New Camera, New Garden

ProfessorRoush has a new camera.  Nothing really fancy, but I am setting aside my beat up and almost 10 year old Canon Rebel in favor of modern file sizes  rather than files that are no bigger than those on my iPhone 5.  The Canon was still okay, as evidenced by the couple of thousand pictures on this blog, but it had some autofocusing problems and was pretty battle-scarred.





The new camera is a Nikon D3300...kind of bottom of the line for Nikon DSLR's, but with most of the picture quality of the big boys.  In a few brief pictures yesterday, I established that it was working well and focusing better on auto than my Canon and it was going to help improve my photos.  But I was in for a big surprise.  In selecting cameras, I tend to ignore the bells and whistles of camera special effects because I was trained on film, where the best you could do was manipulate F stops and shutter speed unless you used a filter.  These new cameras are entirely another animal.

This morning, playing for 20 minutes while I walked the dog, the special effect modes are sucking me into the depths of an exciting new world.  Some of them are simple.  The picture to the right shows deep red 'Kashmir', taken this morning in low light on automatic exposure.  Like all digital cameras I've ever known, this Nikon has a problem with reds, oversaturating them. The picture at the top, however, of deep red 'Kashmir', was taken with the "low-key" effect.  Much better for color, don't you think?

There's another special effect that I already know is going to get ever more use as well; the "selective color" effect.  Take the non-descript peach daylily to the left above.  If I use the camera to pick out the yellow of the throat and use the selective color effect, I get a pretty boring photo like the one to the left.



But if I take a photo of a more vivid pink daylily with a yellow throat like the one at the right, and then, keeping the effect on and using the yellow chosen from the first yellow daylily above as a selective color, I get the picture below:

Like, Wow!, right?  The possibilities for just this one special effect are almost endless and I have a feeling I'm going to be spending a lot of time hunched over with a camera in my garden in the next few days.  The pictures above are all just exploratory photos taken within my first half-hour of using this camera, not really worrying about holding the camera still or picking the best bloom or lighting.  There's a whole new garden waiting out there.  And I'm chomping at the bit to see what the "super vivid" effect can do with a Kansas sunset!

Pleasing Combos, Native or Not

A recent post by Gaia Gardener about nice combinations of native prairie plants was timely and I made a mental note to blog this combination, of butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) and catnip (Nepeta cataria) that sprung up voluntarily in my back garden.  This one is for you, Gaia!   I now have 8 or so Asclepias volunteers around the yard and I've blogged before about my accidental combination of Asclepias and a 'Fiesta' forsythia.   The catnip simply grows everywhere.  I fact, I weed out more of the catnip than I permit to  grow.   I wonder if the daylily in the foreground will bloom in time to add to the display?








Gaia's post also reminded me to occasionally look beyond the roses and view the rest of my garden, and while I was in a mood to appreciate plant combinations, there were several other combinations that were particularly pleasing to me at this time of year.   Here is an iPhone photograph of a couple of  recently planted lilies against the backdrop of tall, stiff 'Karl Foerster'.  I'm not that fond of "Karl", but even blurred in the Kansas wind, as it is here, it makes a good foil for the flowers.  The pink blooms intruding at the lower right are Griffith Buck rose 'Country Dancer'.








You should always assume that any pleasing plant combination in my garden is the result of a happy accident because, well, because that's exactly what it is.  I'm a plant collector by heart and I tend to plop down any new plant that tickles my fancy into the next open available spot, full speed ahead and ignoring the dangers of clashing colors and inappropriate size differentials and wildly differing growth patterns.  They can always be moved if they prove they can survive the Kansas climate, right?  Here, one of the more colorful lilies has opened up against the fading 'Basye's Purple Rose'.  The deep reddish-purple rose makes a nice contrast to the more orange-red lily.






It's probably now obvious that within the past couple of years, I realized that Asiatic, Oriental, and Orientpet lilies are useful to fill in the dreary period between the end of the first wave of roses and the cheery summer daylilies.  I'm seeing the payoff from planting a lot of lily bulbs into the beds the past two summers.  Here, a nicely colored lily blooms in front of a Yucca filamentosa 'Golden Sword', both in the foreground of a nice, light pink 'Bonica' shrub rose.

