I thought selecting my favorite photos of 2015 would be easy for my final Gardening Gone Wild post of the year. That is, until I had to actually narrow down the choices.
What follows are surely 10 of my favorite photos, but I can’t say they are my absolute favorites – my overall list is 26.
This is a broad mix of photos, some from my garden travels, some of my landscape shots, some of my art and extractions, and some from work to be published next year. I do seem to dabble in many things:
Alnus tenuifolia – Mountain Alder bare branches in winter in shrub border.
I still gasp when I see this photo, from the Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Berkeley, California. I was shooting bare trees last January in that wonderful California native plant garden, and at the end of the day, after absorbing branches and patterns all day, these white branches of the Mountain Alder at the end of a border, with the garden in the background became a blend of shapes and colors I put into my art gallery.
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Parkinsonia ‘Desert Museum’ Palo Verde tree at LA Natural History Museum
I made a trip to the Los Angeles Natural History Museum especially to see the sustainable gardens that my friend Carol Bornstein is helping to create and curate. An early morning shoot with backlight allowed these Parkinsonia flowers to glow.
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Quercus agrifolia in California native plant garden around modern home
High on a ridge in central California this modern home overlooks the Pacific ocean. These oak trees were planted to create sight lines within an entirely native plant garden.
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Heteromeles arbutifolia ‘Davis Gold’, Toyon – PhotoBotanic Extraction
I have been doing a series of PhotoBotanic “Extractions” over the years. An extraction is a botanic illustration from nature, where the elements of the plant are highlighted against the garden itself, as opposed to a studio illustration where the plant is drawn on a white background. This native Toyon shrub is a hedge by my front steps.
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Webb Farmhouse, Meadow Garden, Longwood Garden, Pennsylvania
An entirely different native plant garden, here at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. This old farmhouse reminded me of Andrew Wyeth painting, sitting at the edge of the grand new meadow that is being planted at Longwood.
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Liriodendron tulipifera – spring leaves unfolding with bue sky, Mount Cuba Center.
While on the same trip to the East Coast I visited The Mount Cuba Center For Piedmont Flora in Delaware just as the Tulip Poplar trees were budding out. This delicate moment of leaf unfolding is more fleeting than the flowering of more ornamental trees.
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Red Cutleaf Japanese Maple tree, spring leaves unfolding, Winterthur Garden
My trip to the East Coast was a lesson in leaf unfolding. Every day, in every different garden, I saw a different array of leaves budding out. Here is a beautiful Red Cut leaf Japanese Maple at Winterthur Garden in Delaware.
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Connecticut meadow garden by lake with native wildflowers; Larry Weiner Design
On a summer trip to the East Coast I was able to photograph a couple of Larry Weiner’s beautiful meadow gardens in Connecticut. In this one, by a pond, the native flowers were in the lineup, seemingly just for me.
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Nepeta, Oenothera, and Layia – pollinator flowers; Kate Frey garden.
Back in California, my friend Kate Frey, called me one day to say her bee pollinator garden was looking okay. Just okay?
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Geranium nodosum ‘Clos du Coudray’, Robin Parer Geraneaceae nursery
Perhaps my favorite project for the year was the new geranium book that my friend Robin Parer has just completed for Timber Press. The style of the book places the flowers against a black background for identification. Creating these sorts of silhouettes for my PhotoBotanic illustration series was a joy.
I invite you to look at more of my favorite photos on my PhotoBotanic.com site. Next year I will be sharing more of my new books from PhotoBotanic here on Gardening Gone Wild.
Happy New Year to all. Onward into 2016 !
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