Every spring I try to take as many photos as I can in the beautiful little blue scillas, and this year was no exception. My favourite spot has always been the old abandoned orchard along the York/Durham townline, but it's not as nice as it used to be thanks to the invasion of dog-strangling vines in recent years...
Even so, there's one small spot (on the far left in the photo above) that is less overgrown and still usable. We went there several times over the course of the blooming period, each time taking dolls who had not been there before. I'd set up the dolls in the flowers, go sit down at a distance, and then direct Jan to make any small adjustments if needed, since things can look very different once I'm down at the doll's level, as opposed to from above when I'm placing them in the flowers.
Then I take the photos...
I also have a decent patch of scillas in my backyard, but then there's some huge rocks and a fence in the background, neither of which make for a nice scenic background. So I position two huge tree roots in front of the rocks, and I temporarily 'planted' several pruned evergreen branches in the ground to add some greenery. Then I'd pose the dolls....
Get down on the tarp, and take the photos...
The easiest place to take photos is if they are posed in the upper garden, but there's not a lot of scillas up there (yet). Plus the tulip leaves are way too big out of scale, so have to be avoided, as well as the ugly fence. But there was one small spot which had enough scillas to work for some photos. So I positioned the mushrooms and posed the mice....
Then took the photos...
All in all I managed to take photos with fourteen different subjects this year, all in the course of a week. It's a lot of work, but the flowers don't last very long, and I was determined to take as much advantage of them as much as possible during their short bloom period. And I'm glad that I did, because the entire plants have now been mowed down, and are just a memory for another year.
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