Category Archives: Musings

My iPhone Plant Identifier is Very Cool

The Garden Artist Posted on by
New Mexico Plant ID-Brittlebush

Screenshot of the plant ID feature on my new iPhone 13

My new iPhone 13 has a great feature for identifying plants. Just take a photo of the plant, hit all the right buttons and voila, it gives you the suggested name or names of the plant. It also gives a few links to try to further learn about and identify the plant as well as suggestions for other plants similar to it for further research.

This is so amazingly cool and has already helped me identify the plants I was seeing as I traveled out west on vacation. Generally, in my own backyard, I’m able to identify the plants. But put me out in another climate or time zone and I can be lost. There are so many roadside plants that I was seeing while on vacation that I wanted to know more about.

It was October in the Arizona and New Mexico areas and I was at a loss for the most part plantwise. So I did a tutorial on my new iPhone 13 and low and behold, there was this feature that I never had before on my older phones. How very useful and a great tool for learning about new plants and new growing habits.

Here’s an example. All along the edges of pathways and roads in New Mexico were these plants in bloom with an overall yellow flower. I couldn’t decide if they were shrubs or herbaceous plants. I took a photo of them and Bingo..there they were. The plants were Gutierrezia sarothrae also known as Broom Snakeweed in the family of Asteraceae. With this information, I was able to spend time after the trip to read more about them. Very cool!

While hiking around Bell & Courthouse Rock in Sedona there were dozens of plants that captured my interest but couldn’t identify. I kept stopping our 5-mile trek in the breezy sunshiny day to take photos of them, all the while keeping an eye on the clock to make sure we were back safely before sunset.

First I’d take a photo on my phone of a plant. The phone would identify that it was a plant by putting a small circle with a leaf over the plant in question. Then I would click in the lower right-hand corner on the blue circle with the letter “I”. The next screen would give me results with links to research further along with images of similar plant images. Oh my! This is such a major step for them to have invented in order to feed my insatiable curiosity. Thank you Apple!

There is always so much to learn, so much to enjoy and explore when it comes to gardening and horticulture. I often feel that I like studying more than I like gardening which can be exhausting and back-breaking work. I can read about plants endlessly without losing interest or running out of topics to explore. Deadheading, planting, transplanting, weeding, mulching, is mostly not as much fun for me. Ah well, it’s a better workout than the gym at times, plus a far greater reward for all that hard work.

Sedona Plant ID-Initial Capture

The initial screenshot showing the little white circle with a leaf indicating the camera identifies that it’s looking at a plant. The blue “i” in the lower right activates the ID process.

Sedona Plant ID-Dakota mock vervain

Once you activate the search your next screen hosts the Siri Knowledge of what plant it might be along with links for further research. It also gives you links to similar web images to look at.

Sharing My Garden In Support of the Huntington Historical Society

The Garden Artist Posted on by

June 6th is one of the many days I think of my Uncle Teddy, the man who introduced me to gardening at the tender age of 6. Because of him, I began my long journey into gardening. I’ve written about him in previous posts.

This year on June 6th, I opened my garden to benefit the Huntington Historical Society. It was so fitting that it fell on Uncle Teddy’s birthday since, in the garden, he and I are entwined together. For five hours straight I taught, explained, identified plants, offered historical references, shared my knowledge, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Between 200-250 people came to enjoy my creation.

June 6, 2021 Garden Tour Welcome

June 6, 2021, Huntington Historical Society Garden Tour – Welcoming the Docents

I helped them to understand that my garden is one of my artworks. It is an installation, an assemblage of art, plants, hardscape, and sculpture. It is a conceptual work that embraces the garden as a metaphor of the universe. There is a community of cooperation, of symbiosis and that of opposition, of parasitism in the garden. There is a quest for resources, for nutrition, water, sunshine, and shade between the multiple worlds of humans and animals, plants, pollinators, insects, and the microorganisms of bacteria and fungi. There are lifecycles of birth, maturity, senescence, death, and rebirth. There is a cyclical life experienced by all in the days, the seasons, and the years.

My garden has two major themes beyond this metaphor. I designed my garden as a journey. It must be walked through to be fully appreciated. There are no dead-ends, just options at each intersection for the choice of a different journey. No visit through the garden will ever be the same. The paths selected, the time of day, the week, the season, the year make for new appraisals. New adventures. New sights to be seen and new revelations to experience. New meditations on life to be contemplated.

