Unfortunately, this scene from Nitobe Memorial Garden was photographed two weeks ago, so anyone wanting to see the Garden with these colours will now have to wait another year. The red-leaved maple in the foreground is most likely Acer palmatum 'Osakazuki', and I believe it is slated to be moved this winter to another area of the Garden.

Nitobe Memorial Garden was originally planted over fifty years ago, and has been described as one of the most authentic Japanese gardens outside of Japan. Over the next few years, some difficult decisions will be made to renew some of the plantings (e.g., decades-old cherry trees that are declining in health). The challenges will be to do so while honouring the spirit & intent of the original garden design, ensuring the present-day garden is not visually harmed, and, planting (and planning) for the future.

The intense low sun of a late autumn afternoon in combination with a breeze off the Salish Sea helped to produce this image a couple days ago in the David C. Lam Asian Garden.

While taking the photograph, I was only reacting to the sights and experiences of bright leaves and moving branches. In the back of my mind, I would have had some familiarity with similar techniques or approaches used by other photographers under the same conditions. However, thinking about the photograph a bit more, it could also complement a number of stories about the David C. Lam Asian Garden:

• - the combination of coastal woodland plants (represented by the Douglas-fir) and cultivated plants of Asian origin (the Japanese maples in the background)
• - along the same lines, one could also interpret that the solidity of the Douglas-fir represents what was here and what will be here in this place (it is timeless), whereas the maples are fleeting and less solid, less permanent
• - the maples remind of flames, an allusion to the fire that threatened the Asian Garden earlier this year
• - the charred scars of stumps and trunks of the few remaining original-growth native trees in the Asian Garden speak to the burning of the site in the early 20th century after it had been effectively clearcut -- had colour film existed then, it is not difficult to imagine a similar photograph being taken a century ago, but with real flames

A photograph from early this morning in the E.H. Lohbrunner Alpine Garden here at UBC. I'm making a bit of an effort to photograph anything red in relation to plants at the moment. This is in preparation for an early December presentation I'll be giving entitled "Red Reverie", in which I'll be discussing the colour red in plants, on topics ranging from food plant pigments to leaf colours, from attracting pollinators to preventing herbivory. Busy again today with meetings, but thought I'd sneak in a quick image for BPotD. For local readers of BPotD, autumn colours will continue to persist through this weekend, particularly in the Alpine Garden and the Carolinian Forest.

Updated @ 3:20pm on Thursday, September 8, 2011: Added a second photo to the entry by Douglas Justice of UBC Botanical Garden.

It's been a while since I've shared a scanned image from the John Davidson collection of lantern slides (all of these can be viewed on the gallery of the site dedicated to UBC Botanical Garden's first director, "Botany" John Davidson). Although this isn't one of the slides that he decided to hand-tint, I found it intriguing because I was able to locate a modern counterpart along with the story of how things changed.

A present-day view of this vista can be seen (added) with Douglas Justice's accompanying photograph or on Benjamin Simpson's Hodomania blog, in his entry on Kew Gardens (scroll to the bottom of the page, or here's a direct link to the image). A side-by-side comparison of the images shows the vista having been transformed from a relatively narrow lane with imposing Atlantic and deodar cedars to a wider lane with the addition of other trees and shrubs in a far more informal planting style. These latter plantings are also evident from the satellite photographs of Kew via the Google Maps link below the photograph.

The changing cultivated landscape helps to date John Davidson's photograph, placing it before 1923-1924. However, it is still unknown as to whether this was taken on a return visit to the UK for him, or prior to his immigration to Canada in 1911. Kew's web site helps to determine the date, because they include a brief history of the Cedar Vista:

"Cedar Vista... was planted in 1871...Constant pruning of the trees over the years led to their becoming mutilated, so in 1923-24 director Sir Arthur William Hill felled many and widened the vista by some 12 metres. Today, irregularly spaced trees give Cedar Vista the character of an 'informal avenue'."

I wanted to start a series on plants of Japan today, but I also wanted to allude to Valentine's Day somehow, so the compromise was to feature UBC Botanical Garden's Japanese stroll and tea garden, Nitobe Memorial Garden. The February 14th connection is that Nitobe Memorial Garden has been mentioned as one of the best places to kiss on campus. These photographs are from late November of last year.

Nitobe Memorial Garden was previously featured on Botany Photo of the Day with a couple of other wintertime images. I've plans to photograph the garden in other seasons this year, so perhaps more entries will follow.

Next up on Botany Photo of the Day, a series on plants of Japan.

...and the last brief entry during this stint of vacation. This Canada goose "statue" is part of the whimsical Mosaiculture art series at New Brunswick Botanical Garden.

