Mental Seeds

Part of the commercial flower shoot for Sakata Seeds at the California Spring Trials were sunflowers, the variety ‘Vincent’.  To get them for the spring shoot in California they were flown in from Holland, where they waited for two weeks until the show, when...

I see what I see, even if I can't show it very well on a blog.  Here, the peeling bark of a Manzanita (Arctostaphylos densiflora) has been transformed into elegant orange, rust, and mahogany brush strokes with the Topaz Simplify3 filter.  It looks great in...

Drifting through Beth’s garden in the quiet still morning I was unsure whether I would take any pictures.  I just wanted some time to appreciate her marvelous Oregon garden so full of choice plants and foliage textures.  Before you take a decent picture you...

It began with a vague suspicion.  Was my vision, out there in the outer periphery of the left eye, blurry?  Now, you say, how could you not know your retina was becoming detached ? The blurriness of my eye was a filminess that would surely...

A recent assignment took me to a very special magnolia in a very special, private garden.  The resulting photo was to be a surprise gift, and I was only allowed access during one afternoon when the owner was away. I previously wrote about this adventure on Gardening...

Retinal tears and fears of darkness, What DO I actually see ? Lightning strike laser; pain visualized, (how odd this queasy flash). The wet drops from my eye splashes my glasses, remembering the first rain and sprinkling Cotinus Grace. Update on Detached Retina It has been three weeks since I posted to Mental Seeds.  Begun with such enthusiasm.  Begun...

As I was poking around my garden last fall, adjusting to my vision and letting the new wonders reveal themselves to me, I decided to keep my big smokebush, Cotinus 'Grace'. It is a monster of a shrub, every year growing way beyond its allotted...

These leaves were photographed last autumn when I visited my cousin in Vermont.  I drove all across the state looking for fall color and then found this scene by a pond behind her property in rural Proctorsville.  Something to be learned about not driving...

It took 4 months to grow this picture; a single second in the garden to "see" it; and 8 hours of computer work to clean it up. The one second part is easy to explain.  Last Saturday was a garden day and when I walked...

"Between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is a space...