Studiology

Happy Halloween

The pumpkins are lit, all have been carved. The carrot nose's will wither and curl, perfect for the month of November. The month that lays the garden down, November - the beginning of winter.

 

A Scary Place

A trip to the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia, is quite the experience, especially if you stay overnight. Yes, overnight. You check in at 9:00 PM and out at 5:00 AM. Not for the feint of heart, it's the scariest thing I have ever done. So you're asking, what about sleep? No, you don't sleep.

The asylum is very large and a qualified tour guide will lead you to the various parts of the building. The main building is very large and you spend an hour on each floor.  Our tour guide's name was Copperhead and he was excellent. Mind you, there's no electricity, it's very, very dark and on the night I went it was raining and stormy. Plus the building leaks, so you hear the drip, drip, drip of water all night. Yep, it's a very spooky experience.

I was there with fellow photographers and we were equiped with flashlights to do some light painting. Basically that means you shine lights, colored or white, as you photograph. We came with props. 

I have also been there for day tours, fabulous for urban decay photographs and not as scary. 

 Till you get to the hole in the wall....bwhahahaha!!

Pumpkin Carving Time

After a month of "super busy", I decided to take a break and carve a few pumpkins. I just love how they look when they're lit up at night. I still have 3 to do, but enough sawing into thick rinds, one forgets how hard it is to carve into a pumpkin, especially those warty ones.

If you are not busy for Halloween (in only 4 days), you  should consider my "Dark Side" presentation at Green Spring. The time is 1:30 on Halloween day, this Thursday. It's really about gardening, with a wicked twist. You will laugh.

Much of my time lately has been spent preparing for the 2 hour lecture at the Nature Visions Expo. I will teach various methods for transferring your photographs to different surfaces.  One special technique is working with a cracked plaster base, the look and feel of each finished piece is really unique. I will also show how to transfer your photographs to wood and lately I have been working with wood shingles.

Since a shingle is made of white cedar, it's not prone to warping. Each shingle also shows the circular motion of its cut, which can really add another element to your art.  There will be a few of these for sale at my show in December at the Lorton Workhouse. Save December 14th as the date for the reception, it will be the second Saturday of December and the place will be hopping!

 

 

My Favorite Fall Tool

My favorite tool for fall clean-up is a small sickle blade. A  single sweep can cut down an entire hosta clump, a vast improvement over many small cuts with a pair of clippers. This small sickle cutter comes under many names, so I have offered this link, a direct connection to the Barnel stainless steel serrated harvest knife. Several companies sell this item, but this has always been my source with a price tag under $10. Now how often do you find a good gardening tool for so little?

 You will love how it cuts down large sweeps of Solomon's Seal, canna stems, peonies and just about any sturdy stemmed perennial. It was orginally called a bramble cutter but I see the name has been changed to "Tiger Tooth Sickle" (the label on the handle). For me it's just the greatest gardening tool, especially for perennial clean-up. 

I also use it in spring to cut down epimedium and grasses. 

My good gardening friend Donna Williamson introduced me to this marvelous tool. And the gardener sure likes a tool that makes garden work easier.

The Lorton Workhouse

I received another "People's Choice" award at the Lorton Workhouse this past weekend, this time on an interesting piece that I had created for my show in August of 2012. The framed image is titled "She Wolf", a layered work, with a wolf named Frodo and a model named Stephanie. Frodo the wolf lives at a sanctuary in Pennsylvania and I photographed him, choosing him over other wolves, because I thought he looked more wolf-like with his gray fur.

This wolf sanctuary has both timber and gray wolf, all kept in pens where they live as packs. The care taker is a young lady that rides a Harley motorcycle (naturally) and she happened to be coming in while a group of us were photographing the wolves, which can be very early in the morning for good light. The wolves joined together with their calls, clearly they felt that she was part of their pack(s), and I have to say, it was just an incredible sound. All of those wolves were howling in unison, repeating it over and over. 

To create this piece I used Lutradur as the base, which is a spun-bonded, non-woven fabric that you buy at a fabric or art store. Coat it with gesso and then InkAid, which allows you to run the Lutradur through your printer. The gesso gives you great texture and the InkAid can give you color and sparkle. This is one of the techniques I will be teaching at the Nature Visions Expo on November 8th.

If you want to visit the Workhouse and see "She Wolf" in person, go to building 9 and gallery 902. Open Wednesday to Saturdays - 11-6 and Sundays - 12-5. 

A Gardening Weekend

If you're looking for some inspiration to get ready for fall, consider a weekend of fun lectures at Green Spring Gardens. Next Saturday, the 19th of October is the "Landscape Rejuvenation" symposium, myself and 2 other fabulous speakers will be here to deliver some humor and horticultural tips when it comes to landscape do and don'ts. I will follow many of Bonnie Appleton's guidelines, one of which suggests that your landscape needs rejuvenated every 15 years.

