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I know it’s late and I have a backlog of photos to put into the blog. There are a couple of drafts that are approaching a first year’s birthday waiting to be posted. I will try for the next few days to get some of these online so that I can retire the photos to a disk somewhere outside my hard drive.

Our Ken Janek rhododendron was spectacular. All the plants this year seem to be blooming with numbers of flowers above and beyond all expectations. There’s only a close up of the KenJanek.

I cut one of the May Apples to have inside. The white flower developed these translucent windows in the water in the vase.  Don’t know if this is a usual development as the flower ages.

These are two of my seedling azaleas.  Geisha was one of the parents,  these are planted where we buried Max, he used to sleep under these plants on summer nights.

Bill and Mary started to  replace their fence last year.  The Montana rubens clematis was undisturbed and bloomed very well. It has climbed to the top of one of Bills  conifers next door and the tree is also covered with the vanilla scented flowers.

My primulas put on a nice show too.

Joker (azalea) and an azalea  whose name we have forgotten blooming with Gordon Jones.

The Azalea Joker.

This is  Rhododendron Gordon Jones. It has been languishing in the back garden for years, it is finally putting on a show of its large and marked flowers.

The rhododendron Grumpy has finally bloomed in the correct season.  In the past we have had mild Novembers and Grumpy would bloom just before Thanksgiving thinking (?) it was Spring. Even in the Fall it never bloomed this well.

This peony, Cytheria is an unusual and luminous color. I cut two stems to have inside and protect the blossoms from some predicted heavy rains.

Toward the end of May our Nathan Hale  Kalmia started to bloom. You’ll see more of this when it’s fully opened.

Inside, I have been concerned with wire work for wine cup stems.

These tulips were blooming in the park in front of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, Manhattan side, last week as I went into the city to make some deliveries uptown. The flowers are blooming in our yard too.

It was the beginning of a weekend of beautiful weather ( it’s rainy and cold again today).  There were a number of events on our island but I’ll show photos of that later, this entry is about our tree peony seedlings. Colman planted seeds that formed on the plants we bought;  the seeds take two years to visibly (they don’t show leaves the first year)  germinate and another 4-5 years before they bloom. This first photo is from our Green Dragon in a Pink Pool, it may have been one of the parents of our seedlings. I cut the flower because it had been beaten down by a shower and I wanted to trim the plant back a little too. This particular Chinese hybrid is always the first to bloom.

This next plant was the first of the seedlings to bloom. It has bloomed  three years now and the flowers have gotten better  and more plentiful each year.

The flowers have subtle flares in the center.

The next plant bloomed the first time this year.  It has a strange center and lots of petals.

A very pale pink, almost white flower is blooming its second time in the back yard.  It has a beautiful shape and subtle color.

Our primulas are in full bloom too, These are just outside the back door.

The white primulas are my favorite for their cut edge petals and textured leaves.

I was in the city Friday to go to class at FIT. I bought more copper at Metalliferous and then went back downtown to see Ellen before class. I got out of the subway at 23rd street and walked up Fifth Avenue on the west side of the street through one of the new paved parks that have shown up all over the city on what used to be part of the street. There’s a big one along Madison Square extending the park-like atmosphere beyond the park itself. There, the planters were exuberantly planted with tulips, daffodils and smaller flowering spring bulbs. It made me feel like warmer weather is finally arriving.

Looking across Fifth towards  Madison Square Park.

On the Broadway side of this triangular space a film crew was breaking down after filming.

On Fifth Avenue, one of the fill lights was still turned on.

This is my new hair cut for the summer.

Just a few quick photos of the unusual flowers blooming in the yard. This clump of Dutchman’s Britches  gets larger every year.  It just appeared about 6 years ago. 

These are  Erythronium, commonly known as Trout Lilies. I bought 6 very expensive bulbs about 10 years ago. Only leaves came up for about 3 years, since then they have spread over a large area of the  shady side of the front yard.  There are more flowers each year .  They come and go very quickly. I really like the simple celadon leaves with their  maroon markings.

It was warm enough for Henry top  come outside and help with some of the Spring Clean-up.

On the 14th of this month we went to an opening at the College of Staten Island to attend the opening for an exhibition of Tracey Jones paintings. I was attracted by the invitation image and knew I had to go to see the work. I was not disappointed.  When we arrived there were a number of people already there and a photographer was shooting the show.

Tracey was talking with her friend and I asked if they would stand for a picture.  Colman likes the painting ‘Table’ behind Tracey’s friend.

