Digital Garden Camera

First bloom of the climbing rose Westerland

The first weekend I had my new digital gardening camera was a gardening write-off. I clicked and zoomed, composed and cropped, as the weeds grew. I discovered hidden treasures sprouting in unlikely places, colours I'd never seen before, and many plants I couldn't identify, let alone remember introducing to the garden.

I snapped leaf forms, ripples on the water and grass blades, every first rose bloom in closeup, and several irises normally lost in the growth spurts of their neighbours. I pointed the camera at the light. I pointed it away from the light. I took pictures on glaring sunshine days and dull grey days.

New rhododendron

Perpetual Pictures

What to do with this incredible oversized record of one day in the garden? I realised quickly that I am as greedy a photographer as I am a gardener. I need to see and experience every little change, every new colour arrival - and I need to record faithfully every detail.

This camera doesn't run out of anything, nor do I have to wait days for the results. My catalogues of every rhododendron in flower and every first rose blooming in the last week of October are impressive.

In pre-digital days I was never a successful garden photographer. My older photos used to perplex me. When the garden was looking awful and scruffy, somehow the images looked quite the opposite. And whenever I was awed by some tableau of beauty and clicked in excitement, the result was disappointing. Animals would always move just as I'd got them in focus.

Stumpy in the grass

I'd given up trying to capture the clear red flowers on the first rhododendrons - the prints were never the right shade. And I was forever lying in the grass, trying to capture the never-ending space and distance relationships of cats, and getting stuck there (older ladies will identify with this problem).

Jerome and fungus on an old tree stump

I'd given up trying to capture the clear red flowers on the first rhododendrons - the prints were never the right shade. And I was forever lying in the grass, trying to capture the never-ending space and distance relationships of cats, and getting stuck there (older ladies will identify with this problem).

Cherry blossom

A Blossoming Photographer

But most of all I can see the beauty of an outside border instantly transferred to a lasting pictorial record, to gaze at later that day. With spring blossom I can capture the beginning of the heat, with snow I can remember the cold. But what to do with these heart-warming gardening records? Someone who loses plant labels, who always gets seedlings mixed up, and who forgets the contents of mail orders does not sound like a good cataloguer and filer of thousands of photographs. I could end up living all my garden dreams gazing at static images of beauty, while the rather more upwardly mobile weeds are left to grow in peace.

I must take some photos of the roses before the sun gets too hot...