Holly Scoggin's lecture is titled "Beginning Anew" and in true Holly style, it will be funny (no doubt her chickens will play a starring role), and revealing. Holly is a professor at Virginia Tech and the Director of the Han Horticulture Center. Jessica Walliser will discuss your garden and your personality, joined together in the creation of your garden space. Jessica is a contributing editor to Organic Gardening and Fine Gardening magazines. She also teaches at the Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After all three lectures there will be a speaker's panel and you can ask about problem spots in your garden, challenges you might face with a difficult site, etc. Bring in digital photos in .jpg format and we can openly discuss ways to improve your garden space. The symposium runs from 9:00 am to 3:00 with a break for lunch, which is included in the fee.

Sunday, the 20th brings Amy Stewart to Green Spring, one of 4 stops in the D.C. metropolitan area before she heads to Georgia. This is part of her book tour, promoting "The Drunken Botanist", which has been a resounding success! I bought my copy along time ago but will be getting another for my local ABC store. Hello!, they've never heard of it. And if you haven't, well it's based on the principal of liquor and plants, every bottle of booze is plant based. Amy talks about the agave plant for tequila, the history of burnt barrels for flavoring and how so many of our garden plants play a part in alcohol. Lemon balm, Filipendula ulmaria, violets and eucalyptus are all in her book. Use this link to register and finish up a grand weekend of horticulture.

See you there!

Monarchs?

As of yesterday my monarch count was at 21. That's 21 monarchs I have seen up to early October, which is an alarmingly small number when you consider the fact that I work in gardens and a garden center 6 days a week. The decline of the monarch butterfly is big news, and I suspect it will only get bigger. We might tell stories of long gone orange butterflies to our grandchildren, how they migrated from Mexico,  flying over fields rich with milkweed, which is the single, one and only plant the caterpillar eats.

East coast monarchs migrate to Mexico, some flying 3,000 miles - twice, the only butterfly to do so. The spring monarchs search out asclepias, and any variety will do, but their favorite is Asclepias curassavica, commonly known as Mexican Milkweed or bloodflower. The offspring of the first monarchs to arrive, remain for the summer and it's their children that will make the long trip back to overwintering grounds in Mexico.The critical phase for survival is finding milkweed as they arrive in spring and then summer as a second generation is born. 

So I was driving the other day and saw a roadside planting of cosmos. A lovely sight and a common sight. Cosmos seems to be the favored planting, but I have seen poppies, larkspur, gloriosa daisies and corn flowers planted in mass.

I think that all of these roadside plantings need to be turned into Asclepias curissavica plantings. They are as easy to grow as cosmos (or zinnia), direct sowing will do. The price will be higher, a quick price check showed $34.56 for a lb. of cosmos, versus $115.20 for the same weight in asclepias, but we could be saving a dying species. My point being, that if you know of anyone that plants these isolated beds at park entrances, or in median strips, have a little talk with them. Let's see if we can't do our part in helping the monarchs find food. 

And in the meantime, we can all plant more asclepias. Native perennial species ~ A. tuberosa, syriacus, or incarnata will come back every year. In spring, direct sow some Asclepias curissavica (a tender perennial) and you will probably find that they reseed for you.  I let them reseed every spring and always plant a few more, just to make sure I have enough. I have had good years when I have so many larvae that they eat all of the foliage and start on the seeds. 

  We really must try to make this better! All of us.

 

Lensbaby and Photography Class

I dusted off my Lensbaby the other day to photograph in the garden. It's a great little lens/contraption that allows you take very different and creative photographs.  I've owned every version since Lensbaby 2, which I still own and is one of my favorites. The current version is the composer, basically the 4th edition and really fun with all of its optics, which are inserts that allow you to adjust the focus area and add creative blur all around. The earlier Lensbabies varied in their appearance, always good for a laugh, which is one of the reasons I liked them for photographing people. Lensbaby 2 looked like a lens on a Slinky, and #3 looked like a little alien spaceship with bolts that allowed you to lock your focus. All of the following photographs were taken with the Lensbaby composer and a soft focus optic.

On Saturday, November 23rd I will be teaching a beginners photography class for owners of DSLR cameras (digital with interchangeable lenses). The class will be at The Center for the Arts in Manassas - 9419 Battle Street, Manassas, Va 20110. Here is a link to register or call 703-330-2787. The class runs from 10:00 to 4:00, with an hour break for lunch on your own, in Old Town. You will learn basic functions, an overview of the dials and buttons on the outside of your camera and internal menu options such as jpeg versus raw, ISO settings and white balance. I end the class with some creative techniques (like Lensbaby), fun and simple ways to add something different to your photography.