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April 30, 2006
The Arboretum Project, Week Seventeen
Panorama 4-30-06
Gorgeous weather today. The sunny kind that makes me smile. Perfect temperature. I even spent part of my shoot today sitting on a bench in the sunshine. I think that's how I managed to get this picture.
White Crowned Sparrow Taiga West
I met a man today who donated one of the arboretum benches. He's from China, UI Class of 1954. Became a U.S. citizen. He was back here for a reunion. Interesting, how having a bigass camera around your neck makes people think you can take a decent picture. I took one of him next to his bench. And then he explained that it was his bench. And I read it. And I got all weepy.
Not counting the photo of the I took 457 pictures today. It was horrible, trying to narrow my choices to the top 30. Eventually, I gave up. You get the top 45.
Baby Apples
Cherry Blossoms II
Bark
Upperlake
Crabapple Blossom
Blue Sky and Branches
Breezy Red Maple
Cherry Blossoms I
Companions
Pink
Curves and Angles
Daffodils
Dancing Camas
Tulip – Orange
Palouse View
Florets
Flowering Plum
Flowers to Be
Four Turtles
There are actually four turtles in the picture above. Three are on the bank. The fourth is in the algae. Look to the left of the picture. That thing that looks like a rock? It's a turtle.
At one point today, I could see five turtles at once on the banks of the lower lake. What with the sunny weather, I should have expected sunning turtles. But five at one time is a bonus.
Tulip – Pink
White Daffs
Green Shade
Happy Accident
I gave the above photograph that name because I just stumbled across that tree. Every week I try to vary my path within the arboretum so I'm never going the same way twice. Normally, I would stop just before the spot where I found the tree in the picture, because the ground gets really steep. But this week, not only was the ground not remotely damp or muddy, but my knee is feeling much more the thing. So I wandered a little further and found a little spindly blooming tree in the midst of a bunch of scrub. The least I could do was take a picture.
Healing
Palouse Curves
Koi
Painted Turtle
Can you see the red in its undershell? Isn't that just gorgeous?
Finding Its Way
Pink and Bee
Nesting
Maple Blossom
Lots of White
Green Tunnel
Robin Diptych II
The Robin Diptych photographs are actually of two different birds in one tree at the same time. I took several of them together, but the individual portraits turned out better.
Sneaky Yellow
Robin Diptych I
Red and White
I wish I knew what the above plants were. Everything else in the area is carefully labelled, but not these shrubs, whatever they are. The arboretum contains the same plant with flowers in red, white and orange. And none of them are labelled.
Turtle Rock
This is that fourth turtle in the earlier photograph. I walked right past it at one point. I thought it was a rock. Hence the title.
Secrets
As I mentioned earlier, I spent about 15 minutes sitting on a bench in the sun. There were quail in the nearby shrubs, and I wanted to see if sitting quietly would allow them to forget I was there. After all, quail aren't the smartest members of the bird kingdom. They didn't, but the stillness allowed the sparrow picture at the top of this entry to happen. It also gave me a chance to notice things I might not otherwise have seen in my normal "wander through and take pictures as you go" mode.
Purple
Tulips – Yellow
Willows and Cottonwoods
The smell of cottonwoods in spring and summer is one of the happiest smells I know. It smells like freedom to me. I scented them on the air, and just stood and sniffed it up, trying to fill myself, every pore, every space available, with the smell of cottonwoods.
Veronica and Woodchips
Lowerlake View
Posted by sally at April 30, 2006 08:33 PM
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