‘Blue Moon’ Siberian iris against a backdrop of Astilbe foliage

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Bearded iris (unknown variety)

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Origami paper cranes

Colorful 2,500 Origami paper cranes hang like a chandelier in the Cottage Wing of Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden’s Conservatory

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Colorfuze Blue Diamond Phalaenopsis White Dream ‘V3’

Plainview Growers in New Jersey produces Colorfuze orchids, which are plants that have been infused with dye. Upon reblooming, the flowers of this orchid will be white. They also produce them in purple and lavender. While I love naturally blue flowers, the verdict is still out for me with this one. It is lovely to photograph, but…what do you think?

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Vertical beauties

When my friend Senthil was visiting in September (to be photographed for the cover of the upcoming November/December 2011 Hearing Loss Magazine), Michael and I dropped him off at the U.S. Capitol building so he could get some photographs. I went over to check out the sprawling vertical garden display outside the U.S. Botanic Garden, which is in view of the Capitol.

Apparently the exhibit has been in place for a couple of years and I just got to see the very end of the exhibit. I can’t find anything on the web regarding who designed it or any details on the types of plants, how-to’s, etc., but I do have some photographs to share. It was really a sight to see—and had I the room to build something like this in my own backyard garden, it would happen in a nanosecond. I shot some closeups so you can see the details. The wood frames have coco fiber “shelf baskets” held into place with wire screen. The plants are tucked either directly into the liner baskets or through holes made in the side of the baskets.

There were a lot of plants that I recognized immediately, including vegetables and ornamental plants, plus herbs such as oregano, sage and basil; various coleus plants, licorice plants, flowering annuals, sweet potato vine, ferns, ivies, catmint and catnip, just to name a few. Read more about vertical gardening here.

Michael and I saw these Woolly Pocket living planters in the gift shop at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden last week. They’re made from recycled plastic bottles and come in unlined (for outdoor use) and lined (for indoor use) versions, along with wall anchors. You can line an entire wall with these pockets (which come in a multitude of sizes and colors), fill them with a variety of plants, and achieve impressive results!

But the type of vertical gardening that makes me swoon are the “succulent gardens” shown on Flora Grubb Garden’s blog here and their main website here. Jaw-dropping beautiful pieces of living art—they remind me of landscapes as seen from the air. Flora Grubb sells the tray components to achieve these looks in your own home or on a garden wall.

Authors and gardeners Susan Morrison and Rebecca Sweet recently published Garden Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces, available here. Author and garden photographer Derek Fell has written Vertical Gardening: Grow Up, Not Out, for More Vegetables and Flowers in Much Less Space, available here. And on my list of books to add to my gardening library is green thumb artist and French botanist Patrick Blanc’s tome The Vertical Garden: From Nature to the City, available here. Want to see some spectacular living walls? Visit Blanc’s website here.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on Stoke’s Aster

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) on Stoke’s Aster (Stokesia laevis)

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Kaleidoscope!

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Tulip trio

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Fringed Tulips

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Blushing

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Check out my newly-updated Zenfolio botanical gallery here.

Pink Tulip

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Grape Hyacinth

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Spring glow

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Check out my newly-updated Zenfolio botanical gallery (with almost 600 photos!) here.

Triumph Tulip ‘Negrita’

Can you tell how enamored I am with this beautiful flower?

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Spring has sprung!

Yesterday was officially the first day of spring, so it was fitting that my friend Karen and I make a stop at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden while we were out at her lakehouse in Lake Land ‘Or. The botanical garden is just 30 minutes away. This photograph was made in the conservatory, which was just a jumble of spring color.

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Pink sheep

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Colorful borders at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden

Earlier this month, I visited Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, Virginia. While I usually only post my signature “plant portrait extreme closeups” on the blog, I also photograph more “record shot” images of gardens as well. There were many new borders in the garden—a smorgasbord of interesting plants, colors, contrasts and textures. Enjoy!

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Magenta!

Does anyone else find it difficult to maintain detail in flowers that are in the pink-red spectrum? This was photographed under a bright, but overcast sky.

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

‘Blue Moon’ closeup

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Camellia

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Siberian Iris ‘Blue Moon’

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Re-post: On color…

I promise I’ll have some new works posted by this weekend. Perhaps some new images of lotus blossoms from Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens? Or maybe something from Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden? I’ve been going through my oldest archives and have found this collage I posted two years ago that makes me really, really happy when I view it. I also love the quote. Hope you don’t mind the reruns!

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.” — Georgia O’Keefe, American Painter, 1887-1986

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.

Check out my garden-photos-only portfolio at:

http://cindydyer.zenfolio.com/p270076135

Check out my zenfolio.com gallery!

I’ve been working on putting the “cream of the crop” of my garden and landscape photos into one easy-to-navigate gallery. Eventually I’ll have the gallery set up to sell prints as well as stock photos, but in the interim, this is just a way to wrangle all of my web-viewing-only images into one gallery. I’ll be adding more images in the future. Currently there are 380 images in the Botanical Gallery. That should keep you plenty busy! If you’re a regular visitor to my blog, you’ll recognize many of the photos.

Once you click on the first link below, you can click “view all” at the bottom and see everything on one page, scrolling down as you go. If you click on an individual photo, it will enlarge and thumbnails for other images will show up on the side (as shown in the collage below). You can click on any of those to enlarge, or you can just launch the slide show in the second link below. I hope you enjoy the show!

Gallery:  http://cindydyer.zenfolio.com/p270076135

Slideshow: http://cindydyer.zenfolio.com/p270076135/slideshow

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Open a Zenfolio account with my referral code 8B9-BTJ-6G3 and save $5.00

Halleluiah light

In the North Wing of the Conservatory at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, there are hordes of Easter Lilies in full bloom. In one corner I noticed the flowers in shade. In this one flower, I noticed the water drop. As I was getting set up to photograph it, the sun broke through the clouds and illuminated the shaft of this one flower! I call this “Halleluiah Light,” because I can just hear the angels singing!

Did you know that 95% of the 11.5 million Easter Lilies grown and sold originate from the border of California and Oregon? The area is labeled the “Easter Lily Capital of the World.”

From http://www.about.com:

Lilium longiflorum is actually a native of the southern islands of Japan. A World War I soldier, Louis Houghton, is credited with starting U.S. Easter Lily production when he brought a suitcase full of lily bulbs with him to the southern coast of Oregon in 1919. He gave them away to friends and when the supply of bulbs from Japan was cut off as a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the rising price of the bulbs suddenly made the lily business a viable industry for these hobby growers and earned the bulbs the nickname “White Gold.”

And if you have cats, please keep them away from this plant! Any part of this lily, as many of its relatives, can cause kidney failure in cats. Eating even one leaf can be fatal. There is a handy list of plants that are poisonous to cats compiled by the Cat Fanciers’ Association, Inc., here. For more information about what types of Lily plants to avoid, read the information here. I do grow Stargazers and Asiatic Lilies (in pots and out of reach), but my cats are kept indoors and when they are (very briefly) outdoors in the summer, they are under strict supervision—plus, their very own bed of catnip keeps them occupied the entire time! They never have been plant nibblers, so I’ve been fortunate that they ignore all of our house plants. I did get rid of a pencil cactus (which was out of the way anyway) as soon as I found out they are highly poisonous.

See another example of this serendipitous light here in a post I did last summer.

© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.