Early Blooms

We’ve had a really late start to the 2013 gardening season.  However, we do have a couple of blooms to show off.  The first is our flowering almond (Prunus triloba) shrub that burst into bloom this week.

The second is a hybrid tea rose, “Irish Gold”.  I’ve mentioned in previous posts that we pick up a few hybrid tea roses when Wal-Mart has them on sale in April just as they break dormancy, the roses that is, not Wal-Mart which doesn’t ever seem to go dormant.  But, I digress.

When we get the roses home, we re-pot them and nurse them in the greenhouse until the first week of June when we plant them outside in the rose bed.  By then they usually have buds on them.  In this case, a week after planting out, the first blossom appeared.

Redpoll Flash Mob

During February each year the redpolls (Carduellis flammea) arrive at the two vertical feeders in our back yard. The feeders are filled with nyjer (thistel) seed They hang around for a month or so and then disappear.

This year, with the really late spring they have stayed around much longer than normal.  And for the past week or so they seem to have gone into panic mode.  Particularly in the mornings they swarm the feeders with a frenzy we’ve never seen before.

Here’s a YouTube video to show you what we mean:

This year’s Amaryllis

Each year in November or so, our SuperStore offers amaryllis bulbs for sale.  The boxes are beautifully presented with a photo of the amaryllis in full bloom that looks surreal – you just can’t imagine the bulb would produce a flower like this. Most times it’s a bit of a disappointment because, for a variety of reasons, the result is not as perfect as the photo on the box.

But this year we ended up with a bloom that was so amazing we had to call family and friends over to see it.  It was HUGE, the color was stunning, and all four trumpet-like blooms emerged together.  It didn’t start out that way.

As Christmas approached, a secondary stem came up from the left side of the bulb and produced two decent blooms.  When they faded, we cut the stalk back to the base.  And then the right side produced another stem which also bore a couple of nice blooms.  It appeared the main primary stem was not going to emerge and we were tempted to toss it out.  But then a week or two later a bit of green started showing.  For the next two weeks an enormous stalk shot up and then displayed this bloom:

Amazing!

Fall Colors in the Garden

Here we are mid-September and we’ve already had some overnight frost.  Enough to turn on the fall display of color in the amur maple (left) and the hawthorn (right).

Mid-August Garden

Most of the posts this season have been close-ups of flowers in the garden.  It occurs to me that blog visitors may like to see parts of the whole garden.  So here are some shots.

Lavatera with ‘Stacked Focus’

Taking macro photos of flower blossoms is a great way to show fine detail and beautiful forms.  One of the challenges is to get the entire image in focus.  Often the front or back of the flower is not tack sharp because of the shallow depth of field when taking close ups.

To get around this with digital photography,  there is photo editing software such as PhotoShop that can merge a number of images of the same subject and create a single image where all of it is in focus.  This is referred to as ‘stacked focusing’.  Today I tried this out.

With the camera on a tripod, and in manual mode so that the exposures would be the same, I took six shots of this lavatera blossom.  In the first image I made sure the front edge of the bloom was in focus.  The back of the bloom is very much out of focus.

I kept moving the focus ring at slight increments, taking another photo each time, as each part of the bloom was in sharp focus.  In the 6th photo the back of the bloom is in focus and the front is blurry.

I then loaded all six images into PhotoShop, aligned them and merged them, and presto!

Here it is, the whole image in focus.  Love it when stuff works!

Some of this season’s blooms

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