friday randomness

Here are a few mostly unre­lated things I’ve been stor­ing up.

Shop­ping for Pumpkins

McLean, Virginia photo by Joel Sternfeld

McLean, Vir­ginia photo by Joel Sternfeld

First off, I wanted to share this fun(?) photo that’s only a few days late for Cana­dian Thanks­giv­ing or a cou­ple weeks early for the US hol­i­day. (Be sure to click it to enlarge it to get the full effect.) The image is “McLean, Vir­ginia (1978)” by pho­tog­ra­pher Joel Stern­feld. It’s his best-known photo and the cover to one of the edi­tions of his book, Amer­i­can Prospects.

A big part of pho­tog­ra­phy can be being in the right place at the right time. But then you have to know when to snap the shut­ter. Stern­feld nailed this one!

Orna­men­tal Grasses

Grasses have been used as lawn mate­ri­als for cen­turies, but the last cou­ple decades have seen an explo­sion in the use of orna­men­tal grasses that you don’t attack with lawn­mow­ers. The Cana­dian firm, Bluestem Nurs­ery, has assem­bled one of the bet­ter brief guides to dozens of commonly-used orna­men­tal grasses. When does a grass bloom? How much water does it need? How large does it get? Just take a look at the great sum­mary. Click on the plant name for pho­tos and a more detailed descrip­tion. It doesn’t have every plant you’ll run into in a seed cat­a­log, but it has plenty of the hardier species.

Pen­ste­mons from Seed

A few weeks ago I was plan­ning to sow seeds of a cou­ple species of pen­ste­mon. Some of the species in the genus require a cold snap to ger­mi­nate, oth­ers require light, while some respond to a fairly elab­o­rate string of tem­per­a­ture changes. And some just spring to life after you sprin­kle them in some soil and water them in. I had no idea what kind of treat­ment my species required until I went trawl­ing the web. That was when I ran across Jim Swayne’s pen­ste­mon seed ger­mi­na­tion method­ol­ogy pages.

There you’ll find sev­eral hun­dred pen­ste­mon species listed, along with brief ger­mi­na­tion notes on how you make the lit­tle seeds come to life. (For exam­ple, one of the more elab­o­rate rou­tines, for P. hartwegii, goes some­thing like: “Sow fresh seed @ 70ºF (21ºC), sow stored seed under thin cover 8 wks @ 40ºF (4ºC), move to 50ºF (10ºC) under light; if no germ. in 4 wks, move to 60ºF (16ºC).” For­tu­nately my two species were closer to the “just add water” category.)

An Elec­tion Video You Haven’t Seen

Leav­ing the gar­den, I wanted share this clip in recog­ni­tion of the elec­tions just con­cluded. It may be the last elec­tion footage you’ll need to watch this sea­son: a promo for Please Vote for Me, a Dan­ish doc­u­men­tary from 2007 on an elec­tion for Class Mon­i­tor for a third grade class in Wuhan, China. It’s a lit­tle Sesame Street in parts, but it’s got its Lord of the Flies moments as well.

November 14 2008 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: • • • • • • • • • | 1 Comment »