Here are some shots of the gallery during our visit.

The blue canvas titled ‘Etruria’ was on the invitation.

Behind this trio, the gray canvas, ‘Large Fence’.

Colman talking with Craig Manister, also a painter and supervisor of this gallery at the college.

One of the paintings that I enjoyed seeing,  ’Sign 5′.

As we were leaving, a final shot of the gallery.

The sun was beginning to set on a beautiful Spring day.  These photos were taken just outside of the Center for the Arts buildiing.

About 15 years ago I was hybridizing with azaleas. We had clipped and rooted cuttings from a friend’s collection in Lederach Pennsylvania. He had a wonderful collection of Japanese azaleas that I used to make my crosses. These seedlings from that time are crosses that were made with a variety called Geisha. It has single white flowers splashed with stripes and spots of bright pink. Geisha is still growing in our garden and it is usually the first azalea to bloom each spring. The whole bush can be seen in yesterday’s entry, the first photo.

The seedlings in the following photos are most likely a cross of Florence Waldman and Geisha. Florence Waldman was a hybrid  from Roslyn Nurseries on Long Island, one of the only American hybrids to have stripes and spots. While it had beautiful flowers there in Long Island, it performed poorly here in Staten Island, the buds came early and were often blasted by late frosts. Crossing it with Geisha, which has similar coloring, gave us plants with larger flowers that perform much better and reliably in our garden.

This first hybrid is outside near the back yard door, it’s one of the small bushes that Max used to sleep under on summer nights. The flowers are larger than Geisha. A strange thing about the seedlings is that all of them, at least the ones that survived some neglect for a number of years, have hose-in-hose flowers, that is to say the blooms are two azalea flowers, one inside the other.

The second seedling has more substance and color, the petals are more ruffled rather than rounded like the first seedling.

Primulas are blooming in the bed closest to the deck, there are more in pockets all around the back yard, but this is the main part of the collection.

I am especially fond of these white  flowers with the cut edges, I think I bought them on 28th street about 5 years ago.

I got these yellow  primulas a few years ago to replace some that just weren’t surviving very well.  The types I like come from higher altitudes and don’t like it much here at near sea level.

These came from our friend, Bud, in Lederach too, in his garden they are in an abundant array in a border and along a path that leads to his azalea collection.

Some shots of the yard. Daffodils, chionodoxa, scilla and hellebores. Scattered plants all around the house. Daffodils, chionodoxa, scilla and hellebore. Everything in bloom today. The daffodils were rescued yesterday, we’d had a vigorous rain and wind event  that laid a lot of the new blooms flat, spattered with mud.

Colman at breakfast.

These flowers were blooming in the front yard earlier this week, I think they are seedlings of the pink chionodoxa, whose flowers had yet to open when I took this photo. They are very small, barely over two inches tall.

Scilla is all over the yard.  I planted them in the back first  shortly after we moved in to this house, then a few years later I planted borders of them in the front yard.  They have seeded themselves everywhere, these are by the hatch in the back.

two or three years ago I ordered about 200 chionodoxa bulbs to line the walks in the front.  They were supposed to be blue flowers with white centers and wine colored stems. The suppliers sent the bulbs and I planted them, I was surprised and disappointed when they bloomed pink.  Before they were gone that first spring, I decided that it was a fortuitous error.  There’s already a lot of blue blooming here.

The first honey bee I’ve seen this year.

Hellebores by the back door.

Henry caught scent of something on a Spring breeze.

It’s been a busy few weeks leading up to last weekend. Colman and I went to Adi and Sabine’s home in Connecticut for a special event. Here’s a photo that  our friend Helen took on Saturday the 30th, the story will be in a later entry, for now, I will try to catch up a little.  

Sunday before Memorial Day  we went to a party at Kevin and Diana’s.  I didn’t take many photos except in their garden, on the way around the block  we were surprised by the fullness of our neighbors rhododendrons. Our next door neighbor Gary’s bush was at its peak, the chionanthus in his driveway was also in full bloom.

The Brown’s house next  to Gary’s is surrounded by very old plants, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many flowers on any rhododendron.

Around the side of the Brown’s there grows a pink flowered bush.

At Kevin and Diana’s the stand out was this clematis. There were roses, iris and other flowers all around the yard but these were special.

