New Year Flower Recording

The BSBI (Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland) run a New Year Plant hunt which I completed for Toft today, recording 16 species in flower.

Full Spectrum Photography - Autumn Rain

I took my full spectrum Lumix camera for a walk in the rain and concentrated on flowers, berries and leaves. Rather too slow shutterspeeds as light was very poor but I like the colour palettes. There is some channel swapping of background colours in Lightroom but often as taken.

Full-spectrum photography at Cambridge Botanic Gardens

Most full-spectrum digital cameras can detect some ultraviolet, all of the visible and much of the near infrared spectrum (350 nm to 1000 nm). However, the longer infrared waves are recorded the strongest and remove much of the visible light in the blue and green areas in a full spectrum photograph. Here are some examples from a day in the Cambridge Botanic Gardens yesterday. Interested how the Greenbottle's metallic colours recorded so strongly despite the background information above!. The first image, taken with a lot of green foliage overhead cutting out some of the shorter wavelengths, reminded me of trips to northern Scandinavia and the views as our small plane came into land!!

Early Light Garden Images

Great fun taking contre jour images in the garden especially the spiders.

Open Gardens (NGS) Toft

Three Gardens were open in Toft yesterday for the National Gardens Scheme which raises valuable money for nursing and health charities. I started at the largest, Manor Cottage by the church with its sweeping lawn, meadow, copse and herbaceous borders. Old Horse Yard is more compact and very beautifully laid out with its arches, paths and geometric beds. By the time I got to the third garden on Comberton Road the thunderstorm was arriving but certainly time to appreciate a garden started from scratch in 2020 which reimagines a late 18th century garden with four interconnected zones including my favourite, a Ritual Landscape Zone, which was full of British native plants.