“Sunset” Coneflowers

"Sunset" Coneflowers

“Sunset” Coneflowers © 2011 Bo Mackison

A visit to one of my favorite gardens in Madison proved disappointing last night until I rounded the last corner of a small enclosure and found a patch of hybrid coneflowers. (The garden is under going major renovations and the atypical heat we have had has taken a toll on many of the summer gardening projects.)

I am not a fan of most of the purple coneflower hybrids, which are no longer purple, but instead they are white, yellow, orange. I don’t think I mind the change in color as much as the change in the prickly cone head center of the flower. Many of the hybrids have a flowery center and it seems they lack the character of the original prairie flower.

Most of these have not undergone much testing so the hardiness of the flowers is unknown. I thought the “Sunset” coneflower was one of the nicer varieties and still had the typical center. A bumblebee seems to like it fine, too.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and the owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is experimenting with a new photo techniques with the huge variety of flowers in bloom as her willing subjects.

‘Blue Beauty’ Water Lily

'Blue Beauty' Tropical Water Lily

‘Blue Beauty’ Water Lily

The ‘Blue Beauty’ Water Lily is one of the more popular water lilies. It is a hybrid developed in 1896 when hybrid studies were just being undertaken. Originally called ‘Nymphaea pulcherrima’, a pseudo-Latin name translated as “beautiful water-lily,” its name was changed to ‘Blue Beauty’ in the 1930s.

I love the bluish-lilac color, but even more I love the blue-gray, two-toned shadows of the two lilies. This is one of those photographs where I think the shadow as interesting as the subject. The lilies that stand above the water — this one grows 6″ to 8″ above the surface of the pond — seem to cast rather impressionistic, moody shadows on the barely rippling pond surface.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and the owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. While at the Chicago Botanic Garden Art Festival, she paid a morning visit to the tropical water-lily ponds. What a wonderful collection!


Weekend Show – Seeded Earth Studio at Chicago Botanic Garden Art Festival

Tall Stem Poppy

Tall Stem Poppy © 2011 Bo Mackison

Here is one more photo of this gorgeously pink poppy, my favorite flower from this spring.  The soft pink colors combined with a hint of purple, and the bonus raindrops, made this a flower any botanical photographer would love to study and photograph. And I did both.

This weekend I will be at the 1st Annual Chicago Botanic Garden Art Festival in Glencoe, Illinois, an art show organized by Amdur Productions of Highland Park in association with the Botanic Garden. This photograph will be one of the many flower and garden photos in the Seeded Earth Studio booth.

I can think of no better place to display my garden photo gallery than in this magnificent botanical garden.

The art fair will be held on the Esplanade from Friday July 1 through Sunday July 3 — 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. The 80 artists in the Chicago Botanic Garden Art Fair will exhibit art that is in some way related to a botanical theme. This promises to be a one of a kind summer art fair.

If you visit the art festival, please come visit my booth, #24. I will be presenting a booth chat about photography at 11 a.m. on Saturday, July 2. Hope to see you there.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and the owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is looking forward to this weekend’s art fair set in the midst of the Chicago Botanic Gardens–a tiny piece of heaven on earth.

A Distraction of Poppies

Poppy and Bokeh

Poppy and Bokeh © 2011 Bo Mackison

Sherpa and I spent last weekend in Milwaukee. We attended the Wright and Like Tour, a tour of eleven houses in the Milwaukee area, all designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and related architects. The annual tour is sponsored by the The Frank Lloyd Wright® Wisconsin Heritage Tourism Program, Inc., created with the assistance of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the State of Wisconsin Department of Tourism.

This is the third year we have attended. We attended our first tour in Madison in 2009 and last year toured homes and businesses in the Racine area.

The main tour was held on Saturday, and although the weather was overcast with a few sprinkles here and there, it was not unpleasant outside. As an added bonus, I much prefer taking photographs of architecture when it is cloudy. Sunny days, especially during the mid-day, casts harsh shadows and the light is too bright and washes out details.