On vacation, so only a photograph taken last year at the entrance to the New Brunswick Botanical Garden. No pumpkins in that location this year, but the garden does have a live webcam of their giant pumpkin.

More about giant pumpkins via Wikipedia and Oregon State University: How to Grow Giant Pumpkins.

A few more entries in the UBC Celebrate Research Week series remain. Lindsay introduces Dr. Mooney:

Dr. Patrick Mooney is a Professor in the Landscape Architecture program in UBC's School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture at UBC where he teaches sustainable landscape planning and management, ecological restoration, design studio and planting design. Dr. Mooney consults to developers, environmental groups, the B.C. Ministry of Environment, regional parks and city governments on habitat management and restoration. Dr. Mooney designed and supervised the installation of Maplewood Flats, a constructed wetland on the Burrard Inlet. The mud-flats that previously existed on that site were filled for a port facility that was never built and is now a Provincial Wildlife Management Area operated by the Wild Bird Trust (WBT) of BC. Since its installation, the WBT has recorded an increase in bird diversity from 208 bird species prior to 1995 to 231 in 2004.

Dr. Mooney writes:

Maintaining biodiversity in urban regions (PDF) requires the implementation of conservation actions that are informed by local knowledge. To meet this need, I've developed general biodiversity models that may be used to select candidate conservation areas, to enhance habitat in urban disturbed sites, to increase site level biodiversity and to guide ecological restoration for wildlife habitat.

The plant associations of three conservation areas on Burrard Inlet in the Metro Vancouver region were inventoried and mapped as habitat types (figure 1 -- the map)

The 62 species of birds that were found to use the sites on an annual basis were grouped according to their foraging guilds. The guilds are coded A through L in the second figure. It was found that that certain habitats support more species than others and some habitats support a high proportion of certain guilds.

Since most species use multiple habitats, a cluster analysis was conducted to determine which groups of habitats supported the most bird species. Three habitat assemblages - Deciduous Forest / Mixed Forest / Park; Shorezone / Old Field / Meadow and Old Field / Salt Marsh / Freshwater Marsh were found to contain the primary use habitats of the majority bird species found on the study sites (see Figure 2). All other possible habitat assemblages contained the primary habitats of three or fewer species.

Habitat Assemblage 1: Deciduous Forest / Mixed Forest / Park

Eleven species of birds from guild A, the gleaners, utilize this habitat assemblage for both primary and secondary habitat. This assemblage contains the primary and secondary habitat for 21 species. 13 of these species were found only within this habitat assemblage. These are black-throated gray warbler, brown creeper, chestnut-backed chickadee, evening grosbeak, orange-crowned warbler, Pacific-slope flycatcher, downy woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, bushtit, Cooper's hawk, cedar waxwing, Steller's jay and purple finch.

Habitat Assemblage 2: Shorezone / Old Field / Meadow

The habitat assemblage of shorezone/old field/meadow contains the primary and secondary habitat for 16 species or 25.8% of the 62 species in this analysis. This assemblage is notable in that primary and secondary use habitat for three of the four species in guild C, the probers, are captured by this assemblage. These are killdeer, solitary sandpiper, and spotted sandpiper. The exception in guild C is the sora rail which was found only in the freshwater marsh habitat type.

Habitat Assemblage 3: Old Field / Salt Marsh / Freshwater Marsh

This assemblage contained primary and secondary habitats for five species. Two species are particular to this habitat assemblage. The wood duck was found in both the freshwater and saltwater wetlands, while the sora rail occurred in only the freshwater marsh habitat.

I'm on vacation, so please accept my apologies for the brief entries. -- Daniel.

While I'm on vacation in Manitoba, these are the sorts of scenes I'm missing back in Vancouver -- the foggy afternoons with warm low sunlight in the David C. Lam Asian Garden. This photograph is from a couple years ago, taken while slightly leaning out my office window.

Apologies, but I'm going to interrupt the pollinator series today. Instead, here's a photograph from the new Greenheart Canopy Walkway at UBC Botanical Garden. It opened this Wednesday morning to the public, and garden staff were among the first to experience this walk in the treetops.

The walkway is independently operated by Greenheart Conservation Company Limited and provides visitors with a lengthy 300+ m (1000+ ft.) suspension walk reaching a maximum height of 15m (50ft) above ground level.

