Lilac Fields Forever

On Sunday morning, my watch shook me awake at 4AM rudely waking me from a rather pleasant dream.

I had set the alarm deliberately, for Nick would pick me up at 4:50 and drive me to the lilac fields in nearby Franktown. He gets up early when the light is good. I have also risen early in the past to take photos but not recently.

Before I continue with the narrative, let me explain why I chose the watch to wake me, rather than Alexa, or my phone, or a conventional alarm. Well, who uses conventional alarms anymore? I am sure we could dig one up from somewhere, but we really don't use those kinds of clocks or radios anymore. That being said, both Alexa and Siri (phone) would make a lot of noise. They might wake Sue, but in my deafness, I might not hear them at all. My watch vibrates in addition to ringing. It is the buzzing vibrations that awaken me first. For a backup, I had set the phone as a backup for 4:05, but I was able to tell Siri to turn off all alarms before it went off.

Franktown is a little hamlet about ten minutes down the highway. It calls itself The Lilac Capital on Ontario. I'll post a blurb, below, but it is not an unwarranted claim for this little place as they have a few acres dominated by lilacs that are blooming in profusion right now. Next weekend, they will host their annual Lilac Festival, but this past weekend was glorious, indeed.

There are two main lanes. This is a photo of one of them about twenty minutes after sunrise. The sun rises fast and strongly at this time of year: especially noticeable when the sky is cloudless.

While that photo sets part of the scene, I like the next two photos better. I love the softness of the first scene while using the farm gate to anchor the image. While I would have preferred a nice lilac bush instead of brush at the bottom right, it still provided a frame for the gate. I also like the line of lilacs in the background, just above the gate. I think I made the best of the photo opportunity.

A little later, the sun had risen higher, but look at all of the lilac bushes in this field, off the main path.  Splendiferous! Nick was somewhere out of sight back there, lying on the ground and taking macros of low-lying lilacs. He has his muse, and I have mine.

For awhile I switched to my telephoto lens and tried to pick out individual lilacs along the lane. I came up with three very different photos. I love the second one and think it is print-worthy, if I were to so choose. It's the soft background that makes it special in my opinion. I was at the right distance from the flower, and the flower was the right distance from the background flowers to achieve this effect.

Here is the blurb about Franktown's from a website.

How did Franktown become Ontario’s lilac capital?

Franktown was settled as a supply stop between Richmond and Perth in 1818 by Scottish and Irish settlers who planted lilacs around their farmsteads. Over the centuries, Franktown has remained a small community. No large-scale developments have razed the land. In fact, the opposite has happened—undeveloped land has allowed the seeds and suckers to flourish unchecked. When scientists from Ottawa’s Central Experimental Farm examined the area in 2007, they found the suckering so dense that other plant species were mainly excluded.

Franktown’s lilacs aren’t just dense. Many of them are unique. Over time, naturalized hybrid species with double florets developed and became species known only to the Franktown area. A pink variety has been named Dixie (after Dixina Pierce McLellan, who once owned property along Lilac Lane). A white combination has been aptly named Franktown, while a blue variety is called Beckwith after the Township. These varieties just aren’t a local point of interest. In 2009, Franktown was honoured with the International Lilac Society’s President’s Award for protecting its unique varieties.

1 hour and 1 day late

With the forget-me-nots in full bloom, I liked the view from both the back and front upstairs windows.

Then, I decided to go out to take some pictures of blossoms that I had previously seen around town. This is when I discovered that I was an hour late and also a day late. I was an hour late because the sun had come out, and I had hoped to get flower and blossom photos in more subtle light. However, here are photos of the front garden that I took before I got in the car for more my intended drive-around. They are okay, I guess, but I think they would have been better an hour earlier.

But I was also a day late — for at least some of the blossoms that I had wanted to capture. Our next-door neighbour had a beautiful tree with pink blossoms just the day before, but on Saturday, they were spent. However, another neighbour's lilac bush was doing pretty well.

This ↓ was a slightly farther neighbour. Please ignore the messy setting; I show it for the blossoms only.

My disappointment escalated when I got to the beautiful garden at a house farther away. Their two flowering trees were also done. They had been gorgeous, and I was disappointed. I did photograph this entrance to her garden, however. Whomever the gardener is, they did well.

I drove about looking for more blossoms, but gave up in disappointment and turned toward home. Then, I passed by the curling club and had to stop. Once again, please ignore the background.

As for the neighbour's front lawn, I did give in and decided to mow it. Because the grass was so long, I set the lawnmower blades very high, so it still looked long and messy after my initial mowing. However, the owner did send someone around the next day to mow again. The best news is that they are going to sell. At least I hope that it turns out to be good news, but I know the old saying: be careful what you wish for. Fingers crossed, eh.

Anniversary Lunch

Generations Inn was the venue of choice for our anniversary lunch. It's an repurposed building, possibly an old farmhouse, in a nice setting by the river.

The lilacs were out; I took this picture before lunch. I like how the trees provide a frame for the  lilac bush.

I like the photo but wish that I had lowered the camera just a tad to get a little more separating
between the branch and the bush. This is what happens with quick walk-by photography.
I don't take the time to notice the little details.

Later, as we were leaving, I snapped this one of the dead tree fringed by the lilac bush n the background.

Inside. we dined in the screened verandah, except they had glass over the screens because it's still early in the season. My hot wife was not amused, but it was overcast out, and I was pretty comfortable once I got settled: except for my awful chair, that is. (Sue's pic of me turned out better than mine of her.)

The server (remember when they were called waitresses or waiters?) obliged us with this photo.

After lunch we wandered down to the river, but as you can see, it was not a glorious day: overcast, much like our wedding day 55 years past. 

