May in the Northern Hemisphere

[Maggi Young]

Gorgeous, Allan!!

[Maggi Young]

Aquilegia laramiensis-seeded into a nearby pot

   Makes you wonder why we bother trying to make them grow where we want them to, doesn't it?   

[johnw]

With great trepidation Ken planted Epimedium 'The Giant' out last spring.  After this messy & icy winter he reports it's come through the winter with foliage intact. We have one in the greenhouse whose flowering stems measure over 8ft.  Here's a reminder of it - Philip MacD. and his pride and joy 'The Giant'.  He's crossed it with E. wushanense and they too appear to be cold hardy, some very interesting foliage there.

johnw - +10c @ 9:49 Atlantic

[johnralphcarpenter]

Amazing pictures everyone!

The camellias haven't enjoyed the cold weather and overnight frosts, but this one is doing well: Camellia 'Nuncio's Carousel'.

And a couple of Epimedium cultivars, Epimedium 'Amber Queen' and E. 'William Stearn'.

Would LOVE to grow E. 'The Giant'!

[Allan Jamieson]

Not really alpine but kind of nice all the same, a few shots of Cowslips and Daisies taken on last Thursday/ Friday mornings when there was a sharp frost first thing in the morning. The daisies in particular look pretty good when viewed up close, I could do without the buttercups and dandelions on my lawn but the daisy has a certain something too it and unlike its neighbours does not invade the rest of the garden!

[Matt T]

Welcome, Allan. We like all plants here, it doesn't have to be rare or difficult. We're enjoying cowslips at the moment too, with a batch of young plants grown from seed last year. Can't beat them for putting on a good show.

[Allan Jamieson]

Thanks Matt, somehow the self sown Cowslips in the lawn look better and more natural to my eyes than those in the borders, just a bit smaller and not so over grown.

[astragalus]

In from the garden.  With no shade, it's too hot to plant on top of the cliff, even with screening.  We seem to be morphing from lingering winter into summer.
This wonderful onosma is always early.  It's planted at the edge of one pf the crevice gardens in these pictures.  Please notice this year's tiny seedling in front and last year's seedling behind.  It's also planted on the back of the cliff.  It seems to like exposure, sun and wind but it will get woody in a few years.  Makes lots of seeds.

[johnw]

I was pleased as punch to see this skunk cabbage I had given friends as a small plant a few years ago.  They are stinkers to get established, especially so near brooks that can be fast moving at times.  Once they have a couple of years under their belt they can withstand anything.

johnw - +18c & brilliant sunshine

[meanie]

Okay Maggi, here are the images resized your way, kind of convoluted this, export as jpegs from Lightroom reduced down as per your instructionsand then opened up in Photoshop saved for web, the file sizes now are tiny from what they started off as! Even a jpeg version of these files, exported from the original raw file is around 18 to 20mb each, now down to less than 50kb each.

Hopefully they will look a bit better this way!

For forums I just embed them from Flickr (1t.byte free) or Photobucket. Flickr is particularly good as you can save the original but select a smaller size to embed.

[Maggi Young]

For forums I just embed them from Flickr (1t.byte free) or Photobucket. Flickr is particularly good as you can save the original but select a smaller size to embed.

Unfortunately we have had occasions in the past when Photobucket and similar  albums have become unavailable and the photos are then  lost from the forum. 

This may not bother everyone but from the point of view of building the forum as a permanent searchable resource, it is, as they say "a bummer"   

[Allan Jamieson]

It isn't that big a deal now I know how to do this but all the same there is definitely a bit of loss in image quality compared to the original images but good enough to give an idea of what I saw. I understand Maggi's point of view completely, dead links are very annoying and rather commonplace on photography websites where people chop and change the images they have on online sites like Flickr and might well forget that they have linked some of these images to other sites. I do have a Flickr account which is really needing overhauled and more images put onto it, currently if you look up my name there all it has are a few pictures of Meconopsis but I have many thousands of images of many very diverse things including landscapes, macro of plants and abstract stuff, etc, etc.

Sometimes it is nice to share some of these images with people who might appreciate them for what they are without wanting to know all the technical details of how each image was taken, which camera/ lens/ aperture/ filter. Photographers sometimes lose sight of the beauty they try to capture by obsessing about using the latest and greatest cameras that they can afford but truth be told I could take virtually the same images on any modern camera which allows you to change the lens. The only real difference being the image quality gained from the sensor and the lens used, the photographer can control every other part of the image taking process, taking control back from the camera where need be and manually focusing the lens where you want it to be in focus and not where the camera thinks that it should be. In macro photography that is all the difference in the world!

[Maggi Young]

For print work big files are essential of course  but for  standard web-viewing, what kind of system and size of screen would one need to "properly" appreciate a huge  18MB  picture?!

No average screen would be able to cope with even a tiny segment of the photo, would it?
Very grateful to you, Allan and the others who take the trouble to share their plants with us in these pages.

[johnw]

This is terribly late for Leucojum vernum to be flowering but that's not a complaint.  We love the vernums and have v. carpaticum, we lost v. wagneri and one called 'Popo.......' which originally may have come from Janis. What has been elusive are those with green marks.  We were told the seed must come from Romania or easternmost Hungary. ()
So I was excited when going through friend's garden yesterday to learn they had the green-marked vernum which came from a neighbour.  On examination the marks were green initially but seem to fade to yellow. Is this the case as a rule?  We had 1000 seeds from the eastern form but none germinated and have not found a source since.

A few photos from the aforementioned ones, you will see green marks on a freshly opened one on the left.  The last photos shows how persistent this species is here, it is struggling to come up in a well-used path that is compacted like cement.

johnw

[Roma]

Gentiana acaulis (or it may be angustifolia)
Oxalis enneaphylla just coming into flower - it produces lots of seedlings but does not travel far from the original plants.