I fell in love with Ladytron when their Witching Hour album came out a few years ago. Visually, I’m currently in love with their video for Tomorrow. It’s like a series of softly lit polaroids.

Along somewhat similar lines, Barbara Cole was recently called in for work on an Anthropologie catalog. Barbara specializes in underwater photography, and you can see a bit of insight into her process here. The light in her photographs is distorted, played with, discovered. The colors are definitely intense, which pleases me greatly.

So, I’m just curious if anyone has an opinion on the following.

Here is the first, an original of some poppies in front of my house on a partly cloudy day.

Here is the same photo, “polaroided” by myself in under 5 minutes. I tried to add more yellows and softness to achieve the effect, which was actually a little tough because of the intense red of the flowers.

Here in Seattle we’re going on just about a month without any rain. It’s kind of unusual for this time of year. Usually the drier weather starts in July. My garden is suffering a bit, even with nightly waterings that Mike administers with great concern (will the beets make it? should the swiss chard look like that?). But two things are flourishing: our grapevines, and our lavender.

I did a little research on how to harvest lavender. The most important element of harvesting the little purple spears appears to be the following: cut just before the blooms open. You’re too late if you see the bees doing their own share of harvesting.

Megan at Not Martha had an even more useful guide to harvesting lavender, a little experiment. She actually harvested the blooms at one week intervals and then did a sniff test to see which bunches held the best scent.

Above: the line of lavender plants along the southern border of my house.

Too keep myself from going nuts and just clipping all the lavender, I came up with a limit: 5 bunches that can I can hold in one hand.

My office is in a room of the house that faces north, so it’s a cool and dark room to dry the bunches. The smell in here right now is incredible—clean, slightly floral—and the other bonus is that the color is so pretty.

Image courtesy of Jordan at Hive-Mind

The past 3 days have been sunny and warm here in Seattle, the weather coaxing open cherry blossoms to open in pink and white petaled glory. And the score to the unfurling? A persistent and low buzz, little bees drunkenly hopping from blossom to blossom.

Honey is not just sweet. It’s amber-hued, magical in its longevity and touted as a medicine. I own a necklace made of amber and like to think of it more as honey droplets (lovely!) than as hardened pine resin (how prehistoric!).

Recently I went to my first Seattle Dorkbot, and the theme was “Geeking Out on Green”. The first two talks were each of interest on an artistic and technical level, but didn’t get me laughing and really thinking like the last presentation titled “Jordan Schwartz: Adventures in Earthly Technologies: Sundials and Beekeeping”.

Jordan’s talk mainly focused on beekeeping as a hobby, with the significant rewards of more honey than he can handle combined with a good deal of interest from local eateries. We were told that Molly Moon’s uses his honey for their honey-lavender ice cream flavor, and he mentioned a deal in the works with Thomas Douglas restaurants.

Opening up the idea of not just local food, but food from one zip code over from the heart of an urban downtown sounds delightful. Probably not very likely when it comes to crops of sustenance, but for honey, herbs, mushrooms, and edible flowers grown in the backyards of willing citizens – a much more likely proposition!

If I was a cat, I would sleep in a garden store like like this grey girl.

In spite of lead-grey skies and shiver-inducing winds, I decided to check out City People’s Garden Store yesterday morning. I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly, even though I spent a couple of hours in the morning trying to figure out a theme for this year’s front yard flower garden. Browsing through my copy of the Sunset Western Garden book did at least give me the idea to put some focus on feeding some of the songbirds and hummingbirds in the neighborhood.

Once I got into the store, my thoughts on a color theme really started to solidify. It all started with some intense red dahlia photos, which promptly made me drop a package of bulbs into my basket. After that, I saw that Renee’s Garden seeds has a special entice-the-hummindbirds packet. While I wasn’t wild about the seeds that were included in that mix, I realized how much red entices hummingbirds, and how scarletts and reds are a color group I’ve unintentionally left out of my garden up until now. Time to experiment.

As for the darks, I decided on anything ranging from black to deep dark purple as an unusual compliment to all the red. I came across some “black” hollyhocks first (I have no idea how black these flowers will really look in real life). Once I started looking, there were many more possibilities than I’d thought!

Here are some of the plant life that will contribute to my Scarlett & Dark theme.

Scarletts:
Dahlia ‘Night Queen’
Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’
Nasturtium ‘Empress of India’, ‘Mahogany’, and ‘Cherries Jubilee’
Poppy ‘Legion of Honor’

Darks:
Hollyhock ‘Black Watchman’
Sunflower ‘Chocolate Cherry’
Nasturtium ‘Black Velvet’
Bachelor Button ‘Black Magic’

Lime green:
Zinnia ‘Envy’
(more to come..)