Trivia that matter
It’s more winter than fall now, and there’s little happening outside, or inside. However, a friend up the street has a little greenhouse in which the plants are quite active, including the bird of paradise above. There are a few more plants from her place below the fold.
Usually during Kansas summers the problem in the garden is not enough water. Once in a while we get a wet summer, though, and this year’s has been the wettest I can remember. We got heavy rain nearly every week, often three or five inches at a time. It’s still happening; it’s only Tuesday, and already this week an inch and three-quarters has fallen. The problem is compounded by topography. I live in one of the flattest areas of one of the flattest states, and there’s very little slope in my yard. Insufficient moisture can be remedied with a hose, but a surplus is not so easily dealt with. Some of the plants in my garden like all the water, as do weeds and mosquitoes. Others don’t. I’ve been experimenting with dryland plants, which often do well out in the prairie, and everything looked happy and vigorous back in June. But the rains never stopped, and I’ve lost a number of species I had high hopes for.
For those interested in Penstemons: species native to Kansas did fine with all the rain. P. strictus and P. barbatus also look healthy despite the downpours. I’ll have to wait and see on the others.
Snapshots from the summer:
It’s been a while since I last posted any stereo pictures. Here are a few recent ones. These are “crossview” pairs, i.e., the right-eye image is on the left and vice versa. Cross your eyes so that you see three images, and focus on the middle one. When everything is properly aligned, the subject will pop into three dimensions. Once you can manage this with the small pictures, click on each to view it at a larger size. There’s a knack to it, but once you get it, it’s easy.
Here’s a selection of snapshots from my visit to my sister’s place near Fairbanks in Alaska. It’s a very different world than Kansas. As usual, click on the pictures to see them larger and with better color.
I spent the last week of June in Alaska visiting family. Circumstances precluded any long trips outside of Fairbanks, but I still found plenty of subjects for my camera. Disappointingly, the Alaska Range was generally concealed by haze and clouds. The above was as good a photograph as I was able to get, though I did spot Denali/Mt. McKinley once when I didn’t have the camera in my hands. It will probably take a week or two to go through all the hundreds of pictures I took. For now, here are some of the peonies and roses at the Georgeson Botanical Garden at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the most northerly botanical garden in the world. In Kansas, peony season season is long over, but in central Alaska it’s just starting. The roses are mostly hybrids of the very hardy Rosa rugosa.
In lieu of a substantive post, here are some recent pictures from my garden.
The Great Penstemon Experiment is returning some preliminary results. While there are penstemons native to every state except Hawaii, species from the eastern half of the country tend to be white or lavender — nice, but generally not brilliant. Out west, however, they’re much more eye-catching, with many blues and reds. I’ve started a number of these from seed and purchased a few plants, focusing on species said to be “easy” or “adaptable.” The following all survived a full year in Kansas and are blooming now.
The garden is at its most colorful now. Here are some recent snapshots.
The Baptisias I started two years ago are finally blooming. Blues are (almost) always welcome, and the plants are tough and attractively bushy, but they’re no substitutes for Russell Lupines.
Continue reading “More blues, plus pinks, yellows, whites, etc.”
Last year’s experiments are starting to bloom. The Penstemons native to Kansas are fine plants, but if you want the vivid blues that the genus is legendary for, you need to look to the arid west. The very blue P. mensarum is found only in a small region in Colorado. Fortunately, it is easy from stratified seed, and the plants seem perfectly happy in Kansas.
I took the camera out to the local community college garden this afternoon. It’s early, but I did find a few things in bloom.
While the weather can always double-cross us, it does look like winter is really over. Here are a few snapshots from the yard today.
The first lilac of the year.
Geum triflorum, or “prairie smoke,” is grown not for its peculiar little flowers, but for the fuzzy seed heads that follow in a month or two.
A few weeks ago it was -10℉. Yesterday it was 80℉. Perhaps it’s now spring, but I don’t quite trust the weather.
It’s been a while since I last visited the Cosmosphere, so I went there this past weekend to give my new used lens a workout.
It’s getting warmer — the temperature is all the way up to -6℉ now — but it was ten below, colder than central Alaska, when I snapped these pictures at the front door this morning.
While most of the yard is dormant, one of the daffodils got the dates mixed up and is blooming now. Unless the temperature gets extremely cold soon, I should have flowers in the garden for Christmas.
Update, January 1, 2025: still blooming, but not for much longer. Snow and single-digit temperatures arrive Sunday, according to the weatherman.
I’ve been scanning some of my old black and white pictures from back in the days of wet darkrooms and manual focus. Here are a few.
The skies this weekend were mostly clear after sunset, with just a few clouds at the west horizon. Those clouds were perfectly positioned to hide Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, currently visiting our neighborhood, and I couldn’t see it, even though Venus and Arcturus were perfectly visible. Last night the sky was completely clear, and I finally could set up the tripod and get a few pictures. These were taken 45 minutes to an hour after sunset.
Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is no Hale-Bopp. It was barely visible to my bespectacled eye as a faint smudge, and I would not have noticed it if I hadn’t known where to look. In a place far from city lights someone with sharp eyes might possibly spot it, but most people will need binoculars or telescopes to see it.
Right-click and open the images in a new window to see them at maximum size.