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Ashland Garden Tour
In June 2013, Steve and I went on a very cool tour of lovely gardens in the town of Ashland, Oregon. It was a fantastic day of photography for us with visits to glorious landscaping planted with endless varieties of flowers and plants.
2013 was the year of my 265 Project, which meant that I posted one picture each day for a whole year. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but it actually is. The tim… (read more)
2013 was the year of my 265 Project, which meant that I posted one picture each day for a whole year. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but it actually is. The tim… (read more)
230/366: Lovely Clusters of Ornamental Chives
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Thanks to Pam J for confirming that these are a kind of allium, more specifically, Ornamental Chives. I couldn't resist the opportunity to get some fun bokeh in the background with some crisp focus on the foreground cluster. Yet again, this is a picture I captured at the Ashland Garden Tour a few years ago.
229/366: Pink Firework Flowers: Pink Mula Mula
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Have you ever seen such beautiful, unusual flowers before?! I cannot even classify them for a proper description...they look like colorful grass, but they look like living fireworks too! Thanks to Ker Kaya for letting me know the name of this Australianf flower and getting information too I love them!! I found these flowers on the garden tour that Steve and I went on a few years ago. (If you'd like to see another picture I took of a single flower, roll your mouse over the upper left corner of this image.) :) You can learn more about them on this wiki page: Wiki: Pink Mula Mula
228/366: Blush-Colored Penstemon
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I love Penstemon, and when I found it growing wild in one of our meadows, I was overjoyed! I've seen this lovely flower in the wild before, but it's almost always been shades of blue and purple. So when I found this one in lovely blush pink during the garden tour Steve and I went on, I was delighted! What a soft, pretty color for this marvelous flower! :) (If you'd like to see some pictures of other Penstemon that I've photographed, roll your mouse over the upper left corner for a link.)
227/366: Spring Beauty, that's it's name!
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Such delicate details in something so small. Macro lenses give you the chance to see clearly what you either cannot see at all with your naked eye, or it's barely noticeable. I am blessed with what I call "micro-vision" and am able to see things extremely close up and tiny. Unfortunately I'm also blind as a bat, but I think it's a pretty fair trade! :)
226/366: Artistic Aster
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What fun to have the excuse to play with textures! This pretty little flower was wonderful in every way...except that it was growing right in front of a white garage door. No worries...just change the background to a texture and suddenly the pretty little flower against a boring dirty white door turns into something artistic and fun!
Explored on August 18, 2016. Highest placement, #59.
225/366: Sparkling Ornamental Grass
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It's a wonderful thing when a twinkling light catches your eye and it's possible to capture the magic of what you see with your camera. This can be a maddeningly elusive challenge! When I looked to see what was flashing at me, I remember mumbling, "You'll never get that shot...it's gonna look like nothing." However, I consider such nay-saying commentary to be a personal challenge, an irresistible invitation to find a way so I can return with, "HAH! I GOT IT!"
I spent some time looking at my subject and then I took a bunch of pictures with different compositions, angles, depth of field and I also stood at different distances away. I had about a dozen pictures to look through, and most of them went flying into the trash. But I got a couple that were ok, and then I found myself staring at this picture. Hooting gleefully, I announced to myself, "HAH! I GOT IT!" :)
224/366: Abstract Fountain Take 3!
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Here is my third pick from my fountain pictures, where I chose several water images and used the Topaz filter suite, "Restyle", to change the color palette. Such fun to use, there are actually too many wonderful choices to pick from...one must almost just close your eyes and click randomly or you will be in there forever! :D If you roll your mouse in the upper left corner, you'll see the other two pictures I picked. These images were all taken at a fountain that Steve and I saw during a garden tour in Ashland a few years ago.
Explored on August 15, 2016. Placement unknown; alerted by Jaap van 't Veen of Explore.