It was pretty amazing to get up close and personal with some of the largest second-growth trees in the David C. Lam Asian Garden -- grand fir (Abies grandis), Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), western red-cedar (Thuja plicata) and big-leaf maple (Acer macrophyllum). Looking down one can see a combination of temperate coastal rainforest understorey shrubs and ferns interspersed with some fine specimen plants of Asian origin. All in all, very cool and it will definitely be the source of a few photographs in upcoming BPotD entries. Intriguingly, it will also be an opportunity to highlight research at UBC, as it is expected a number of researchers will be making use of the canopy as well.

Just a warning to other photographers: the range of light in the forest is going to be a challenge. If you have one, bring a polarizing filter to cut down on glare from the metalwork and foliage. I didn't use one today (had my point-and-shoot) so there are a lot of burned-out areas in the photographs I took. I'll have the advantage of going back when light conditions are more advantageous -- you may not.

I've been a bit tardy about posting a follow-up to this image of University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley by John Davidson. This was taken last month when I briefly visited the garden on my way home from points further south.

Dr. Paul Licht, Director of UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley, was kind enough to take some time out of his day to point out the approximate location of the original photograph. I tried my best to capture a similar image, but things have changed quite a bit -- for one, I think the place where the original photograph was taken from is now part of a garden bed (and, respecting the rules of the garden, I didn't hop into the bed). What hasn't changed, though, is the columnar cactus on the right-hand side of the image. Labeled Echinopsis pascana (perhaps now considered a synonym of Echinopsis atacamensis subsp. pascana), this particular plant is present in John Davidson's image as well. It's a 1932 accession. For details about the changes in the photograph (including what happened to this particular cactus), see Dr. Licht's comment on the previous entry.

High on my list of places to visit when I next travel to California is the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley. This undated photograph by John Davidson is clearly from the garden's early days. It is an early image, perhaps, of the New World Desert garden, or that particular garden's predecessor (almost all cacti are distributed in the “new world”, hence the guess). The details of the hills in the background might make it possible to take a modern-day photograph from the same point.

A photograph of the present-day New World Desert Garden is available on the mission and history page for the UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley.

Eric La Fountaine has been very helpful to me these past few weeks while I work to meet a deadline, so once again, here are a couple of his photographs and a write-up!

Vancouver has been graced with a few good snowfalls this year. These photos were taken late January, in Nitobe Memorial Garden. The garden was not yet open for the day, so the fresh layer of snow was undisturbed, except for the few paths that had been cleared by horticulturist, Junji Shinada, who has tended the garden for over 15 years. The white snow outlines the graceful form of the cherry trees and highlights the bridges, ponds and other structural elements typically found in Japanese gardens.

Opened in 1960, Nitobe Memorial Garden is one of the most authentic Japanese gardens found outside of Japan. Professor Kannosuke Mori of Chiba University came from Japan to design the garden and remained to oversee construction until the official opening. The planning and construction of the memorial was chronicled in the garden's journal, Davidsonia, by John W. Neill, now deceased, who was the University of British Columbia landscape architect appointed as the university liaison to work with Professor Mori during construction.

This image is a scan from the garden's John Davidson lantern slide collection. UBC Botanical Garden has been continuously operating as a university botanical garden since 1916, but it has not always been in the same location. When the Point Grey campus was originally constructed, the garden occupied the heart of the campus. This image from that era gives an idea of what it looked like; formal evolutionary beds for teaching purposes formed the core of the garden, with an arboretum of mostly native plants ringing the edges. Much (95%?) of these original plantings have since been destroyed.

There is one object that connects the first iteration of the botanical garden with the present third version. The plinth in this image now stands at the centre of the modern Physic Garden, though the sundial on it has since been replaced.

Yesterday's wet and rainy day was spent indoors being treated to André Gallant's visual whirlwind of travel photography, people photography and “dreamscapes”. On the latter theme, he talked about three techniques: panning, composite montages (which I've never tried) and Orton imagery. It inspired me to share another photograph using the latter technique today (a link from the previous entry, added here for easy finding: Orton Imagery - A How-To Guide for Photographers).

I wasn't certain what to title today's entry, as I would normally title it using the name of the garden area. However, this garden bed currently lacks a descriptive name. It is planned to transform this into a themed area (incorporating elements, if not more, of a sensory garden), but plans can often be difficult to turn into reality for whatever reason.

In any case, I've decided to name the entry after the most prominent plant in the photograph. The orange-red Fothergilla major (witch-alder) is native to the southeastern United States, where it characteristically grows on dry highland ridges. It's been recognized as a horticulturally-desirable plant, having won a Royal Horticultural Society Award of Garden Merit (Fothergilla major via BBC Gardening). An extensive factsheet about witch-alder is available from the Center for Plant Conservation.

The genus Fothergilla is named after John Fothergill, a philanthropist and patron of Sydney Parkinson and William Bartram.