Winter flower by the seashore: Gardening Gone Wild Picture This Photo Contest

For months now, our friends at Gardening Gone Wild have been presenting the Picture This Photo Contest, which challenges bloggers to open their eyes to the wonder of the world around us, and to catch a little of that wonder with our cameras. Then share it with others.

I haven't entered before, partly because I'm in Canada and even if I had a winning shot, they couldn't ship plants here without going through enough security checks (phytosanitary certificates, etc) to put us in qualification for a G20 conference. But I wanted to participate just to show support for the folks at GGW and all the information they, and their guest judges, have given us over the past months.

So I'm offering up this little picture for the theme "Winter Light".

I went down to the wharf here in Scotts Bay a couple of weeks ago, on a day when the sun was out, it wasn't blowing 95 miles an hour, and it wasn't as cold as our priminister-bot's heart. It was getting close to sunset and the shadows were long, but I encountered this frozen stem of a Queen Anne's lace (Daucus carota) flowerhead while walking along the rocky shoreline above the water, and took its photo.

What I especially like about this photo is the glistening hints of rainbow in the crystals of snow behind the plant, and the echoes of light in the relatively calm waters of the Bay just behind this cliff. Plus although the seedhead is frigid, its seeds all but gone, there's a whisper of spring promise in the fact that the seeds ARE gone. Plants will bloom again here on this stony promontory.

It works for me. I hope you enjoy it, too.

Wordless Wednesday: The sound of (winter) silence

Wildflowers in Winter: Week 5

Looking down through the rest of the topics for Wildflowers in Winter, it looks like this may well be my last post. For sure we won't have any wildflowers outdoors before the end of the project; I don't have contact with any kids to speak of (my son is grown and thankfully there won't be any grandchildren any time soon!) and as for art...well, we'll see. Of course, I'll get to visit all who do their own posts, which is just as satisfying.

This week was a challenge because looking around the house, I noticed a dearth of wildflower stitchery. I don't do needlework--it's been years since I cross-stitched anything--and I don't seem to buy any. Or so I thought. Then I looked closer.

This clever card incorporates fabric, paint, glitter and sequins to create one of my favourite plants (no surprise, it's a blue Meconopsis!)


And this little darling incorporates two of my favourite things; cats and flowers! Handstitched by an artist in St. Andrews by the Sea, New Brunswick, I had to have him when he looked at me.


Some of you will have seen this before; my huge leather sunflowers, also made by a local artist. Aren't they terrific? I move this wall sculpture around the house on a regular basis, because every time I look at it, I smile. And that's always a good thing, as we all know.


I have a LOT of silk scarves of various patterns, but they are either abstract in design or feature cats, blueberries, whales and porpoises, or, most intriguingly, a jellyfish! But then I realized I had this silk painting done by well-known artist Holly Carr, who lives here in Canning. I would love to have a larger piece than this 'Poppy Angel', and maybe one day I will.I bought this at an auction put on by a local group raising funds for solar lighting systems for schools in Uganda, so it was a beneficial thing all the way around.


Whew...two posts in one evening!? Now I get to read and catch up with what everyone else is up to! Happy blogging!

Wildflowers in Winter, Week 4

Here we go with Week 4 of Wildflowers in Winter; wildflowers in the home. What a good idea this was for Elizabeth Joy to give us something else interesting to do to while away the dreary weeks of winter. Because we ARE into the dreary part now, at least in Nova Scotia, with irregular weather patterns making for a lot of ice, grey days sapping all the energy out of us. BUT, the days are getting longer, and we've lots of indoor or virtual gardening to do, so we'll get through!


This week's theme posed a bit of a challenge for me, because I realized that a lot of our dishes, etc either are cat-related, or have other plants besides wildflowers on them. But like a good writer, I decided to interpret dishes a bit more loosely, and so we'll start off with this porcelain candleholder of a rose. After all, we have wild roses, including semi-double and double blossomed ones, so this could be a wild rose. Or a water lily. And the candle is lavender scented, naturally.


