war in the veggie garden

I’ve been remiss in posting on my blog, so when I overslept this morning, missing my morning trip to the gym, I thought I would take the opportunity to share with you why by taking some photos.  I’ve been waging war in the vegetable garden.  Last week, I found my first two tomato fruitworms burrowing into my beautiful ‘Juliet’ Roma-grape tomatoes.  So I ‘took care of them’ and applied BT (Bacillus thuringiensis) on the eggs of the young; I’m growing everything organically.  Ok, I lost a few to a common pest and helped mother nature take care of controlling the remaining pest population.

Then I came home to a ruin of tasty slicing tomatoes still dangling from the vine.  Something was taking various sized chunks out of them.  I had installed a deer fence around the garden  in the spring, so I knew some smaller critter was enjoying my growing harvest.  Initially, I thought it might be squirrels or chipmunks since the neighbors had problems with squirrels last year, devastating their entire harvest in one weekend; I’m growing indeterminate heirlooms (Giant Belgium Pink and  Costoluto Fiorentino) so I will have a continual crop all summer and hopefully avoid a complete loss.  Last weekend I spent an entire afternoon constructing a netted cover for the garden.  But I missed one small corner since I had just barely enough netting to finish the job… and that’s why I found out who the thief was, a bird.  He found the small hole and took one last bite before I secured that hole with additional netting and some zip-ties.

So far so good for this week.  I’ve been able to harvest the home grown tomatoes and make some delicious tomato sauce or ‘gravy’ as commonly called here.  I’ve never tasted such sweet sauce from home grown tomatoes.  Definitely worth waging war in the veggie garden.

hot papaya

With tomorrow’s solstice and the official beginning of summer, I thought I would post this image of a relatively new coneflower introduced by my friends at Plants Nouveau, Echinacea ‘Hot Papaya’.  I found it blooming last night in the entrance garden of the Scott Arboretum.  And although I took the typical portrait shot with as much detail as my 105mm macro lens could capture at f/45, I quickly found the sultry petals luring me in for a closer look.  So I recomposed and found f/7.1 to capture enough detail that you can still infer it’s a flower, yet with a shallow enough depth of field to soften the flow… an image more reflective of the plant’s name!

summer is here

Since we’ve had exceptionally high daytime and soil temperatures in SE Pennsylvania this late spring, many perennials are sending out flowers earlier than I expected.  I found this Penstemon pinifolius (pineneedle beartongue) blooming on the hillside at Chanticleer Garden last weekend backed by Stipa tennuissima, or Mexican feather grass.  I intentionally blurred the grass out of focus to hightlight the form of the penstemon.  I first explored the symmetry of the individual flowers along the inflorescence.  But soon I became more fascinated by the leading lines of the flower parts and created this off-center image.

I am excited to see these blooming along with Clematis texensis and other nectar food sources for hummingbirds in local gardens. But I have not seen any hummingbirds yet in the garden this year.  Sure hope they arrive soon to feast upon these wonderful plants.

gratitude

Today I found myself grateful… grateful for the flowing water from the tap of my bathroom sink; grateful for this gift from nature that landed on the leaf of an evergreen tree in the mountains, nourished the land and travelled through a myriad of her waterways and human plumbing systems to allow me to splash some tepid water on my face as a greeting to the day.  I found myself grateful for sunshine… solar radiation to warm my body while working in the below average temperatures today. And grateful that even though the weather has been chilly, spring is continuing to push forward with new delights for our senses most every day.  The Puschkinia scilloides, or striped squill, popped open today; they bloom shortly after Scilla siberica and Scilla mischtschenkoana in southeastern Pennsylvania.  And while I enjoy all the spring bulbs and the way they cheerfully greet spring and attract the early season pollinators, I especially enjoy the striped squill.  It’s a little less abundant, a little more delicate, and requires a little more attention to notice it’s unique morphology from Chionodoxa sp. and Scilla sp.  Tomorrow will bring another day to be grateful and surely more sings of spring…

finding beauty

Today I decided to revisit a plant I photographed last week; the turkish filbert had the female flowers out today along with the male catkins!  I have a few good captures I’ll post later on my website.  But close by another plant caught my attention… not because it was in spring bloom, but because all the ingredients to capture a fleeting moment were just right.  Needles on a dead branch of Pinus uncinata, damaged from the difficult winter we had here in Philadelphia, were radiating a warm glow against the blue sky.  Other branches were also broken, needles past this stage of luminosity and a much drabber brown.  But this branch was at just the right phase of compartmentalizing off, giving me the opportunity to capture the fleeting beautiful burnt orange color… finding beauty in this moment of a conifer’s decline.

gentle inspiration

As you might already know from following my blog, I’ve been patiently waiting on new eyeglasses for several weeks now. And I’ve been using this excuse for not getting out and shooting some macro work; I almost always focus manually since the auto-focus jumps around so much.  But I was gently inspired by a friend of mine who is taking beautiful images with a dislocated shoulder… So I needed to figure out a way to keep shooting too.  Last Friday the weather was unbelievable… nearly 70F here in Pennsylvania and luckily I had scheduled a half day off from my day job.  So I got out my camera and shot all my macro work hand held and with auto-focus.  Surprisingly, I came home with eight or more keepers in two hours of shooting.  I found the expected witch hazel and winter aconites.  But I also found some other marvelous signs of spring including this Turkish filbert, Corylus corluna, sending forth these catkins.

milkweed

 

milkweed blowing in the wind

 

This past week has been an amazing transformation into fall color here in eastern Pennsylvania.  The colors are really starting to blaze… but there are still smaller miracles happening every day.  I found a beautiful field of milkweed blowing in the wind and later discovered the little milkweed bug (a true bug known as Oncopeltus fasciatus) and her offspring hiding in the shadows!

red in September

young seedhead of Magnolia grandiflora

This morning was a perfect morning for macro photography… not a hint of a breeze, a chill in the air with some morning fog and dew.  Just before sunrise I found this magnificent Magnolia grandiflora covered in cone-like structures.  These fruiting cones turn pink to red when they ripen and later this fall will split open to reveal the brilliant red seeds suspended on a fine silk-like thread.

Today they remind me of autumn’s renewal.  So many think of autumn as a time of decay, death and dormancy.  But autumn is also the time of spring hopeful and the renewal of life.

behind the lens

After photographing the amazing sunrise yesterday morning across Cunningham Field, all to myself and without the scurrying feet of hundreds of soccer campers, I visited one of my favorite gardens at the Scott Arboretum, the John W. Nason Garden.  At this time of year, the grasses are in full swing highlighted by many members of the Asteraceae:  Silphium perfoliatum, Rudbeckia maxima, Ratibida pinnata and assorted Echinacea selections.  I was deep into the photographic process by the time I made my way to the Entrance Garden at the Scott Arboretum Office almost 3 hours later.  So much so that I didn’t even notice several of our volunteers out for their early morning walk.  Being behind the lens brings me close to the rhythms of nature not much differently than meditation does and allows me to see her more clearly.

with the wind

This dandelion reminded me of the simple yet magical transitions in our lives… moving with the wind towards better places in our minds often yields better places in our physical being.