune, St. Judy’s Comet, Loves Me Like a Rock, the Reggae rhythms of Was a Sunny Day, etc.
But what about “Kodachrome”…. the film? Fifteen years later in 1988, I was married with four kids, living in Toronto, and determined somehow to create a career combining writing, which I loved, with gardening, which I also loved. And somehow, I did it! I had my first piece published in my botanical garden’s newsletter that spring. It was about my backyard pond. Six years later, I debuted my newspaper column with the Toronto Sun. After my spring introduction, below, I would be required to provide my own photography each week. That went on for six years with this paper, (okay, it was a tabloid with bikini-clad girls on page 3 and hardly any of my friends ever read it, unless they found it on a streetcar or in a hockey arena dressing room, but still….), then another few years with the National Post. So I became a photographer, too. And when I discovered I loved photographing plants as much as writing about them, I launched my own stock photo library.
In the early 90s, I used a Pentax point-and-shoot camera to illustrate my gardening articles and columns. Then I bought a new Canon Elan SLR. And yes, in those days (1990-1996) I used Kodachrome 64 slide film. It did produce Paul Simon’s “nice, bright colors” but it had problems, too. It was high contrast, something that can be problematic in garden scenes in bright light. (And since I was never an early morning riser, preferring to work in my office late at night, I counted on overcast conditions for my optimal outdoor light.) Because of its unique emulsion (something about dye couplers), it meant that development of the film had to be done by Kodak or an approved dealer. When digital began to emerge in publishing in the late 1990s and necessitated the scanning of slides, it was apparent that the emulsion did not behave like the Fujichrome transparencies to which I switched after 1996. (These are so old that the little kid with the beans in the top row is now a dad of a toddler!)
Today I have an overflowing bookcase filled with many dozens of binders of slides containing tens of thousands of pre-2007 images. Having switched to digital that year, I rarely pull out a binder. (The photo below only shows some of them; the rest are scattered around my office.)
But when I do, I cringe if it’s a Kodachrome slide I need to scan with my Plustek scanner (the successor to my first Coolscan scanner, below it), because it requires a lot of fiddling with the software. I kept the old Coolscan as a stand so the Plustek insertion frame would not knock into my Canon flatbed scanner below.
Over the years, I went through a lot of cameras and lenses and photo tutorials. In 1998, at a workshop in New Brunswick, when the renowned photographer Freeman Patterson turned my camera from horizontal to vertical to show me the difference it made in framing a scene, I could only watch him in amazement. I wanted to see with his eyes.
My cameras came with me everywhere. This was me in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the 1990s. (My hair was still mostly dark then….)
I’ve been photographing at that wonderful 200-acre arboretum/graveyard in all seasons for more than two decades. Just one of my many ongoing projects.
Another multi-year photography project is the Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Preserve in Muskoka. One year, a cousin took me up in his plane with the window open (!)….
……so I could get some aerial shots of the Barrens with fall colour.
I recently had a night sky photography lesson there, with well-known photographer Wes Liikane. I blogged about that evening.
….the other fitted with a 70-200 f 4.0 lens for intimate design vignettes and close-ups of my beloved pollinator insects.
Photographing on safari in South Africa was much more satisfying with my telephoto lens…..
…..which let me zoom in on the eyes of a black-maned lion just waking up. (I wrote a 3-part blog about that safari at Kapama Game Park here.)
By the time I visited the Wellcome Collection in London en route to Kenya in spring 2016, I had purchased a lightweight, mirrorless 50x-zoom digital camera (Canon SX50 HS). And rather than draw a self-portrait like the other people had done there….
….. I used my new camera to do a mirrored selfie. (Well, I needed one for Instagram!)
My new zoom telephoto camera had pretty good video and let me focus at a safe distance on the cheetah brothers roaming the savannah at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya a few weeks later.
I’ve had some magazine covers over the years, and many self-illustrated stories inside the pages.
I loved this cover because it illustrated my story inside the magazine on my wild meadows at our cottage on Lake Muskoka.
Indeed, our cottage is where I indulge in my love of nature photography….
…. using my own meadows and wildish garden beds……
…… and hummingbird-friendly containers as my muses.
I’ve done some smoke and mirrors fine art photography over the years. Especially in spring, after six long months of winter.
And I’m crazy about autumn, so I’ve used my light table to create some fall colour fine art…..
….. then had a photography show at the perfect time of year.
But seriously, my old slide light tables are mostly used as superhero or cute-kitten tracing centres now….
….. and most of my non-floral photography these days is devoted to my three grandkids. I’ve made a gallery each year filled with photos and videos and I keep them in a private folder on my Smug Mug site. A gift to my daughter and son-in-law.
All those years, all those days spent in gardens with cameras… sometimes three of them… slung over my neck, often for 6 or 7 hours straight. Thank you, Naomi Brooks, for recording the moment on that hot August day in 2016 on New York’s High Line when some helpful tourist suggested I get some harness contraption that would keep all the camera straps straight. That really sounded too logical to me!
Though I’ve spent more hours alone photographing in gardens than I could begin to imagine, from time to time, I had a dear photographer friend, Virginia Weiler (aka Ginny) who would bring her camera from her home in North Carolina and we would play like kids together in various photogenic places that piqued our fancy, like a Civil War graveyard in Charleston. Or we would play hooky from boring symposiums and rent a car and drive to the garden we both wanted to photograph. Or we’d phone each other on a few days notice and say, “Superbloom, California!” and fly out to meet and wander the Mojave Desert or Mount Figueroa in the Santa Ynez mountains to photograph poppies and lupines. That’s us below in April 2004, and below that, Ginny and me at the beautiful 2014 Quebec wedding of Ginny and her partner Claudine.
Cellphone cameras? Selfies? I secretly scoffed at tourists like these ones posing beneath the Statue of Liberty and resisted buying a cellphone of any kind until late 2017 when my family said I should have one for night-time driving emergencies.
Then my Samsung S8 became my easy travel camera for social media updating. And yes…. okay… selfies, too. I joined the legions of ridiculous people, just like I said I wouldn’t.
But for my stock photo library of plants, I still need the higher resolution of my digital SLRs – and I spend much too much time at my desk late at night photo editing. It is truly a life immersed in photography and I am so happy to be there. Buried so deeply I may never be found.
And when I look at my rainbow array of flora, made especially to illustrate my paintbox garden concept, I do know Paul Simon had it exactly right way back in 1973. We need “those nice bright colors”….
….. because “everything looks worse in black and white”.
When I think back On all the crap I learned in high school It’s a wonder I can think at all And though my lack of education Hasn’t hurt me none I can read the writing on the wall
Kodachrome They give us those nice bright colors They give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away
If you took all the girls I knew When I was single And brought ’em all together for one night I know they’d never match My sweet imagination Everything looks worse in black and white
Kodachrome They give us those nice bright colors They give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph
So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away
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Here is the entire #mysongscapes list up until the end of winter (and Covid)!
