The 21st Century Matriarch

It was not a great day to go to the Springfield Botanical Gardens – cloudy and chilly….but I wanted to try out my new Nikon Coolpix P950 camera. My husband did the driving to the garden and he brought along his camera too even though he didn’t use it.

It was not a day for landscapes but there was enough light to get some zoomed pictures of winter plants – dried flowers from last summers’ hydrangeas, some evergreens with enough color variation and texture to be interesting, berries that the birds are reluctant to eat, and dried grasses.

I saw one witch hazel and it was booming. This is its normal time to bloom so not exactly a sign of coming spring.

There were some bulbs peeping from the mulch….which seems more aligned with the notion that spring is coming.

There were some succulents and prickly pear cactus that seemed in better shape than I expected after the very low temperatures a few weeks ago.

It was a good first field trip with the camera…a learning experience without much pain. I somehow managed to not charge the battery completely so it was depleted very quickly…and I initially couldn’t see through the viewfinder with my glasses on….but my husband helped fix that problem with a slight adjustment on a knob that had no equivalent in my previous camera.

I am ready to try some bird photography later this week!

The temperature was in the 70s…in January! But the plants in my parents’ Carrollton yard were still in winter state. As I walked around the yard, I found myself thinking about whether this would be the last time to photograph the plants. I latched onto the fruitless mulberry trees – thinking at first that I would look closely at the joints of the small stems to the big branches…but then I noticed all the places where larger limbs had been cut over the years with the wound healing in various ways. Somehow, they reminded me of elephant eyes.

There were at least 8 mulberries when my parents bought the house 33 years ago. They were large trees but got larger over the years. One was the “climbing tree” for grandchild in the first decade they lived in the house. Now the trees are nearing the end of their lives; 3 have been cut down before they could fall – their trunks hollowed out with decay; their larger limbs were cut and were burned in the fireplace in recent years. A red oak, sweet gum, and pecan are getting big enough to take over the shading of the garden as the mulberries succumb.

Yaupon hollies were already growing on both corners of the front of the house 33 years ago and have been kept trimmed as ornamentals. There were still plenty of berries…I wondered when the birds would discover them!

A few nandina bushes remain. The berries are pretty…but toxic to birds.

The canna leaves from last summer were golden spotlighted by the sun…I noted the green of some bulbs coming up through the debris already. One of my sisters is determined to clean out the old leaves….have the beds in good shape for the next owner of the house.