Posts in Category: Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens
Swallowtail on Cone Flower. Happy Sunday!
There are Tiger Swallowtails everywhere this year. I see them in meadows feeding on Milkweed and flitting through the trees on unknown missions in the deep forest. I see them at Laudholm Farm, Emmons Preserve, Saco Heath, Old Falls Pond, the Waterboro Barrens, and the Kennebunk Plains. I have seen several in our yard, and actually photographed one on our apple blossoms. I almost thought we were going to get out of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens without seeing one, but one final turn around the Garden of the Senses and the great lawn after lunch turned up a lovely specimen feeding in a stand of purple Cone Flower.
Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom. 600mm equivalent. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 200 @ f7.1. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet. Cropped for scale and composition.
And for the Sunday Thought: Comparatively speaking we do not have a lot of Butterflies in New England (compared say, to South Texas)…especially big showy butterflies like the Swallowtail. There are summers when a single sighting would be exciting. This year we have Swallowtails in abundance. I have no idea why, and I don’t even know how to begin to speculate. 🙂 But I am, of course, happy to see them, and I will undoubtedly photograph every one that will sit even remotely still for me. And I will give thanks. I know, year to year, on average, it is our most common big Butterfly. In fact nothing else in New England comes close to its size. So, common or not, every single one is a blessing. Even in a year of abundance, any day with a Swallowtail in it is more blessed than a day without. I have cherrios for breakfast every morning in the warm days of summer (oatmeal in the winter), but that does not mean I should forget to be thankful for cherrios any morning. A day with cherrios in it is always more blessed than a day without. And we do good to remember that. No matter how common the Swallowtails are this summer.
Yellow-jacket on Lantana
You do not see a lot of Lantana growing in Maine. It is a plant I associate with the Southwest and southern California where it is popular in Gardens for its bold color and for its attractiveness to butterflies. At the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens they had it growing in huge planters which I assume they move inside during the winter. I stopped for a macro of the flowers. The Yellow-jacket (Common Wasp) is a bonus.
Sony Alpha NEX 3N with ZEISS Touit 50mm f2.8 macro. ISO 200 @ 1/320th @ f11. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet. Anyone who appreciates macros would have to love this lens!
Bee for Thursday
I mentioned in an earlier post that there were more insects at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens on our visit Monday than I had seen before…especially bees…and especially Bumble Bees. They were everywhere. After a few shots with one in the frame, I began to collect them on different flowers.
Sony Alpha NEX 3N with the ZEISS Touit 50mm macro. ISO 200 @ 1/160th @ f10. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet.
Any perch
My wife and I spent the better part of the day at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Maine yesterday. It is something we have done several times now on or around our anniversary. The CMBG is a treasure, the unlikely result of the ongoing efforts of a group of dedicated people in Boothbay. They have assembled a world class collection of plants in beautifully landscaped settings that always provides a day of pleasure when we visit. We were a few weeks later this year than in past visits and it was interesting to see the difference that few weeks made in what was blooming, and what was not.
A highlight of this trip was the number of insects. There were bees, mostly Bumble, everywhere, and squadrons of Twelve-spotted Skimmer Dragonflies. crickets. Wasps. Several other Odonata. Etc. It sometimes seemed difficult to photograph flowers without catching a bug in the frame. 🙂
This image is, of course, an unusual juxtaposition. Dragonflies, like the Blue Dasher here, are predators and do not generally visit flowers. That is not to say they will not settle on one if it presents itself as a likely perch for hunting. This stand of salmon colored Day Lilies was along the bank above an ornamental pond where many dragonflies were patrolling. And the Blue Dasher is not the only dragon I caught perched among the blooms.
Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom. 380mm equivalent. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 320 @ f8. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet.
7/9/2012: Happy Anniversary Carol
Today my wife Carol and I celebrate our 29th wedding anniversary. The last two years and a third year 2 years before that, we have visited the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens as part of our celebration. We love the whole place, but the Children’s Garden, which we saw for the first time last year, is very special. All kinds of the best quality whimsy going! This is Carol in the little reading house in the center of the garden. All cedar on the inside and shingled on the out…with a grass roof. I am certain she wants to take it home and plant it in our backyard as a sanctuary from my untidy habits. You can see it here in the wider view, on the other side of the ornamental pond.
But this is really to celebrate Carol, who for 29 years has been my companion on many such adventures. I am still amazed to find we share so much…that there is so much of the world we can enjoy together. That has to be special.
And here she is braving the rope walk in the tree house beyond the Children’s Garden, getting in practice for next year’s trip to the Canopy Tower in Panama. 🙂
Happy Anniversary Carol. I may not have brought you flowers, but I brought you to a garden. And here is an Azalea just for you. All my love.
7/6/2012: The Hillside, Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens
As I mentioned a few days ago, my wife and I spent a day at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Maine this week. It is becoming an anniversary tradition, although next year we may try to vary the timing to see the garden in another flowering season. The CMBG always amazes me. It is so unlikely that it is there at all. Boothbay is quaint and touristy, and a bit up-scale for the Maine Coast, but it is hardly a metropolitan hub with resources for something like a world class botanical garden. And yet, there it is.
The light was particularly good this trip, for some reason, or maybe my camera is just that much better at capturing it. This is a white Penstimon from the Hillside Gardens which feature a blend of more natural wild-flower plantings on a relatively steep landscaped slope with many rock ledges. I really like the way the flower is illuminated from inside by the shaft of sun through the overhanging pines.
This is a good example of what the Canon SX40HS can do in 24mm macro (close focus to 0 centimeters) when you also use the 1.5x digital te-converter function. The resulting 32mm field of view and magnification gives a very natural macro, with great depth of field and image scale.
At the other extreme, the Stonecrop that follows was taken at 840mm equivalent field of view, plus 1.5x digital tel-converter for a 1240mm macro effect. Here it is as much about the bokeh as the subject. Shooting at high magnification allows for an intimate approach to followers (bugs, etc) that you could not otherwise approach. This flower was poking up over a ledge behind other plantings 8 feet away.
What follows, still from the hillside gardens, is a mass planting of purple Penstimon, framed at about 50mm equivalent for a natural view…and then a close up of the blooms, again using the wide-angle macro plus digital tel-converter function.
I have lots more flowers, which you will see over the next days.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. ISO 125-200.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.