The Asticou Azalea Garden, Northeast Harbor, Maine

The Asticou Azalea Garden is a local landmark, and like most locals, I rarely manage to visit our landmarks during their seasons. You New Yorkers out there, betcha only visit the Statue of Liberty when you've got enthusiastic houseguests, right? Same here.

Well, I finally made it to the Azalea Garden during peak bloom this week for the first time in seven years. Wow, what a show! Most of the year it is a calm Japanesque garden in shades of green and white, with granite bridges and a dry sand garden. In June, though, it goes from tea ceremony serenity to full-on Kabuki glitz. 

Azaleas in flaming orange, hot pink, vivid purple ...

and a few calmer patches of pale pinks and lavenders.  There are lots other rare and unusual plants here, many of them moved here from Reef Point (Beatrix Farrand's estate in Bar Harbor) when that garden was dismantled in the 1950s. This beauty:

is Paeonia obovata var. willmottiae, a woodland peony. I find that purple center mesmerizing.

For anyone planning a visit, the Garden is open during daylight hours from May through October. If you're anywhere nearby, go quickly, it's in full bloom right now!

Leaf Peeping

 

I finally took a walk with my camera to catch the last of the fall colors.

The birches and poplars have finished, the red maples are going bare from the top down, the sugar maples are clinging to their last leaves, the oaks are going straight to brown, and the Norway maples are just starting to turn gold.

 The Burning Bushes (Euonymus alatus) are going bare, but the berries are still vivid.

This Euonymus turned pink instead of red!

 This is a Northern Toothed Polypore tree mushroom colony (Climacodon septentrionale). It isn't fall foliage, I know, but it's still amazing! Must have been over two feet across...

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (The Common Ground Fair)

It's bald, but I think it's supposed to be like that. Who breeds bald chickens?

The Common Ground Fair is held near the end of September ever year in Unity, Maine. It's run by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, which should tell you right off this is not the kind of fair with ferris wheels and fried dough.

Quail eggs

Well, no, there is fried dough, but it's made with whole wheat flour and sweetened with honey or maple syrup. No refined white sugar at the Common Ground! (Plenty of salt, though, so that's going to have to be the mineral I promised in the title.) I love the CGF, and I'm not sure why, because it's terribly expensive (for a fair) and since I'm always there with kids I don't get to go to all the interesting lectures and workshops. Maybe it's because the animals and produce get star billing? Or because the food is usually amazing? Or there's such a variety of interesting people to watch?

A colorful, not-bald chicken. Much prettier. Well, he's a rooster, so I guess he's handsome, not pretty.

This year, the 6th graders went to the fair on a school field trip and I went along as a chaperone. I love chaperoning field trips - I usually learn a lot, both about whatever we're studying and about the kids I'm watching. I'm always torn between photographing and chaperoning, but I haven't lost any kids yet, and I usually come home with one or two shots worth posting.

Our trip to the fair was a little less organized than our usual National Park trips, though (god bless park rangers, they are so good at crowd control!), and even though I only had six girls who have been best friends since kindergarten, getting them around the fair was like herding cats. The minute we entered, they all headed straight for the rabbit barn, but once we wore out the bunnies (and I flatly refused to let anyone buy a baby rabbit to bring home on the school bus) it was utter chaos. This one wanted these particular french fries and that one saw a doll and wanted to find the booth selling them, and that other one wanted to try hula hoops.... complete madness.

heritage corn varieties

Until we got to the produce section, that is, and the girls discovered these:

Miniature gourds! There were also tiny pumpkins, only a couple of inches tall, and itty bitty honey bears ...

oh, I was all set for at least fifteen minutes of peacefully photographing vegetables while the girls zoomed from one booth to another squealing over doll-sized squash. (Apparently the very latest thing in 6th-grade coolness??) So what with one thing and another, I have lots and lots of vegetable photos. Fortunately, the Common Ground Fair farmers specialize in heritage varieties, which are very colorful:

there was red corn, 

 

 purple carrots,

 orange and red cherry tomatoes,

 blue squash,

 and romantic pumpkins! 

(This was done by scratching the words into the pumpkin when it was small. As it grew it produced woody tissue in the cuts.)

Hungry yet?

Autumn Leaves - Barberry and Fothergilla

Village Burying Ground, Bar Harbor, Maine; November 13, 2011 (Woodland series No.4)

Fall just keeps lingering on this year. Usually by November all the leaves are gone, the wind is bitter, and the skies are grey. With the snowstorm we got just before Halloween, I thought for sure we were in for a long, dingy winter. But no, the days have been warm, in the 50s and 60s, with sunshine and lots of beautiful colors still in the woods. The peculiar weather has coaxed fantastic color out of trees that often slide straight into muddy browns, like the oaks and the Norway maples.

Barberry

Barberry and fothergilla, on the other hand, never turn muddy brown! These two are always spectacular, but usually they are brown sticks at this time of year. If the weather weren't so delightful, it would be a little creepy. I was walking through the Village Burying Ground (aka "the cemetery") in the middle of town and saw these beauties glowing at me beside the path.

Barberry & Fothergilla

I started out intending to make one entry for the Woodland series, but got carried away playing with the little barberry leaves. Looks like a mini-series now!

