Tag: Wildflowers

A Summer Challenge: Documenting My Garden’s Blooms

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What better way to spend a Saturday morning, after rain showers throughout the night, flowers covered in raindrops and perfect overcast skies? The conditions were too perfect to not make photographing my flowers a priority. I had made a challenge to myself to photograph more this summer. Especially all of my flowers. That challenge has been a failure up until yesterday.

It has been hard with my day job, vegetable garden, multiple flower gardens, strawberry patch, raspberry patch, and going to a local organic blueberry farm to pick blueberries to meet my own challenge. Yesterday, I decided to let the weeds that needed pulled, making pesto and dead heading flowers wait for another day. Although I do find dead heading annual flowers therapeutic after a trying day. I needed to play! And play I did.

The first image in the gallery below is of snapdragons from Johnny’s Seeds. I planted Johnny’s Early Sunrise Mix. And they have been so beautiful, I plan on planting them again next year. If you look close on the right side of the frame, there is a newborn praying mantis. They are born brown and turn green as they mature.

My purple prairie clover is blooming quite nicely. It is a native wildflower to Iowa. The yellow flowers behind are black-eyed susan’s. Also a native wildflower to Iowa. The final image in the gallery is of new growth to one of my snapdragons. Soon there will be more flowers.

What have I been doing with all of these flowers? Every Monday I take a bouquet to work and put on my desk. If I can’t be home in my garden, at least a small portion can go to work with me.

The bouquet tomorrow is limelight hydrangeas and a few queeny formula mix zinnias. The queeny formula mix is also from Johnny’s seeds and is a mix of the queeny lime series zinnias.

Desert Globemallow

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Of the four images submitted to the 2022 Iowa State Fair, this is the image that I was hoping would had been selected for display. Desert Globemallow, a wildflower in Arizona.

Desert Globemallow blooms in a variety of colors, orange, red, white, light pink, hot pink and lavender. Orange is the most common and can be found throughout the Sonoran Desert.

This particular image was made along Highway 79 between US 60 and Florence, Arizona. All colors of globemallow can be found along the roadside of Highway 79. This two lane highway is quite busy with trucks en route to Florence, Arizona and you have to be careful. Photographing flowers along a highway can be quite challenging. As the large trucks whiz by, the flowers are anything but still, even using a plamp. Not only do you have to watch for traffic along this highway, but also rattlesnakes.

Being mindful of traffic and rattlesnakes, I continued to photograph all the colors of globemallow. Macro photography is harder than people think and you have to have patience and be willing to twist, bend and sometimes lie on the ground. Waiting for the wind to die down after each truck went by and holding my diffuser and/or a reflector in one hand, my camera on a tripod and the cable release in my other hand I worked to make images of all the colors. Fortunately globemallow is on a bush and not within inches of the grounds like many wildflowers. Still, you have to twist and turn to get the right angle for the flowers with a clean background. It’s a good idea to bring along cardboard, paper, a jacket or whatever you can think of, including your shoe, to make a clean background.

The judges didn’t think it was worthy for display, but many people have given me compliments on this image. I’ll be writing about all the images submitted and the story behind each one.

Til I write about the next image submitted, please enjoy my image Desert Globemallow.