Views of Sequim, the Olympic Peninsula. . .and beyond
There’s a nicely landscaped flower bed at Carrie Blake Park. I hadn’t checked out the dahlias for a couple of years. They occupy part of a top tier.
Dahlias grow beautifully around here and the ones at Carrie Blake don’t disappoint. I’ll show you more tomorrow.
Today begins Sequim’s annual three day Lavender Festival celebrating all things lavender. Most of our region offers good growing conditions for lavender and local crops range in size from a small backyard bush or two to large farms with hundreds of plants in dozens of varieties.
Most lavender growing operations are open to visitors during the festival and some offer entertainment, food, lavender education, and craft vendors. A downtown street fair fills in any gaps if you want to shop, eat, be entertained, and sniff lavender and lavender products all in one location.
Side note: If anyone’s counting, this marks my 1,750th post on Sequim Daily Photo. Time flies!
Students at Sequim High School make these flower baskets every year and they’re hung along our downtown Washington Street. They’re pretty even on a gloomy day and I hate to see them come down at the end of summer.
This month’s City Daily Photo theme challenge is “shadow and highlight.” I’ve given peonies from my garden a starring role. Their ruffled petals are animated with an interplay of light.
Click here to see other interpretations of today’s theme.
The native Nootka roses are in bloom which makes this one of my favorite times of the year. In addition to being delicately, wildly beautiful they are fragrant with a soft, heady, delicate scent.
These roses grow like weeds. Bushes of them can be found anywhere that conditions are right, which is, really, a lot of places.
I took these shots with a new camera I picked up recently, a little lightweight Lumix. My bulky, heavier SLR was often lounging at home on my daily walks. After I missed the latest eagle shot it was time to remedy the situation. I expect this new pal to come along more regularly. So far I’m pretty happy with it, especially since I’ve yet to crack open the manual.
This is another of our common native plants. The leaves may look familiar to you. They are commonly harvested for use in floral arrangements. The little blossoms become tiny blackish berries that area eaten by birds, deer, and humans. I’ve never tried them; I must add them to my foraging menu.
The lands of the Dungeness Recreation Area are frosted with blossoms of native serviceberries (amelanchier alnifolia) these days.
Also called saskatoons, in summertime these showy blossoms turn to tiny purple berries. They attract birds, among them one of my favorite visitors, cedar waxwings.
People also eat the abundant berries though they can be a bit mealy. We met a Native American woman harvesting them for pies and other treats one summer and a couple of Eastern Europeans who were convinced they’d found wild blueberries. Some trees have better berries than others. I suspect the soil quality is a big factor.