Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Catching Up
Ya know what happens when you take a week off from blogging and blog reading? You get well over 300 unread blog posts in your Garden Folder in Google Reader. Oh, and the daffodils and other bulbs continue to bloom, completely unphotographed (by me). Happily, this blogging backlog is coinciding with a rainy weekend. This morning I only have 127 unread garden blog posts.
Though I was mostly away from the computer, there were a few blog-worthy items in the past week. In reverse chronological order:
- The wisteria is starting to bloom along I-64.
- Yesterday, while driving through a residential neighborhood in Richmond, we spotted totally-leafed-out Japanese maples. That was a surprise - the flowering trees aren't even finished here.
- We visited a HUGE garden center in the Short Pump area of the Richmond burbs. I didn't look at everything - they appeared to have a good selection of plants at reasonable prices, although nothing too out of the ordinary. They were very well stocked with tools, pricey tchotchkes, garden furniture, bird feeders, pond kits, etc.
- The coriander/cilantro and radishes from seed sowed in the cold frame in late January are now are at a usable size, so yesterday's lunch was an Indian-style Omelet Sandwich with a Indianish Radish Relish.
- Mid-week we visited Ash Lawn-Highland, the home of James Monroe (the 5th US President). During the visit I learned many things I should have learned in school about James Monroe, but the place just doesn't have the star power (or the extensive gardens) of Monticello, its near neighbor. Still, there are huge trees and boxwood hedges; a nice flower border currently blooming with narcissus, tulips and fritillarias; a huge rosemary blooming with the largest flowers I've ever seen on a rosemary; and in a pen in back of the house live 2 pairs of gorgeous pea fowl. Also notable was that I saw my first tiger swallowtail butterfly of the season there.
- On Picasaweb, I posted several photos of a pileatead woodpecker. The first good ones I've ever taken of this cool bird.
If it ever quits raining I'll get out and take some photos of the progress of spring here at Tangled Branches, but until then I'll be catching up on my reading.
Labels: birds, coriander, garden centers, radishes
8 Comments:
I was soooo jealous when I saw your beautiful photo of the woodpecker in your sidebar and now in this blog. I have not had the pleasure of seeing a pileated woodpecker in my lifetime but I hope I get a glimpse one of these days. Like Woody Woodpecker eh, though maybe some youngsters may not know him? I don't know if he was a pileated or ivory billed?
What a great photo. Did you use a long lens?
Ki: The first time I ever saw a pileated woodpecker, I was startled to see such a large bird with a red crest. That was a long time ago and I didn't know much about birds then, so had to run home and look it up. Now I hear them more often than I see them - it's not quite the Woody Woodpecker laugh, but very loud. I'm guessing Woody was modeled on the pileated, but were the ivory-billed woodpeckers gone before Woody was created? Something to look up, I guess.
I had just finished packing up the tripod when I saw this woodpecker. They're kind of wary of humans, so I grabbed the camera (with my new image-stabilized zoom lens) and shot the first photos through the window. The bird didn't notice me, so I cautiously opened the patio door and slowly moved out onto the deck. So far, so good, so I knelt down and braced the camera on the deck railing and that's how I took all the photos that turned out well. The zoom lens goes up to 300mm, but I had enough to time to fiddle with various camera settings. The photo in the sidebar was taken in Portrait mode @ 235mm, F/5.6, 1/250 sec. exposure. The photo in the blog post was taken in Sports mode @ 300mm, F/5.6, 1/640 sec. exposure. The camera adjusted the ISO speed to 400 for that one, although I don't really understand what that does in the context of digital photography. Anyhow, that's probably way more than you wanted to know, but I was fairly excited to finally get some decent photos of this bird.
I love that kind of information. What kind of camera did you buy? I seem to be more and more unsteady as I age so having an in camera image stabilizer is a god send. Since I virtually handhold all my shots I don't think I would buy a camera without that feature. The ability to shoot at the equivalent of 300mm must be nice. I once had a setup with almost similar focal length but the photos were disappointing probably because it was an add on lens.
If I remember correctly, I believe the pileated is almost as large as an Ivory bill but I should look it up in my bird books. I'm keeping the Ivory bill in present tense hoping that it still lives somewhere in Alabama? swamps. Was the pileated larger than a flicker, crow?
Great picture of the pileated, I have only seen one once in my life and that was a fleeting view.
Hi Entangled,
I enjoyed browsing through your links and photos. We once saw pileated woodpeckers near Mammoth Cave - no photos, just the thrill of seeing them! Your description of how you caught the shot with your camera is far beyond my understanding, but congratulations on the capture.
Did you or anyone else ever ID that fascinating seed pod? I poked around on this site:
http://theseedsite.co.uk/seedpods.html
but couldn't make any guesses. Ki will be amused to know that I couldn't open the site in IE but saw it in Firefox.
I never know if these cyberspace events are real or just decisions made by my wacky computer.
Annie at the Transplantable Rose
That is a good shot of the woodpecker. I hope you'll post some pictures of Wisteria - I love it so much and won't ever be able to grow it. (Too bad it can't grow as a houseplant!)
Ki: I have a Canon Digital Rebel XTi. For a year, I only used the 18-55mm zoom lens that came with the camera. It's fine for flower and insect closeups, and wide angle landscapes, but I knew I needed a longer image-stabilized lens if I really wanted to take pictures of birds. I don't use the tripod very much, because these wildlife photo ops seem to come when the tripod isn't handy.
I think the pileated and ivory billed are about the same size, and that's one of the reasons some ornithologists think the ivory billed sightings are wishful thinking applied to pileateds. I would say they're a little smaller than a crow, but way bigger than a flicker.
IGW: We're lucky in having lots of big old dead trees nearby. We have LOTS of woodpeckers. I'm still hoping to see a red-headed.
Annie: Well....if truth be told, the camera did most of the work. I'm not sure whether it's smarter than me, but I'm absolutely sure that it thinks faster.
No, I never got an ID on the seedpod, and I left it on the deck and it blew away :-( so the photos are all I have to work with now. I started guessing with Malvaceae because of the similarity with Kim's abutilon flower, but most (all?) Malvaceae seem to be five-parted and this was clearly four-parted.
I tried theseedsite link in IE and it worked OK for me. I wonder if it has something to do with security settings? I hardly ever use IE and don't think I ever changed any of the settings.
Kate: I'll try to find a good wisteria to photograph. I usually see them along the road at 60 MPH, but had never seen any before I moved to Virginia. There was a really gorgeous one growing wild in a park near here, but I think the anti-invasive folks had it removed. It was gone the last time I went to look for it.
Great pic of that woodpecker Entangled. I don't think we have those here although we have some nice woodpeckers here too.
Yep, I know what happens when you go away for a week; the amount of blog posts you have to catch up with is shocking.
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