This year's Tour was cloudy and took place after a hard rain the night before, while the pretour was pre-rain and sunny, which made for some gloomy tour photos that were challenging. The photo above, my favorite of the entire set, was taken at the Thursday pretour, and the evening light through the redbuds was a happy accident which I tried my best to recreate on Saturday. It's just impossible, however, to follow good photography principles when the light doesn't cooperate (tour photo at right). This pair, taken of the same area in different light, is quite illustrative of the importance of good filtered light in photography.
The Garden Tour had the usual distribution of features and focal points around each garden. One house had both a running water feature and a koi pond. The artificial heron at this water feature looks at home in the environment but is perpetually disappointed at the lack of prey in this short waterfall.Though an old gardener, I am but a young blogger. The humor and added alliteration are free.
Showing posts with label Extension Master Gardener. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Extension Master Gardener. Show all posts
Sunday, June 11, 2023
2023 Manhattan EMG Garden Tour
I'm not sure, in these days of 5G cellular and massive bandwidth, whether anyone needs the warning anymore, but I suppose there are those still out there on 26K modems, so Warning: picture heavy! Click on the individual pictures if you want to see them in more glory then these small blog photos!Yesterday, June 10th, was our annual Manhattan Area Garden Tour, and Thursday, June 8th was the "pretour" for the EMGs, so ProfessorRoush was on picture duty. I took about 290 pictures on Thursday evening and over 600 hundred on the Tour and kept 836 for the homeowners and EMG's to view. A handful are here for your enjoyment. Each garden on the Tour gets a commemorative stone like the one above. I'll bet, however, that unlike this homeowner most of you don't think about painting stones to look like ladybugs in your gardens! The rain prior to the Tour was a little tough on the flowers, but this 'Peach Drift' seemed to take it in stride.
I bid you, at the end of this long post, adieu, until we meet again, with Old Glory as it proudly flew over one of the gardens yesterday, gardens and gardeners alike expressing their freedom of expression and the beauty of creation on the 2023 Extension Master Gardener's Manhattan Area Garden Tour.
Sunday, November 13, 2022
November Notes
Dr. and Mrs. ProfessorRoush set out on a quick run for tacos and Crumbl Cookies® last night, a quest for the perfect Saturday night snack combination. Well, that, and Mrs. ProfessorRoush has developed an addiction for the aforementioned establishment's iced sugar cookies and we needed to lay in a reserve stash in case she developed a craving when they're closed on Sunday. Happy wife, happy life and all that. Anyway, we had no more pulled out of the driveway than we saw a beautiful stag and doe framed in perfect sunlight in the neighbor's front yard.
Unfortunately we missed the chance for an equally perfect photo of the pair, but on our return home a mere 45 minutes later, I spotted this lurker hanging just around the back corner of the neighbor's house. In the way of deer, he was probably just waiting to see if he could hang around until the cover of darkness when he would happily nibble away on the neighbor's landscaping, so I foiled him by driving down a side lane and spooking him. Not before, however, I captured these images in the closing light of day, through the dirty windshield, but still not a bad picture. He's beautiful and I hope his proximity to town allows him to escape the hunting season since most folks around here don't shoot into the random horizon for fear of hitting a house. Most folks, anyway.
I've got a busy week ahead, so I'm not making it a long post today. I've got to spend some of today preparing for a Johnson County Master Gardener presentation about Rugosa and Old Garden Roses. Since they're all that Rose Rosette disease has left me, you can bet that I'm going to touch on that hell-borne scourge as well. Happily, I was in Kansas City a few weeks back and, in a large outdoor mall, captured this image (below) of three 'Knockout' roses in their landscaping, right, so-to-speak, in my audiences' back yard. Most of the 'Knockout' roses on display there were exhibiting signs of RRD, so I think this picture will drive home my point about growing and breeding RRD resistant roses.