June 6, 2021 Garden Tour-Crossing the Garden Bridge

June 6, 2021, Huntington Historical Society Garden Tour – The Bridge Over the Dry Stream Bed

Repetitively featured throughout the garden are circles and spheres. Circles have appeared in my art for decades in many different mediums and imagery. To me, they are the beginning, Eve’s apple. They are Woman. They are the enclosing arms of protection & nurturing. These circles are present in the navigation of the garden, the design of flower beds, sculptures placed strategically in vignettes, as well as found objects collected for decades and hidden as treasures between and around the plantings.

June 6, 2021 Garden Tour-Woodland Entrance

June 6, 2021, Huntington Historical Society Garden Tour – The entrance to the woodland walks.

I call this my “girlie” garden. The plant material is practically devoid of sharp pointy thorns & leaves. I look for soft and frilly foliage when selecting plants to include. The colors are pinks and pastels. I think of little girls spinning in their frilly birthday dresses with joyous abandon when I pick my plants. They are safe plants spreading a gentleness of spirit.

Talking with people about the meanings and thoughts behind the choices in my garden opened many eyes on the garden tour. I don’t think anyone who visited the garden could have enjoyed it more than me, except my long gone Uncle Teddy. It all began with him. And I thank him every chance I get.

 

Lessons From The Garden

The Garden Artist Posted on by

I am a gardener. So in 1989 I bought the garden with the home I could afford in the zip code I sought to live in. It’s the first house as you enter my town but some have needled me and said it was the last. I know better.

That gray day in February, the realtor brought me to five different properties. It was the first day I was actually house hunting but when we pulled into this particular gravel driveway I knew I was home. The house didn’t really interest me all that much because I knew the garden had good bones. The giant oaks and the abundance of understory shrubs of mountain laurel spoke to me. I particularly envisioned how beautiful the spring would be when all those dogwoods came into bloom.

I was home and I knew it. So I made an offer below the asking price. As a single parent of two teenage sons, I reserved enough cash to modify the living space so they could have a room of their own. The offer was too quickly accepted which dismayed me since that meant I could have bid even lower. But, oh well, what’s done is done. I had the garden I dreamed of.

Original House Purchase 1989

Two-Bedroom Cape Purchased in February 1989

That winter I would walk in the garden pulling dead leaves from the shrubs, picking up twigs, learning, and looking. Eagerly I awaited the new growth of spring the flowering of the dogwoods. Fingers crossed there might also be some perennials bursting with color in the beds.

Well, that didn’t happen as I expected. As the weather warmed and the leaves began to unwind from their tightly bound buds, eight of the dogwoods quickly announced to me that they were dead markers of what had been. No perennials decided to surprise me with an abundance of color since there were none. And the large shrub that I viewed outside my window turned out to be a pile of dead branches with ivy vigorously covering the mound.  

Waves of disappointment layered over my expectations. All I saw was so much work and expense ahead of me. The trees needed to be cut down and piles of brush removed. The feeling of mourning that spring still resonates with me. A reminder of all the other hopes and dreams I’d had in my life to that point that had been crushed. The lost expectations of joy. Happiness masquerading the death of dreams.

I took my credit card to Sears and bought clippers, an electric saw, and a gas-powered wood chipper. Rakes, trowels, and shovels followed. And I began to clear the dead and diseased plants and shrubs from the property. I sawed and chipped and raked and dug so by that summer I developed muscles I didn’t know I had. The property became my garden.

What I did that summer of 1989 set the tone for the life I am still leading. Each year the garden provides me with disappointments, with a sense of loss and despair. After a period of sadness and mourning, I recover with renewed energy to create a new reality. New plantings. New approaches. New plans, hopes, and dreams. The garden lives in optimism as do I.

The garden has taught me patience. The closer I watched the garden the more it taught me lessons about life. About renewal. About resilience. About how nothing in the garden or our lives is truly in our control. Tending the garden has helped me to adjust my expectations, to accept that my best intentions and plans can and often will be brushed aside.

The garden also taught me that there is a season and a time for things to happen. It has also taught me that nothing lives forever, perhaps many years, but not forever. That we only have a certain amount of spring times to get it right and we don’t know how many springs we have ahead of us. So time is precious and a gift that I choose not to squander. I still have too many seeds to start and plants to place and flowers to paint. My garden keeps me alert to the cycles of life and the benefits of endurance. I am my garden now.

Front Garden Redesigned

The original house rebuilt in 2000. The garden is redesigned every year.

My Art Starts in the Garden.

To see my art that has been inspired by the gardens surrounding my home,

Please visit my Portfolio and online Art Shop.