We’re trying something new here at Gardening Gone Wild – a photo contest that will be a bit of a collective group visualization.
For this contest, I will pick a subject and ask you, our fellow bloggers, to picture your own interpretation of the subject and send me a photograph. I will gather and post all of the photos in a WordPress gallery here on GGW, pick a winner, offer some commentary and at the end of the month select one winner. The prize for this month is a collection of eight agastache from High Country Gardens.
The first contest, tied into Nan’s Design Workshop on Water-Wise Gardening, will be about native plants. Most water-wise plants are often those plants native to your state or region. When brought into the garden, native plants give a garden a sense of place and are, by definition, adapted to the water needs of the garden. They do not have to look unkempt and wild (though we love Wild at GGW). Often with a bit of modest garden care, the natives can be the best looking plants in a garden.
So Picture This: a beautiful, functional, native plant in a garden setting.
What will I be looking for ?
All these photos show a native plant in a garden, all have a message to say, and hopefully they are aesthetically composed. The most important criteria is that it must be in context of a garden, I mean this is Gardening Gone Wild isn’t it ?
It can be any garden in any season. The definition of a native plant for our purposes will be a plant species that occurs in the wild in the state where the garden is photographed. Cultivars are OK. For our overseas readers, we will trust that your selection is native. And because we can’t ship plants outside of the U.S., we will come up with some sort of virtual prize for you.
Like the deer grass in my autumn garden with Cotinus, your photo does not have to be a native plant garden, but the garden style should be water-wise where natives contribute to sensible design.
Now a few procedures and rules. Send your photo to Gardening Gone Wild at [email protected] by the end of April 20, 2009. I’ll send you an acknowledgment e-mail. If you don’t get a confirmation within 48 hours of sending the photo to the gmail account, then follow-up with a comment on the post. Winners will be announced by the end of the month.
Caption your photo with the plant name and the location of the garden. Do not put your name on the photo itself but try to use your camera software to put your name into the file data. The files should be jpegs no more than 100-150 kb. We will load them to a gallery for all to see and I will make commentary in the wrap-up about the winner’s and some other noteworthy photos.
No doubt there will be some kinks at first with formatting and display of the gallery. We will figure this out as we go along. I hope you will enjoy the process as we begin. As a disclaimer, please do realize by submitting photos you are authorizing GGW to publish them and use the photos in conjunction with the contest and our Privacy Policy.
So, for a prize of an agastache collection from High Country Gardens, please send us some native plant photos in a water-wise garden. Good luck …..