Oh, snap: the good, the bad and the ugly

By Beth Day Waters

WSU Master Gardener

A friend in our local Master Gardener Program recently told me she takes a picture of her garden every day. Though I can’t wrap my brain around a daily commitment, it occurs to me that doing a photo shoot once a week would be instructive, insightful and a definite eye-opener.

Ready for a gardening homework assignment? Consider doing something similar for yourself. Take a walk with me now in the garden as I snap a few photos and contemplate what works well and what cries for attention in my visual portrait of home.

There’s something brutally honest and utterly unyielding about a photograph — unless you’re a photo-editing wizard. Each photo shows truths I look at every day but sometimes fail to notice: the one-season wonder that looks uninteresting the rest of the year … those plants that would have had enough space to grow unimpeded if the information on those plant tags had been trustworthy … that paint job on the house that clashes with the garden’s color scheme … or the garden that has no color scheme at all, and is instead a jumble of every color that caught my eye when I grabbed up plants during nursery shopping sprees.

It’s all there for the camera to capture, with a corresponding photo to serve as prosecution, judge and jury. It declares me guilty of garden transgressions and sentences me to home-landscape community service to correct previous dereliction of duty. Oh, snap!

Are you ready for your homework? With camera in hand, take the first photos as you stand across the street from your home, looking at the entrance to your home landscape — the curb appeal so important to real estate agents, landscape designers and you. Take shots as you walk up the driveway. Walk around the side and backyards, snapping photos as you go.

Take photos of garden views from inside your house and porch, and then take pictures of your house from different angles throughout the yard. Crawl around and prop yourself on your elbows to get a worm’s-eye view of your yard. Stand on a ladder and get a bird’s-eye view from various vantage points. Take shots of it all — the good, the bad and the ugly.

I’m thinking of our dogs’ fascination with all things smelly. The scents that cause you and me to turn up our noses in disgust are riveting olfactory information to a canine’s uncanny sense of smell. Similarly, our collection of photographic information, however visually unappealing, becomes fodder for discernment as we rethink the work we can accomplish to reform the underwhelming portions of our home gardens. (It’s also a great idea to have those “before” and “in progress” shots to compare with the vastly improved “after” photos once you’ve put your advanced gardening skills to work.)

I’ve just completed a course in photography, hoping to improve my artistic skill with a camera. If I’m not yet a hotshot photographer, at least the photos I now take are no longer a shot in the dark. It’s lucky that I have a good memory for gorgeous gardens: I declare with pride that I’ve now mastered the technique of taking photos of the landscapes in front of me rather than close-ups of my left eye and right thumb. If you’re similarly challenged with this art form, let me put in a plug for a local photography class. I’ve progressed from maladroit bumbler to inexpert enthusiast.

Whatever our skill levels, let’s you and I move forward with our common goal: To create a beautiful home landscape is to play the long game — the slow slog of progress from one small improvement to the next, always with the big picture in mind. This game begins with that brutally honest look at the good, the bad and the ugly with an image in our mind’s eye of a more glorious portrait of home.

Just snap.

Beth Day Waters retired last year from her position as art instructor at Aberdeen High School. She has been a Master Gardener since 2010. She gardens on the West Satsop.

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Mark your calendars for the 2018 Grays Harbor Master Gardener Show, May 19-20 at the Elma fairgrounds. Garden and home vendors will fill the entire pavilion. Marianne Binetti will bring her “Container Wars” event to the show’s stage at 1 p.m. that Sunday.