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| Hosta 'Diamond Lake' 12 May 2023 |
In the past I have written quite a few times how I began scanning the plants of my garden with my Epson flatbed scanner beginning on a hot summer day in 2001.
My original intention after at seeing my beginner’s luck (look here) with Rosa 'Reine Victoria, was that I was going to always scan the roses and other plants at 100% size, concentrating in being accurate with colour and recording the day’s date. Because in the case of the roses, I find myself scanning them several times during a season and year after year, there is a visible pattern on how plants age.
With the death of my Rosemary on 9 December 2020 I have tried to overcome my terrible grief by finding distractions like writing this blog (blog 5809) and finding new ways of taking photographs. Of late I have discovered that my scanner is a lovely tabletop camera. The plants scans should have made me notice that.
The scanner as a tabletop camera
But the idea of scanning plants for accuracy, I am now modifying by going bonkers in doing “artistic” stuff.
At many of the Vancouver nurseries they are selling hostas that have been grown in greenhouses so that they are blooming in early May as opposed to the usual June. I buy these largish hostas, to be eventually inherited my my Lillooet daughter Ale for her one acre garden. I cut the flowers on their scapes (hosta lingo for stems) and scan them in all sorts of way, for fun.
There is a bonus here. On June 7 Ale and I are going to the National Convention of the American Hosta Society in Ames, Iowa. I am reprising (with the latest modifications) my last year’s PowerPoint presentation at the convention in Minneapolis.
I discovered the beauty of hosta flowers by observing how lovely rose buds can be before they open. Below are links to two blogs on hosta flowers. The gardeners of the American Hosta Society are enthusiastic about the variegation of hosta leaves and sort of ignore the beauty that I have seen in hosta flowers. It is my intention to so some convincing in Ames.
