Thursday, August 30, 2007

Long Hiatus & Willow Rust

Well, it certainly has been a while. Life happens. I've been incredibly busy with work, and didn't get to do much gardening, or garden photography.

This has been a very weird summer, with essentially no rain in June or July. It was good for the flowering plants, especially the River Beauties. No hot caps needed to get a lot of flowers.

However, it seems to have been a bit hard on at least one species of willow. The Salix longifolia usually has a few spots of rust, but this year it is essentially golden with rust, except for near the drip line, where I'm guessing it got a little more water. Turns out one of the folks coming to a conference my husband & I are organizing here actually is a specialist in Arctic willow rusts, so I spent Saturday PM collecting leaf samples for him. They are currently being pressed, and I'll hand them off to him in late September.

1 comment:

Sue Swift said...

Hi – this is an invitation to join the Garden Bloggers Retro carnival. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across the concept of a Blog carnival – if not I’ve explained it in detail on my site today (Oct 1). But basically the idea is to revive an old post which you think is worth rereading, or which you think new readers might enjoy. Send me the link to the post, and in November I’ll publish a series of posts describing and linking to all the posts people have nominated.
I hope you’ll join in and we have a fun carnival!
Sue