“Layered”
Heatherwood Meadow
Heatherwood’s meadow plantings have been designed to produce layers of color and texture interest throughout the year. The above winter vignette is composed of yarrow, rudbeckia, penstemon, and ornamental grasses. They provide varying shades of brown, textures, and shapes creating beautiful winter interest.
“Winter Grasses”
Heatherwood Meadow
Snow lightly glazes the stalks of the winter grasses adding to their winter beauty. Many gardeners like to have a neat planting area over the winter and cut down all their perennials. We prefer to let the garden get a little messy and enjoy the remnants of the perennials. The birds like it too as they feast on the spent flower seeds.
“Winter Contrasts”
Heatherwood Meadow
A light snow cover accentuates the winter contrasts of the Heatherwood meadow. The snow both “frames” the various plants and highlights the leaves, stalks, and branches with a touch of “white icing.” It is like a miniature winter wonderland.
“Late Fall Softness”
Heatherwood Meadow
At this time of the year, there is a warm softness through our Heatherwood meadow. The warm colors blend together into soft yellow-brown hues. The spent flowers and grasses merge together into a homogenous mass to the eye. The autumn plumes of the ornamental grasses are soft to touch. Gentle breezes blur the grasses and flowers together on a warm sunny late fall afternoon.
“Liatris”
Heatherwood Meadow
As I walk through our Heatherwood garden, I constantly look for little vignettes that catch my eye. When I see something of interest, I pause to look at it from different perspectives. I tilt my head, squat up and down, move around, squint my eyes, and imagine how I can translate what I see into something a little unique. Many times I just move on, other times I imagine what I can do in post processing. For this image, I knew that it was a painting from the start. With a little help from Topaz Impression out popped my interpretation.
“Meadow Contrasts”
Heatherwood, Summer
This small meadow vignette is full of contrasts: disc-shaped yellow rudbeckia flowers, spike-shaped green grass, ball-shaped blue thistle, and reddish-purple penstemon. A soft diffuser filter helps blend them together.
Different vignettes like this abound in Heatherwood’s meadow. This is its second year and it has started to fill in rapidly. In a couple more years, it should be a solid mass of color, shapes, and textures.
“Meadow Pan #1”
Heatherwood, Summer
How many ways can I photograph our garden? So many times I walk through the garden and create images with just a little different perspective that what I have done so many time before. I photograph in monochrome, infrared, color, macro, wide-angle, underexpose, overexpose, HDR, on my stomach, up on a ladder, time lapse, long exposure, and on and on. Today’s challenge was to make images using a soft diffuser-type filter. For this image, I picked a section in our meadow that was full of summer color and did a gentle vertical pan.
“The Color Wheel”
Heatherwood Meadow
Some images are clearly best in Black & White. This is not one of them!!! This image of our Heatherwood meadow has all the colors of the color wheel. Testing myself, I could not come up with a color that is not represented. Two years ago when we designed the meadow, we actually used a color wheel as a tool to identify the perennials we would plant. We are fully enjoying the results of the effort.
“Meadow, Rock, & Japanese Gardens”
Heatherwood Spring
Heatherwood is comprised of several separate garden areas. Each one has a distinctive feeling and character. Even though the gardens are distinct, common elements link them as they flow from one to the other. The scene above illustrates three layers of gardens; the foreground meadow, the mid ground rock garden, and the distant background Japanese garden. Conifers and rocks are repeated to transition from the Japanese garden to the rock garden. Perennials are repeated to transition from the rock garden to the meadow. Together they harmonize with each other.
“Spring Meadow”
Heatherwood
I was away on a photography workshop in the Palouse for just a week. I came back to a wonderful surprise. Our meadow had transformed from a collection of buds to a burst of spring color. Yellows, greens, reds, and purples burst throughout Heatherwood. It was a wonderful welcome home!