I went into the city today to pick up some printing for another large book. As I arrived in Manhattan and got off of the ferry I glanced back toward the harbor, a fire boat was near the terminal in full spray.  I’ve wanted to shoot this for a long time, couldn’t have asked for better lighting or a better vantage point.  Two photos and it was over, the water stopped, when I got back to the terminal the boat had moved on to another place. If you look into the sprays on the right, you can see a shadow of the Statue of Liberty through the mist.

I’ll close this short entry with a photo of Henry, for the past two weeks we have been letting him outside. He gets to be a cat in the wild and he keeps us company on our trips around the garden. It’s also reassuring that when he’s out of sight, he appears when we call him. If we go inside he sometimes waits for us on the deck. 

We have been very busy, Spring is arriving and I’ve barely had time to notice.  It’s only been as I leave the house on the way to the city to shop or for class. Here are a few shots of the yard as it was last week.  Mostly of the front yard where a lot of bulbs have been brightening the overcast and drizzly days we have had enough of  recently. 

And in the back the Ice Follies continue to bloom. 

 Inside the studio we had a big project making silk covered invitations that were padded and would fold up into a pyramid shape.  The first step was to attach the boards to the padding and cut them out.  The padding is about 6 feet wide, the boards were covered with a pressure sensitive material and die cut before they arrived in the studio. 

 Before covering them, I had to put in a “floor” to stabilize the hinges and then we added tassels, Colman is helping me in this photo. 

 This project took over both rooms of the studio, there’s a pan of the studio once the tassels were all in place.  On the left  you can see where I am working on my next project for the casting class along with some other pieces of silver.  In the front room I was about to start cutting the covering material. In the shot it’s still wrapped in a black plastic bag. This was the last day of March.

 By the second of April our blue and white chionodoxa started to bloom,  I didn’t realize until this year that the pink variety was blooming about ten days earlier,  and all around the yard  the scilla was starting  to show its blue flowers. 

 On a trip into the city to deliver my waxes to the caster, I saw this guy with his pair of  dogs.  I  have been  taking and collecting these photos for a few years.  There’s a real collection of  New Yorkers and their pairs of dogs on my Newyorksnapshot.com web site.  These puppies don’t match perfectly  but it was still a part of the phenomena. 

 On 47th street there’s a change taking place.  It seems there is a movement to get all of the diamond merchants into a tower instead of the interesting sprawl they now have along the street. The tower has already started.  Old buildings were knocked down and the foundation hole has been started,  this was taken on April 2, 2008,  about a week or so after I was aware that  digging had begun.  The hole had gone from a rubble strewn street level to about 3 stories below street level. The Komatsu machines are huge jack hammers breaking the rock into portable boulders.

Diamond Dig Movie

 By the 6th of April we had  covered the pyramids with silk and they were ready to have the hinges covered on their interiors. 

I was in the city Wednesday, it was so warm and balmy that I was comfortable in a sweatshirt without a jacket. Several jobs that have finally arrived in the studio ( it seems I wasn’t the only one on Spring Break. . .) and this trip was for them and for school and personal projects. There were seven stops to make, the last one being my class in Gemology at FIT. Walking from 6th to 7th Avenue on 28th Street, it was apparent that Spring is here.  It was really nice to smell hyacinths and narcissus on the street.

In our yard on Staten Island, hundreds of bulbs are blooming. Pink chionodoxa is blooming everywhere.  A few years ago I bought 100 bulbs and planted them in little patches in the front, back and sides of the house.  They are blooming with scilla and the first tete-a-tete miniature daffodils in the front and and in the back with this old curlew weathervane. 

Ice Follies are blooming in the “Piano Bed”  beside the greenhouse.  

Thursday night I made my second rubber mold, the first one was a disaster and went immediately into the garbage.  Our assignment is to make a necklace from one piece for which we have to make the waxes.  It wasn’t easy, after cutting the mold open to release the model, you have to hold it between metal plates and push it against a nipple on the wax injector to make the models one at a time. After the wax cools for a few seconds you have to remove a wax copy of the metal model from the mold.  My first attempts found the wax models incomplete when the mold was opened. I changed metal plates and things seemed to be happening perfectly, then I couldn’t get the models to completely fill with wax again, it turns out that I was squeezing the plates too tightly. The metal and mold sandwich only needs firm pressure, not the type I am usually deliver while binding.  Here’s the array of models with the metal original, spread out on my bench, after I got them home. The pieces on the wooden part of my bench are rejects for one or another reason. 

The next step is to take the wax models to a caster and have them cast in Silver so that I will be able to start cleaning the castings for the necklace next Thursday.  The finished project is due  April 17th.