Soon, the lilies will fade and other accidental combinations will quietly bid for my attentions.  The next round of blooms will be the colorful daylilies against other neighboring plants, and then the late summer flowers such black-eyed susans and daisies will hold center stage, and finally grasses will become the focus of the garden.  And then another growing year, along with all its fleeting combinations, will be gone. 

Glowing Fire

I'm sure that we all could cite an example of a great idea that was ultimately poorly executed.   In my opinion,  'Morden Fireglow', a Parkland Series Ag Canada shrub, is one of those great ideas that needed a little more refinement before it was rolled out to Main Street.

I've grown two 'Morden Fireglow' roses, one at the old house and one here on the prairie, and I really can't say enough about that eye-dazzling color (officially he is "scarlet red"), but the unique bloom color is where my enthusiasm for this rose ends.  Everyone who sees it wants to grow it because those bright, orange-red, loosely double blooms really stand out against the bright green foliage.  Neither bush that I've grown, however, is anywhere near what I'd call a vigorous rose.  It lives, and it doesn't have any appreciable dieback in cold winters, but it also has never grown over 2.5 feet tall or wide in my gardens. 'Morden Fireglow' starts out the season okay, but then seems to either suffer from heat or fungus or both.  It struggles. and then fades away in the late summer.  This is a rose that I have to occasionally spray for blackspot just to help it keep a few of those semiglossy leaves into Fall.   

'Morden Fireglow' was bred by Henry Marshall in 1976 and introduced in Canada in 1989.  It was a complex cross of [{(*Rosa arkansana x Assiniboine* x White Bouquet) x Prairie Princess} x Morden Amorette] x 'Morden Cardinette' according to Internet records.  He bears his small (3" diameter) blooms in clusters and blooms have a cupped, open, and loosely arranged form.  There is no fragrance that I can detect. I see three to four flushes over a season, with some periods of no bloom at all in between, and I wouldn't say 'Morden Fireglow' is an overly floriferous rose.  I agree with one Internet writer that listed 'Morden Fireglow' as the worst of a group of around 12 Canadian and Rugosa roses in their garden in terms of floriferousness.  The same source also stated, "Morden Fireglow is sort of weird in that the center petals don't ever seem to unfurl, while the outer petals do."  I think you can see what that individual is talking about in both pictures here on this blog entry.  Several references suggest that 'Morden Fireglow' has large hips in the Fall, but I don't deadhead my bush and I've never seen any on my bushes after growing it for 15 years.

If you can't live without adding this bloom color in your garden (and the pictures here are pretty representative of the actual color in my garden), then by all means go ahead and grow the thing.  Be advised, however, that 'Morden Fireglow' will take a bit of coddling and that, because of its low height, you'll need to put it in the front of a border for it to put on a display.

A Beautiful Blemished Rose

ProfessorRoush has waited for years to discuss 'Lèda', the classic painted Damask rose.  I've waited because she never seemed to have a good year; as a young bush she often had only a few flowers that would always be destroyed by Spring rains, fungus, storms, or various other environmental influences.  This year, I believed, was Lèda's year.  She was not hurt at all by our tough winter, keeping her three foot stature without dieback.  Hundreds of perfect buds followed, the bush loaded with the promise of delicate beauty about to be revealed for my world.  An early flower opened to tease me with a taste of heaven.


And then she disappointed me once again.  Rains in May, just as the photo at the right was taken, turned the rest of the ready-to-open blossoms to brown botrytis-blighted mops right as they began to open.  The few that opened completely were marred, beauty stolen in the night.  Hundreds were completely browned, with a very few only mildly disfigured, like the flower pictured below.  Even worse, I think her annual problems are entirely limited to me since she is raved about in every other reference I can find.  Perhaps the former Queen of Sparta is still mad about Zeus seducing her in the guise of a swan but for some reason she only displays her anger here on the Kansas prairie.



'Lèda', also known as the Painted Damask rose, is a near white Damask bred before 1827.  She has a strong fragrance and displays, when she's not marred, a very double, reflexed, button-eye bloom form.  Some sources say she has repeat later in the season, but I've never seen it.  That's too bad, because later blooms in my annual dry July or August might not be damaged.  In my garden, at 5 years old, she's reached 3 feet tall and across, a round bush with dark green foliage.  The foliage and bush, at least, are healthy.  

I'm about to give up on 'Lèda'.  Her beauty is either not meant for this world, or at the very least not meant for Kansas.  To paraphrase Longfellow, "When she is good she is very very good, but when she is bad she is horrid."