223/366: Japanese Maple Leaf and Spider Web
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Oh, how I adore these trees. The delicate, colorful leaves of the Japanese Maple tree are lovely in all of their life stages. Here, in June, the leaves are as colorful as if it were the height of fall. With their natural red color, it's an easy thing to get a wonderful back-lit image which show all of the fine details! And I even got a bonus strand of spider web to get everyone's attention! :)
222/366: Sticky Purple Geranium Wildflower
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When it comes to flowers, I find that wildflowers are often as pretty or even more lovely than planted flowers. This beauty was found in a garden full of planted flowers which I also loved, but it would have been terrible to leave without capturing this tiny stunner! :)
221/366: Striped Petunias
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These gorgeous flowers were found in one of the gardens that Steve and I visited a few years ago. I think these petunias are almost unreal in their color and I have read that you can only purchase these flowers as small plants. If you were to attempt to plant seeds gathered from this flower, the resulting blooms would not look at all like this striped beauty.
220/366: Blossoms 'n' Bugs
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Such an impossibly beautiful spike of flowers was impressing the local insect life as well, and if you look carefully, you'll see that many of the blossoms have visitors inside! I found these on the Ashland Garden Tour a few years ago!
219/366: Past its Prime but Still Pretty
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The summers here in southern Oregon can be brutal, with dry, sweltering days that cause delicate poppies to shrivel up by mid-afternoon if not earlier. This flower was probably an incredible sight as the sun rose in the sky, and still, though it has clearly lost its battle in the heat of the day, it's still lovely.
Explored on August 9, 2016. Highest placement, page 6.
218/366: Purple Beauty
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Here's another flower from the Garden tour in Ashland! Sometimes you get lucky with the lighting and you find a flower that's well-lit with several others that are in shadow. A bit more deepening of the background for a more dramatic effect and I had my picture complete!
217/366: Abstract Fountain Take Two
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Last week I shared a fountain image that I captured at one of the gardens on the tour in Ashland. I chose three to play with and here is the second of them. I used Topaz Restyle to tweak the color palette. Although this may look as if I didn't change the color much, the original image wasn't blue at all, but more grey in tone. So, I turned it into the color that would tempt me to dive in! :)
216/366: Bursting into Bloom
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One of the coolest floral sights is witnessing an allium (onion species) grow and then finally bloom. Every day the bud casing grows larger and you will begin recognize the shape of florets forming in their pointy-hat house. They will continue to grow ever-larger and strain against the sheath-like covering, stretching it until you can see the florets clearly. Eventually the bud cover cannot withstand the pressure any longer and it splits open, the still-forming florets bursting out into the air! What a show to watch as the florets continue growing until they form a glorious round ball! This was another gem I photographed on the Garden tour in Ashland a few years ago.
215/366: A Pair of Purple Princesses
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Though they appear to be huge, these flowers were quite small, and were growing among a lush carpet of rich green leaves and dozens of other blossoms. I was able to single the pair out for a tight close-up! I found them while Steve and I were on the Ashland Garden tour a few years ago.
214/366: Crazy Hair Day
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Would you just LOOK at the crazy hair on this Pasque flower that's gone to seed? We are talkin' outa' control, takin' the frizz level to MAXIMUM! On the same estate as yesterday's picture, I found a patch of this goofy "grass" and spent the next while trying to capture the glory of all this frizz. This picture makes me very happy because it shows the marvelous feather-like detail and this-way-and-that mini stems, and then you also get to see the blur of a few others beyond. I would like to extend a big THANK YOU to Karen Forsyth over on Facebook for letting me know that this isn't actually a crazy grass but instead, a Pasque flower that's gone to seed! I had no idea! :D
213/366: Veronica Speedwell: Purple Spiked Beautie…
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I had never seen flowers like these before and they totally stunned me with their dramatic color and presence. During the garden tour that Steve and I went on a few years ago in Ashland, we visited one home that really knocked our socks off. The size of their estate was huge and sprawled over several acres. Every inch was landscaped beautifully and planted with rainbows of flowers and interesting plants. I wish I could have spent the whole day at this garden, but I did manage to capture quite a few of the fantastic treasures that I found.
Explored on August 4, 2016, placement unknown.
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