Here's a bit of a stretch; this cutting board, though, is so beautiful it needed to be included. Unlike two others I have, it never, ever has been used; I bought it just because its colours and plants gave me such joy.


Likewise with this memopad, festooned as it is with violets. It sits on my office desk and I use it some (though the pen that came with it doesn't work well) and gives me great delight, because violets (and violet lookalikes) make me instantly happy.


I have quite a bit of pottery around the house, including these items. The vase with the Ladyslipper on it was made in Prince Edward Island, where the provincial flower is the ladyslipper. The kitchen tool jar and the spoon rest were made by a potter in Canning, who also makes compost pots in the same pattern, and I have decided to treat myself to one as a 'get me through winter' present. (It holds a 2 litre icecream container, which comes easily out, so I don't have to lug the pottery out to the Envirocycle every time I need to empty the kitchen trimmings.)


Lupines grow wild throughout much of Atlantic Canada, and they are just so amazing in their myriad colour patterns. When they bloom the roadsides are awash in colours just like on this soapdish.


See what I mean about cups with cats on them? This one has geraniums on it, true, but I thought I'd sneak it in without anyone making too much fuss. I'm sure geraniums (Pelargoniums, not cranesbills) are wild somewhere!


And here we are again with a bit of a loose interpretation. The pottery teapot is one I picked up at a flea market type place in Cape Breton, years ago, and it's just the best for tea. The teacup has watering cans, not-wild flowers, and butterflies on it, so I figure that the butterflies make it work for this week's post just fine. Because butterflies need wildflowers, and I have lots of both around our yard.

Whew. All this work has made me thirsty...time for tea. Jasmine scented green tea, so that means more wildflowers from somewhere else, doesn't it?

Garden Bloggers Muse Day Meets Wildflowers in Winter

Our blogging friend Carolyn of Sweet Home & Garden Chicago started Garden Blogger's Muse Day a while back, and it's been goin' great guns ever since. The idea is to post some garden-related poetry or prose (our own or something written by someone else we really like) on the first day of the month.

February is no excuse to be muse-less, either. Carolyn is basking in the radiant warmth of Florida, clearing up her winter woes, but she's posted her whimsies for the month right here; leave a comment to let her know when your post is up.

Because I've got so much going on right now, I'm sort of being a bit of a rascal, and combining my muse post with the Wildflowers in Winter Week 3 Post, which is on literary wildflowers, or on a book about wildflowers that we particularly like. Being as how I'm a bit of a bibliophile, with a lot of books about plants and gardening, I thought I'd share a bit of a cross-Canada look at books about wildflowers, plus one more. The book at the top of the post is from 1976, and is by Dietmar Aichele with illustrations by Marianne Golte-Bechtle and published by Cathay Books. It's one of the very first books about wild plants I got; actually, my father bought it for me and gave it to me while I was at Agricultural College studying botany (among other things), and to this day it's one of my favourites. It's a wildflower key, but different from other identification books, simple to use; I've chased down identifications for others using this book's key, even when I haven't been real familiar with the plant itself.


Traveling with Wildflowers from Newfoundland to Alaska is by Phyllis Joy Hammond and was published in 1998 by Newfoundland's own Breakwater Books. What a thrill it was to lug it with me last summer when we plant-hunters went to Newfoundland and the southern Labrador coast, and to actually see some of the places Phyllis wrote about, and the plants she painted in her delicious watercolours. This isn't a book of botany, but rather of travel and observation, and a lovely one to boot.


Of course I have books about the Flora of the Atlantic provinces, each with their dicotomous key of characteristics and plant names. But this tiny gem is one I picked up, like others, at a local used-book store, and it's another book of drawings/paintings, by Katherine Mackenzie and published in 1973 by Tundra books of Montreal. The paintings are very detailed and yet incredibly delicate, perhaps shrunken down to fit the book's tiny size (4 x 6 inches). The author includes interesting snippets of information about each plant, as in this entry about strawberry goosefoot, Chenopodium capitatum "In France, the berry is used to colour wine that has turned out to be too pale.'. Who knew?