I have hundreds of photos to go through, and so I will be posting photographs of the exteriors of the houses we toured, but it will take me a while to organize them.

Since Sherpa and I were celebrating our anniversary, we splurged and added the second day of the tour. It turned out to be an excellent decision. We saw the Lyndon Sculpture Garden in the morning and visited the Greek Annunciation Orthodox Church, one of Wright’s last designs, in the early afternoon before heading home.

The weather was sunny and mild, with a few scattered clouds, on Sunday, providing great background for our walk through the 40 acre sculpture garden. The garden was the creation and much loved project of Margaret Blakey Bradley, one of the greatest benefactors of the arts (and other projrects) in Milwaukee.

Finally, the visit to the church was the highlight of the tour for me. I sat in the church’s interior for well over an hour, just looking in awe of the beauty, the design, the details. Of course, I took lots of photographs in both the garden and of the exterior and interior of Annunciation Church, so I will have plenty of photographs to share with you.

So…if I took hundreds of photographs of buildings and sculpture, why am I posting yet another photo of this lovely pink poppy? Well, because I absolutely fell in love with one of the tour home’s gardens and I received permission to photograph some of the flowers. There were hundreds to choose from, but I was totally captivated by this particular poppy and spent the majority of my time ooh-ing and aah-ing and admiring three pink poppies.

It seems no matter where I look, there is always a wonder or two to photograph.And that truly makes me a happy photographer.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and the owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is catching up on some photo business today before diving into her new stash of photographs.

 

Red in the Rock Garden

Red in the Rock Garden

Red in the Rock Garden © 2011 Bo Mackison

A visit to one of my favorite urban gardens, Allen Centennial Garden in the heart of the University of Wisconsin campus, not only gives me the opportunity to photograph lovely spring flowers and blossoming trees, but also the gift of getting close to the earth and discovering small delights in an intricate series of rock gardens.

This is an example of hens and chicks in its red variety. One of my favorite (and most popular photographs at the art fairs I attend) is another photo I took of hens and chicks, the green variety.  I love both versions–they seem to play off each other. This red one has more composition, the red succulents playing off the light background of small pastel pebbles and large white rocks. The older photo has an overall pattern of the hens and chicks in varying sizes, and the rocky background has more blue tones. Together I think they make an attractive display.

I love the different stories associated with hens and chicks. I heard the first, a passed down family tale, from my great-grandmother, my Grandma Prudie. She was in her eighties when I was nearing ten and given the job of garden assistant by my grandfather. Prudie would often drag a yard chair out onto the lawn near the long strip of garden on the far side of the property and chat about a variety of topics as I hand pulled the weeds.

One day she told me the story of the hens and chicks plant, her version. The story made a big impression on me. I wrote the story in a black and white composition notebook–my diary–but that notebook long ago disappeared. This is the version that my memory remembers:

“Now these plants, the hens and chicks, these are a “sucky-lent” plant. The little plants “suck” all the life from the mother plants–those are the big center plants. The mothers send out roots and then the little chicks grow. The chicks grow and eventually take over the plant. Then eventually the mother plant dies and the chicks become the mothers. And the growing pattern gets repeated over and over, until the hens and chicks spread throughout the  rock garden.” ~Prudence Mackison Willliams

My great-grandmother wasn’t afraid to talk about any topic. I remember conversations about war, jealousy between siblings, religion, marriage and divorce, life and death. She wasn’t a judgmental woman. She thought people did the best they could with what life offered them, and often defended the under dogs of the world.

Grandma Prudie had a hard life, she did many things in her day that weren’t considered womanly things to do, but she was kind-hearted and she was giving; she was an optimist and she lived her life fully. She also loved flowers, and her favorite time of year was when it was flower blooming season.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and the owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. Bo is thankful to see the spring flowers blooming and the sun shining. She is also recalling the many garden talks she had with her grandparents when she was a child.