Barberry & Fothergilla (version 2)

  P.S. All this autumn splendor has me dazzled and distracted for the moment, but I'll get back to beachcombing soon, don't worry.

Clematis Seedhead

I just had to get in close on this one.

More Seedheads

This is the poppy seedpod that started me off.

And here's another composition. The longer I look at it, the more I love that clematis. I think it needs a portrait, don't you?

Seedheads

Seedheads, a photo by quercus design on Flickr.

I started weeding the front garden today while waiting for the school bus, and the coolest, lacy poppy seedpod rolled right in front of me. Then I noticed how frilly the empty daylily seedheads have gotten. And then I completely lost interest in weeding and started rooting around looking for more pods. (This minimal attention span would be why my garden looks so unkempt.)

We have here the seed pods of daylilies, bellflower (a wild one that pops up whenever my back is turned, maybe Campanula rapunculoides), coneflower, Allium cristophii, hyssop, veronica, a small poppy, and those really tall yellow pompoms that nobody has heard of that start with 'c' Cephalaria.

Pressed Flowers

Pressed Flowers, a photo by quercus design on Flickr.

Found this collection in one of my studio drawers last week: flowers I pressed when I lived in Virginia. A little bit of spring from 1996, forgotten in an envelope. Maybe it's time to clean out my hoards...

The Woodland series No.3

"Horse Chestnuts, Ledgelawn Avenue, Bar Harbor, Maine; September 28, 2011" (Woodland series No.4)

When I was little, I used to fill my pockets with horse-chestnuts. I loved the smooth feel of the glossy nuts, and was always surprised and disappointed when they shriveled up. It still surprises me. They seem so solid, more like wood than a fruit, and watching one pucker up like a raisin feels so strange.

Today I Ironed Leaves

I found these beautiful, lacy things on an afternoon walk through Glen Mary Park. They were curled and crumpled in damp piles, so I brought them home and tried to flatten them for a photograph.

 They resisted, so I ironed them.

First with steam, because I was afraid they would crumble, then with a dry iron because the steamed leaves curled as they cooled off.

I did pause at one point and think, "I am ironing leaves. Most people don't iron leaves." At least I didn't say it out loud, because I would have been talking to myself and that would really be kind of, you know, weird.

Beach Plant Class

About a week and a half ago I drove down to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Harbor for a class on wild beach plants. It was well worth the drive! Our teacher was Melissa Cullina, formerly of the New England Wildflower Society in Massachusetts, who not only showed us how to identify the plants, but told us about their cultural histories, reading us poetry, excerpts from colonial diaries, and talking about the various botanists who came from Maine as if they were personal relatives. It was charming and enlightening, and the time went quickly. We spent four hours in two very different habitats - the first was a marshy wooded shoreline and the second was a rocky headland. The sun was intense and straight overhead, so the photos I took during the class are so overexposed or flat that they are barely even educational, so I'm not including many.

Here are my favorite tidbits from the class:

1. Rushes are Round and Sedges have Edges. (That's very helpful, you should remember that, too.)
2. Plantago maritima - a plant I see all the time. I finally know its name! If you've ever been introduced to someone at a party who previously you had seen around town but not known, it is a similar feeling. Ah, so that's who you are!  Early sailors in this area used this as a salad green. One of my classmates tasted it and said it was salty. No surprise there.

3. Seaside Goldenrod (Solidago maritima) - note that the leaves have smooth edges, while most (non-seaside) goldenrod have toothy leaves. I see this one everywhere, too. They are blooming now, and look very picturesque clinging to the rocks by the ocean.

4. The Plants of Acadia National Park is an incredibly useful book, with much better pictures than the ones I snapped on the run. It covers all the plants we discussed during this class, and I plan to order it and take it down to the shore for a class review.
5. There are a variety of ways that plants cope with a saltwater environment. Some salt-tolerant plants keep the high salt concentration from interfering with respiration by storing it in their protoplasm, which keeps the water flowing through membranes.  Succulent plants store lots of fluid which dilutes the salt concentrations. And still other plants drop their leaves when the salt in them gets too concentrated. Some native grasses, like Spartina, actually exude the salt through special glands.

If you live north of Boston and haven't been to the Botanical Garden yet, make a point of it. It was a bit of a drive for me (three hours) but then, living where I do just about everything is a long drive. I'll leave you with one last photo from the gardens:

The Woodland series

Glen Mary Park, Bar Harbor, Maine; September 16, 2011 (Woodland series No.2)

A new project for your entertainment and edification - voila, the Woodland series! I expect it to get more colorful as autumn progresses, and then very monochromatic during the winter. The Beachcombing series will continue, never fear, but I've already been surprisingly single-minded about pursuing it for the last year. I also want to pay close attention to ice as winter comes. I don't know if you remember some of the close-ups I did last year, but I'm planning to work more on that. For once I'm really looking forward to the first deep freezes! So that's three series to juggle through the next two seasons. I'm also developing a set of holiday cards ... hope to have them ready to show you by the end of the month.

The Long and Winding Road, Bar Harbor, Maine; April 21, 2010 (Woodland series No.1)

(And yes, there really is a Long and Winding Road here in Bar Harbor. It is in the village of Eden.)