From Western Producer Prairie Books (a probably long-defunct local publisher, I'm sure) came this delightful book, published in 1977. I've been to Edmonton and Winnipeg only in the Prairie provinces--and to a wildlife santuary outside Winnipeg called Oak Hammock Marsh--and while I did get to look at some wild flora, I didn't find this book until a few years ago in that same used book store here in NS. (One wonders how it ended up there.) I was fascinated by the huge span of plants included in this book; from alpine types that I recognize from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to cacti that would never grow here except in a container indoors.


And now we've reached the West Coast, not to be confused with the Best Coast. In 1990, I went out to Chilliwack for a week or so, to visit my then-husband who was doing officer training in the Armed Forces. He had to work during the days, so I scooted all around the lower mainland, and even went to Vancouver Island, and got to explore woods and streams as well as museums and malls. This small book, published by Hancock House in 1986, was quite useful as I clambered up trails near Cultus Lake and Harrison Hot Springs, seeing lovely wild orchids but also familiar plants from both garden (such as western Bleeding-heart) and house (Piggy-back plant).

Some of the plants in each book are familiar to us as garden plants; some are purely to be enjoyed for their own selves in the wild. Looking through the books, I am taken away many miles. A painting of bog rosemary, and I'm standing on the wind-scoured Tablelands in Gros Morne National Park; one of mayflowers, and I smell their sweetness in the Port l'Hebert Pocket Wilderness near Liverpool, here in NS; Yellow violets remind me of the woodlands of the Ottawa Valley near the Quebec border, while I remember seeing much water smartweed in wet areas near farms outside of Winnipeg. And in each case, to derive from Wordsworth's delight at his wild daffodils, "and then, my heart with pleasure fills..." and dances with each wildflower's grace.

Wildflowers in Winter, Week 2

Almost forgot to get my post for Wildflowers in Winter, Week 2, posted, even though it's been sitting in the draft folder for several days. How does an ice-encrusted aster sound? I don't remember which one this is, other than it's not the tall white aster, or the heart-leafed species either. But it's an aster, and it's definitely winter here in Nova Scotia.

Now the question is, will I get my Garden Bloggers Book Club post up in time? Stay tuned!

Wildflowers and Pollinators.

Elizabeth Joy over at Wildflower Morning is hosting a new photo-posting activity for the weeks leading up to spring. The object is to post a photo of a wildflower, with a different theme for each week. I'm just under the wire with this week's favourite wildflower, which is a photo of Campanula rotundifolia, or Scotch harebell. It's not the best photo I've ever taken, but it's special to me because this little plant was growing on the vast rocky expanses of the Tablelands in Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland; some of the most uninviting terrain for plants to be found, because of the toxic heavy metals in so many of the rocks that litter the mars-like landscape; rocks that were heaved up out of the earth's heart nearly a billion years ago. So I think this is a pretty special little plant.

It's no secret that I'm fond of wild flowers and other native plants, both in their natural habitats and in garden settings. I've got natives on my mind a lot lately, in part because I'm concerned about other natives; pollinating insects, some of which are dying off. We all heard the big honeybee scare last year, Colony Collapse Disorder, but the wild, native pollinators are as important to our environments.

I'll be writing more posts about pollinators later, but just wanted to share a happy bit of news for native bumblebees in our area. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation has posted articles on its website about native bumblebees in decline, including one that is native to my area, Bombus terricola, the Yellow-banded bumblebee. I went through my photos of bees, because while I couldn't tell one species from another when I was photographing them--I just like bees--I thought the pattern looked familiar.

I sent this photo in to the society, who had their resident entomologist study the image and tell me, yes, this is a yellow-banded bee. You can be sure I'll be watching out for them more this coming gardening season; and if planting more natives (and more Eryngium, which bees adore in our yard) helps, then there will be many more natives going into our garden this year.

And lots of opportunities for wildflower photography. Pop on over to Wildflower Morning and join in the fun. Thanks to Nancy at Soliloquy for letting me know about this great bit of photoblogging, winter-unclogging relief.