Mother’s Day Flowers

Many a mom receives a bouquet of flowers, roses or otherwise, on Mother’s Day. This year, put a twist on a bouquet with flower themed gifts that will continue to bloom long after Mother’s Day, or with a flower filled outing.

Give your mom a Mother’s Day Rose photographic art print that will bloom on her wall all year. In addition to floral prints, other photographic art flower themed gifts can include note cards, purse hangers and trinket dishes. Floral themed jewelry and accessories adorned with your mom’s favorite flower are sure to be a hit as well. (Click on the image below to enlarge it.)

Mother’s Day, May 11, falls within National Wildflower Week, May 5-11. If your mother is a nature and/or a garden lover she will appreciate some time spent with you taking in the views at a local garden, arboretum, or nature center. Bring your camera to get some shots of your mom stopping to smell the flowers. Top of your excursion with a light meal or treat.

Here’s wishing you and your mom a fun, flower filled day.

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center's 2014 Photo Contest

This year the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Photo Contest changed up its entry categories a bit and added a rule that you could enter a maximum of eight photos per person across whatever categories you entered. There was a new category, Birds and Butterflies with Native Wildflowers and Plants, that really appealed to me because of the nature shots that I tend to take as a starting point for my photographic art images. I found three images with birds and five images containing butterflies that I decided to enter this year. (You can click on the photos below to see larger images or go directly to my images on the photo contest page for voting by clicking here or to each individual photo's voting pages by clicking the title under each photo. When you are on those pages, if you click the photo to the left of the title, a much larger image eventually comes up.)

Female Cardinal on Bald Cypress------Western Kingbird on Pecan-------------Field Sparrow on Elm-----

---------------------Skipper on Pickerel Rush-----Gray Hairstreak on Late-Flowering Boneset---------------

---Fiery Skipper on Frog Fruit---Variegated Fritillary on Butterflyweed----Question Mark on Lantana---

Unless something manages to go viral, I don't expect to top the charts on the public voting, however it would still be very useful to me for developing future photographic art images to know which of these photos people like the best, so if you have the time please vote for your favorite(s). You may vote once per day (24 hour period) for whatever photo you like through May 9, 2014 (even if it isn't mine). If you really like an image but would prefer not to vote, please leave me a comment about the one(s) you like. The categories are judged privately, independent of the public voting.

What’s in Bloom – October 2012

I stepped out this morning and took photos of some of the plants that are currently blooming in my garden. Just because summer is officially over, it doesn’t mean that the color needs to be gone from your garden. Clockwise from the upper left is blue mistflower, fall blooming aster, strawberry gomphrena, mealy blue sage and hummingbird bush. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Blue mistflower is predominantly a late summer/fall bloomer in my garden. It is a good source of nectar for migrating monarch butterflies. As the name implies, this aster blooms in the fall. You can see that it has just begun to open its flowers and will soon be a pretty mound of purple. Strawberry gomphrena is an annual that reseeds and blooms as soon as it can in the spring and continues until a freeze. Occasionally some of these plants will overwinter as a tender perennial. Late summer and fall rains have brought out another flush of blooms on my native TX mealy blue sage. Hummingbird bush thrives and blooms in the sun, heat and fairly dry conditions.

Announcing Photographic Art Purse Hangers from EDCCollective

While I was purchasing some new supplies for a custom order earlier this summer, that I hope to share with you next month, I found “backbones” for customizable purse hangers from one of my suppliers. I was also ordering a variety of glass cabochons and paper punches for this custom order from other suppliers, so I looked to see if I could find a properly sized punch and glass cab for the purse hanger backbones too. It took a bit of searching, but I finally found all of the sizes of supplies and tools that I needed for my custom order and my prototype for what I hoped would become a new product line for my EDCCollective shop.

I suspected that some of my photographic art would look good mounted under the glass cabochons that I intended to top the purse hangers with. This hunch was based on working with my graphics that I use to make my flying pig and music cufflinks for my EclecticSkeptic shop. After working with several of my photographic art images, I found out how tight I should crop the images to look their best under the glass cabs. I came up with six floral photographic art images that I liked and made two of them up, a daylily and a water lily. When completely assembled, I was even more pleased with the way my artwork looked than when the purse hangers were just mocked up.

I have just recently listed my daylily photographic art purse hanger. It is a functional and pretty piece of art to carry with you in your purse. It folds flat for easy storage and is easily employed to keep your purse at hand but off the floor. I had purchased a similar purse hanger years ago and love to be able to go to a restaurant, grab my purse hanger from my bag and hang it and my bag from the table. No more germs from the floor in contact with my purse, no more hoping that the chair will allow me to hang my purse from it without it slipping off. These things are great!

I was telling a friend of mine about my new product and now I need to put together a purse hanger for her with one of my photographic art sunflower images. While I’m doing that, I think I will also make one with my Mother’s Day rose image as well as my daffodil image. Please contact me if you have a favorite flower that you would like to have on your purse hanger. If I have an appropriate image to use, I’d be happy to customize one for you.

What’s in Bloom – July 2012

As the weather dries out and the heat kicks in for summer, it can be a challenge to find plants that are willing to bloom in these conditions. Two perennials native to some of the U.S. that take the heat and keep on blooming are blackfoot daisy and butterflyweed.

Blackfoot daisy, Melampodium leucanthum, makes rounded mounds full of white flowers with yellow centers. These plants are very drought tolerant. In fact, you can kill them by overwatering them or planting them in soil that does not drain well. They really don’t like “wet feet”.

Butterflyweed, Asclepias tuberosa, is also a waterwise plant. I find that it can tolerate a bit more water than blackfoot daisy. It produces clusters of small orange flowers sporadically throughout the summer. This is also an important butterfly caterpillar host plant. It can take being chewed on, so if you spot some caterpillars on your plants, leave them be.

You can find other native and adapted waterwise plants in my Texas Stars photo album.

What's in Bloom? June 2011

Getting all of the loose ends wrapped up for the big DWG Celebration Weekend has kept me running this week such that I don't have time to write the post that I had planned. However, I didn't want to stop the weekly blog post momentum so this week I am sharing some photos of what is currently coloring up my gardens. Enjoy.

The leaves of these two shade loving plants (Japanese Painted Fern, Purple Leaf Oxalis) are reason enough to plant them. In addition to its pretty two toned purple leaves, the oxalis also sports pretty lilac pink flowers.

Standing up to the heat and full sun, my coneflowers and cosmos mix provide bright focal points. The cosmos attracts a wide range of butterflies too.

You will find other blooming beauties in my Texas Stars photo album.