Saturday, June 25, 2022
2022 EMG Manhattan Garden Tour
Today, June 25, 2022, was the Extension Master Gardener tour in Manhattan. Yours' truly, as usual, was the unofficial photographer for the group, so I spent the morning taking 814 photos in 4 hours, and 720+ turned out to be pretty useable. I'm pretty proud of the fact that despite the heavy daylily bloom today (and at least one of the 7 gardens on tour claimed to have 800 cultivars), I only took around a dozen closeups of daylilies. Of the other photos, I've selected my favorite dozen for you to view, my selection based on what I viewed as the most "artistic" photos. Without further ado, enjoy. Click on the photos if you want to see them full size.
At the same garden as the prairie above, lived this good girl.
Sunday, June 27, 2021
2021 Manhattan EMG Garden Tour
ProfessorRoush seems to have slipped comfortably back into his continuing role as the unofficial photographer of the Extension Master Gardener's Manhattan Area Garden tour, albeit with a break during the skipped tour last year due to the pandemic cancellation of the Tour. I won't comment here on the folly of canceling a GARDEN tour in a time when more of the population would have attended then ever, but that's all rain clouds and opportunities missed. Most importantly, I had planned to share in this blog what I thought were the 6 best photos from this year's tour, however, as usual, I'm failing miserably. It's fairly easy, among 609 photos taken in 4 hours today, for me to weed out all the pictures with identifiable people in them since I shouldn't/can't post people without permission. And my best intentions to catch a bee in the act of nefarious nectar collection went awry several times today; it was cloudy for most of the tour and the camera shutter speed just wasn't up to catching them as a still life.It is more difficult than I anticipated to choose the best from the 50 or so daylily pictures and the various vignettes of gnomes and garden ornaments and from the delightful plant arrangements that were everywhere. Ego aside, many of the pictures are quite good, despite the overcast and early start to the day. My goal of posting six photos became a battle to narrow down from 50, and then from 20, until I settled on these 8. Well, on these 9 if you count the last wanna-be. Who, anyway, could resist this bronze heron sculpture at the K-State Gardens in the middle of the created wetlands? Every photo here is unedited, just as I took them. Normally I would have cropped them for the blog, maybe removing some of the blurred green space at the top of the picture of the fancy echinacea at the left, and perhaps reducing their size, but I thought you'd like them in all their vivid detail. Point and click if you want to see them larger. I apologize, in advance, for the multi-megabyte nature of this blog entry, but most these days don't have the limitations we used to have on download speed, do they? I hope not.
before my reflexes could trigger the shutter. Such are the disappointments that come hand-in-hand with these many glorious photos. Maybe next year. Or the year after.
before my reflexes could trigger the shutter. Such are the disappointments that come hand-in-hand with these many glorious photos. Maybe next year. Or the year after.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
2015 EMG Garden Tour
The 2015 Riley County Extension Master Gardener's Manhattan Garden Tour (27th Annual) came and passed last Sunday, and I believe it was the best ever. Today, we learned that it was, in fact, the most attended ever. For a small band of gardeners and a small city in the middle of the country, Manhattan gardeners did themselves proud. ProfessorRoush could be slightly biased, however, because one of the gardens on the tour was that of a friend. Of likely greater consequence in my bias, however, is my "status" as the tour day roving photographer for the Master Gardeners.
With a relatively new Nikon camera, I captured over 600 pictures in the six tour gardens in 3 hours, not including over 250 additional photos of the gardens last Thursday on the "pretour." These, I have culled down to about 600 photos that were in reasonable focus, of decent composition, and pretty cool. For instance, I hope the painted pine cones above captured your attention as surely as they did mine. They were a table accent in one of the gardens and a fine accent at that. The fabulous deep red lilies against the white fence in another garden provided another bright spot of color. Make sure you click on the photos to see them a bit larger.
Due to various and sundry Federal regulations, the vast mass of which I'm completely unaware and likely violate to some degree or another on a daily basis, I can't show you any photographs of people on the tour or I'll violate HIPPA or FIRPA or one of the OTHER-PAs. I can, however, show you these two ingenious "pot people", Clay, and Terra. Near them; in timeout, the gardener had placed their daughter, Mary Jane. Get it? Timeout? Mary Jane? How's that for garden creativity? I sense these homeowners may have some history within the 70's as former hippies.
