Photographs and thoughts on photography and camera collecting
Well not really that secret. The garden belongs to one of our fellow Garden Club members. The main entrance is up on the road and the property runs down hill to the dock and the lake. However, there’s another entrance. Follow a small path down to the lake and just off it is this gate, which opens into the property at the bottom. I liked the way the gate framed the garden. I also thought that the “old film” look would work well.
I few posts ago I mentioned that I didn’t have many ‘wildlife’ photos because I lacked both the patience and the necessary equipment. However, I was cleaning up my old images and I realized that I had rather more than I thought so I’ll post a few of them from time to time.
I’ll start with a recent one taken during yesterday’s walk. I came across this enormous beetle on a rock by the side of the road. It must have been easily two or three inches long. I have no idea what it is.
UPDATE: It’s a broad-necked root borer.
A recent post on our Garden Club refers to my “baked goods”. This seems to have surprised certain members of my family so I’m going to tell a little story:
There’s a scene I like in a otherwise fairly mediocre movie called “Quigley down under”. In case you’re not familiar with it it’s a western set in Australia starring Tom Selleck. He’s travelling around with a kind of fancy sniper’s rifle taking up lost causes. The villain is played by Alan Rickman (what a surprise). Rickman is a pistol aficionado and Quigley is a thorn in his side. He particularly seems to resent Quigley’s skill with the rifle and the fact that Quigley says he never cared for pistols. So in the final climactic scene he traps Selleck and forces him into a gunfight with pistols. They draw and Quigley pulls out his pistol and shoots the Rickman character. As he lies there dying the Rickman character says something along the lines of “But I thought….” and Quigley replies “I said I never cared for them. Never said I couldn’t use them”.
It’s the same with my baking. I never much cared for baking, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t know how to.
I decided to do more baking after we had our flood down in Briarcliff last year. In cleaning up we came across a stand mixer that, because Mrs. Dale didn’t have any space for it in the kitchen, had disappeared into our storage room downstairs. So I thought I’d give it a try. Since then I’ve made pizza, bread of various kinds (in fact I have some bread dough rising as we speak – see final product above); cookies; fruit pies; quiches; savory pies, banana bread (for which I received compliments from Germaine Chandelier who for many years was one of NY’s pre-eminent caterers) and, my piece de resistance: strawberry coconut cheescake.
So yes I can, indeed, bake
Every year the garden club (of which we are members) organizes visits to a number of gardens around the lake and this year we were one of six chosen. Of course they ask those who are chosen, but the other members of the garden club aren’t told until the day of the even when a flyer is handed out identifying the gardens and providing a brief description. This is what they said about us:
“Relatively new to the community, Eirah and Howard have become active members of the Garden Club. Howard’s photos in the calendar and delicious baked goods are both favorites with our members. Eirah has literally dug in and helped plant and the guide Girl Scouts with their planting. Gardening in pots is their very special talent. Enjoy the transformation of the property.”
Of course my wife was pleased to have been chosen and for the past few weeks she’s talked about nothing but gardening – that is when she’s not buying plants and otherwise tending to the garden itself. My role as usual was to dig holes, carry heavy stuff and generally clean up. Either side of the driveway is somewhat overgrown so I decided to attack that by trimming some of the junipers growing on the right side. Trimming didn’t seem to help much so I ended up cutting some of them down completely. We were surprised to see to very picturesque boulders hidden by the junipers. Since these looked nicer that the junipers I had to cut some more down. The problem is that I don’t have very good tools. A chain saw would have been helpful – but then again you can’t give me anything sharp. So I had to content myself with a pruning saw. Luckily junipers wood is soft so although it was hard work it was possible to cut even quite thick ones with the pruning saw. I have a few left which are just too thick, but I’ve cut them back drastically so they don’t cut off the view of the boulders too much. If I say myself it looks a lot better now.
The Garden Tour took place yesterday. People came to our house and we visited the other houses. All but one were on the lake and it was interesting to see the variety of views and the way people had organized their spaces to take advantage of their lake view. After the visit we convened for lunch (paid for by our Garden Club dues) at one of the member’s houses. I guess there must have been sixty or so people there. A good time was had by all.
Now it’s all over and I can relax a bit….I hope….at least for a while.
Another Garden Club member was taking pictures of the assembled multitude so I decided to focus on things in the gardens:
I was standing in the kitchen late one afternoon. The door to the garage was open and low sunlight was streaming in and projecting patterns on the corridor walls. It looked interesting so I grabbed a camera before the light could go away.