I think this is one of our better selfies.

Anniversary fudge being another tradition, we didn't have dessert at the restaurant but stopped for the fudge goody on the way home. Last night, the day after all of the above, we relented and ordered the usual anniversary pizza too, and it was very good.

And that's a wrap for anniversary 55. Aren't you glad that it's over?

BTW: some of you have been wondering about our long weekend when the American one is next week. It's a different holiday here: Victoria Day (in celebration of Queen Victoria's birthday, May 24 1819), and not Memorial Day. It occurs on the last Monday before May 25, For these reasons, we often refer to as May 24th holiday, even though Monday very seldom lands on the 24th.

Trillium Time

It is trillium time once again; our provincial flower is blooming with abandon: that is if you know where to look. I have learned to look along the shadowy, forested edges of some of our rural roads. The spot that I have returned to for several years is not a great spot, and I will go elsewhere next year,  should I want to photograph trilliums again. In truth my best trillium photos were taken years ago at another spot. Maybe I should have quit while I was ahead.

However, I found myself back to this recent spot yet again regardless and I also found myself regretting my choice almost immediately. The trilliums are some distance off the road, and I can only get to them with a telephoto lens, which is not ideal. On the east side of the dirt road, it is scrubby and the flowers lie in a dip. On the west side of the road the vegetation is closer to forest, and the ground slopes upward over there. 

Here ↓ I look down on a patch down the eastern dip. These flowers are perhaps 15' away. I took a photo just to show you the mass of blooms in just part of the whole patch and also how it would be difficult to get close to them down the slope and through the bramble, even an able-bodied person.

So, I look for individual blooms that I can pick out from the crowd. This ↓ one was about 8' away from the road and also several feet down the incline. I zoomed in a lot but still had to crop in to isolate on this flower. Even though it was my first time out this season, the flowers have already peaked, but they are still in pretty good shape.

On the western side of the road, I found some flowers way in the background near a tree trunk. They were back a long way, maybe 20', but I took the photo as best I could. The blotchy area to the top left is just a leaf that was close to the lens and, therefore, out of focus. I don't mind it for an internet image, but I sure wouldn't print it. Still, I like it well enough.

So that's my trillium outing for 2024. To repeat: I will  not return to this patch again; the conditions are too difficult, and I don't get the very best photos, although with much editing these two photos turned out not too badly.

Nevertheless, it was an outing that has become a tradition for me in the last decade or more, and I am glad that I made the effort  

=====================

After finishing the post, I had a thought and wondered if AI could substitute over that bright patch. Here is what it did.

I think it is a pretty impressive outcome. As much as I might have tried to fix it by conventional methods, I don’t think that I could have come remotely close to doing this well. In point of fact, I would not have tried. 

55

Today is the wedding anniversary that it says on the mug and in the title. It was the May long weekend then, just as it is this year, except the 17th was on a Saturday in 1969.

She was sitting in the sunlight cast by the big window opposite her.

I don't usually think about my photography and blogging in advance, but I pretty well planned this anniversary photo and card back in March. That was when we drove down to Prospect and had breakfast in the Recess Cafe. You might recall that I posted about the excursion here at the time, and you saw the basic photo then.

The words, You are my sunshine, are from a neon sign that hung in the cafe, and I had the thought, back then, of compositing the sign onto a photo of Sue (also taken that day) for this anniversary card.

Those words fit Sue pretty well. They always have and always will.

Today, we'll have a low key lunch at a restaurant in town, or actually just outside of town. That is  doing it up big for us compared to our usual treat of pizza, which of course hearkens back to our wedding night in Stratford. Doesn't everybody order pizza on that night? We won't, however, purchase gifts. It's garden time, so we will consider whatever plants, that we buy next week, to be our gifts to each other.

Honouring Mary

Although I have various family photos printed, it has bothered me that I didn't have one of my mother. I do have a small b&w version of this photo in a generations collage, but I thought she deserved higher recognition.

Either I or Sue took this snapshot on the occasion of Mary's eightieth birthday in 1995. I scanned the little print and edited it quite a few years ago, in 2011 as a matter of fact. As I already mentioned, I used a little b&w version in a collage, but I hadn't got around to printing it properly until now. (Actually, it is still not printed properly but you can read about that it the footnote, below.) Today, the 109th anniversary of her birth, seemed to finally be the time to rectify this oversight, for I finally, supposedly at least, have a functioning printer (also see below).

Mary Rayner (nee Quinlan), lived for almost eight more years after we took the birthday picture She passed just over a month before completing her eighty-eighth year. Mom lived longer than her parents, brother and husband and certainly longer than her twin sisters who both died in infancy.

I feel better to have printed it. Now I just have to hang it somewhere.

(It's not a great print. It has some random black ink spatter here and there, and the page is not as well laid out as I would like it to be, but it is something for the present. I am having trouble getting big prints to process properly with this printer. Sometimes, I think I have the photo paper jammed in too tightly, and sometimes, I think it is too loose.)

Forget-Me-Nots 2024

Dad's forget-me-nots are out in full splendour, but I didn't quite know what to do with them this year — photographically, I mean.

I usually, get right down to their level and take a few close-ups. But, did I need one more photo like that? So I hummed and hawed until I noticed several dandelions emerging from out of the blue as it were. I decided to try to do something with the dandelion on the right because I thought that if I could get a sea of blue behind it, the complementary colours might result in a good photo.

My 70-200 lens got me this photo.

Then, I used my macro lens to get these images.

I think photo #3 is the best, and they are all a little different for my annual myosotis photo exploration. Of course, one could argue that these are more about the dandelion than the forget-me-nots, and one wouldn't be altogether wrong.

But that's okay too.