I have been photographing Leaning Pine Arboretum for years, and it has become one of my favorite gardens. For a garden photographer in California, seeking landscape settings for mature, appropriate plants adapted to the summer-dry climate, Leaning Pine is just about perfect. It is designed as a horticulture display garden for the ornamental horticulture program of [...]
Some thought Ruth Bancroft would outlive us all. Indeed, when she recently passed at age of 109, she had outlived many admirers. Her garden, the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, California was the inspiration for the Garden Conservancy, and was its first garden selected for preservation in 1989. It is a landmark garden for [...]
For my recent garden photography workshop at the Denver Botanic Garden I used the theme Finding Photos. By “finding photos” I ask students to consider the full frame of the camera to create composition within an overall scene that tells their story. It is all too common for any garden photographer, flush with excitement in [...]
This past spring I witnessed the superbloom in the California deserts. It was a sensation. The superbloom began in late winter in the southern most deserts and progressed northward, a result of ample rain after five years of drought. I was particularly intrigued, and made two separate visits to the Sonoran Desert east of San [...]
It’s summertime. It’s hot. Time to shed a little bit of clothing. Arctostaphylos manzanita, summertime bark break In California, some of our finest native trees and shrubs strip down and shed their bark. It’s called exfoliation, and I swear it seems to happen overnight. I have friends who say they have heard it. I wonder [...]