The same gardeners with the pot people also had a wonderful butterfly garden, where I captured these two beauties feeding on the milkweed. Here lives a gardener that truly practices what she preaches.
On the garden pretour, near the end as dusk was falling and a storm cloud was rolling in, the night lighting and landscaping around this pondless water feature turned the whole area into magic. I could have spent hours taking photos from every angle at this garden.
As a gardening voyeur, ProfessorRoush is mad about plant combinations, and several of the gardeners could teach lessons in style. One standout is the grouping around this angelic statue; blue spruce, Japanese Maple, variegated Fallopia japonica, and yellow-tipped arborvitae, an almost flowerless garden with lots of color, restful and serene. The same gardener had the spot of various hostas accented by a green globe seen at the left, below. A green paradise in a single photo!
Another combination I appreciated was the soft gray foliageand pink daisy combination from a second garden:
ProfessorRoush does not get excited over heuchera as a general rule. I've lost several varieties to sun-burn in my own shadeless garden, but I could not ignore the beauty of the dappled sunlight on this specimen heuchera. What a sight!
I'd love to show you the whole photo set, all 600+ of them. They might not appeal to your everyday crowd at a NASCAR race, but I suspect that many of you would enjoy seeing them. I'll leave you, however, drooling at the prospect of another few hundred fabulous photos and contemplating this simple photo of a statue that left me determined to locate a copy of my very own. This little reading child would look great in my reading-themed garden. And if I can't find a copy, well, do you think this gardener would notice its replacement by a cement pig with wings or a nice stone rabbit?
With a relatively new Nikon camera, I captured over 600 pictures in the six tour gardens in 3 hours, not including over 250 additional photos of the gardens last Thursday on the "pretour." These, I have culled down to about 600 photos that were in reasonable focus, of decent composition, and pretty cool. For instance, I hope the painted pine cones above captured your attention as surely as they did mine. They were a table accent in one of the gardens and a fine accent at that. The fabulous deep red lilies against the white fence in another garden provided another bright spot of color. Make sure you click on the photos to see them a bit larger.
Due to various and sundry Federal regulations, the vast mass of which I'm completely unaware and likely violate to some degree or another on a daily basis, I can't show you any photographs of people on the tour or I'll violate HIPPA or FIRPA or one of the OTHER-PAs. I can, however, show you these two ingenious "pot people", Clay, and Terra. Near them; in timeout, the gardener had placed their daughter, Mary Jane. Get it? Timeout? Mary Jane? How's that for garden creativity? I sense these homeowners may have some history within the 70's as former hippies.
The same gardeners with the pot people also had a wonderful butterfly garden, where I captured these two beauties feeding on the milkweed. Here lives a gardener that truly practices what she preaches.
On the garden pretour, near the end as dusk was falling and a storm cloud was rolling in, the night lighting and landscaping around this pondless water feature turned the whole area into magic. I could have spent hours taking photos from every angle at this garden.
As a gardening voyeur, ProfessorRoush is mad about plant combinations, and several of the gardeners could teach lessons in style. One standout is the grouping around this angelic statue; blue spruce, Japanese Maple, variegated Fallopia japonica, and yellow-tipped arborvitae, an almost flowerless garden with lots of color, restful and serene. The same gardener had the spot of various hostas accented by a green globe seen at the left, below. A green paradise in a single photo!
Another combination I appreciated was the soft gray foliageand pink daisy combination from a second garden:
ProfessorRoush does not get excited over heuchera as a general rule. I've lost several varieties to sun-burn in my own shadeless garden, but I could not ignore the beauty of the dappled sunlight on this specimen heuchera. What a sight!
I'd love to show you the whole photo set, all 600+ of them. They might not appeal to your everyday crowd at a NASCAR race, but I suspect that many of you would enjoy seeing them. I'll leave you, however, drooling at the prospect of another few hundred fabulous photos and contemplating this simple photo of a statue that left me determined to locate a copy of my very own. This little reading child would look great in my reading-themed garden. And if I can't find a copy, well, do you think this gardener would notice its replacement by a cement pig with wings or a nice stone rabbit?
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