At Raleigh's Dorothea Dix Park, everything is coming up sunflowers

Just two months ago, I did several posts about a shoot I did at Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh. One thing I was wanting to shoot at the time but couldn't -- because it was out of season -- was the park's renowned sunflower field. The flowers wouldn't be in bloom until July. 

On Wednesday, I returned to the park and took care of that little detail, as this post attests. According to an article I saw last weekend in the Raleigh News & Observer, the sunflowers are expected to remain in bloom through this weekend. 

I was impressed by what I saw, and I made a point to try and get different perspectives and angles of the field itself and the blooms in various arrangements -- singles, doubles, groups, lines, front and back. 

I've emailed the park staff to see if they could tell me the dimensions of the portion of field on which there are sunflowers, and I'll add that to this post if and when I get a response. But until then, I'd say that length is easily a football field long, and the "width" (the shorter dimension, if it isn't exactly square) isn't too far off from 100 yards as well. 

The area of field containing sunflowers -- let's call it the garden -- can be cruised by foot along a series of dirt paths, and visitors are asked to stay on those paths. When I was there, some of the most traveled paths also were topped with matting for protection from an overnight rainfall. (Yes, we finally got a decent rainfall!)

Sunflower plants average about 5-feet 9-inches in height, and at the Dix Park sunflower field, they are in all sizes. I'm 5-9, and I saw quite a few that were taller than me. 

The size of the crowd visiting the display Wednesday was manageable for someone like me trying to get photos. I avoided going last Saturday, when there an celebratory event planned for the field and the sunflowers. I knew it'd be impossible to get decent photos with so many people. 

It was nice to see people enjoying the display. Quite a few paused to get pictures of themselves (selfies, or someone not in their party was asked to do the honors). Many also were taking pictures of the flowers.

Interestingly, adjacent to the sunflower field was the cemetery of the former Dix psychiatric hospital. I also strolled that grounds and took pictures, which I'll present in a subsequent post.

To view a full gallery of images from the sunflower shoot, follow the link in this sentence.  

Above and first nine photos below: These images are designed to give you an idea of the layout of the "garden" and paths through and around it. 

Above and first two photos below: These looked like they might have been pummeled downward by yesterday's hard rainfall. 

Above: The backside of a petal.

This lone sunflower (above) was drooping so low that I decided to stop and photograph it. The shot below is a crop of the flower to bring it into closer view. 

Above: This shot reminded me of the scenes in the motion picture Field of Dreams when old-time ballplaying "ghosts" disappeared into the cornfields after their games. 

Above and last four photos below: Adjacent to the sunflower field was this garden of non-sunflowers booms. I decided to grab a few shots of it, too.

Some nativity scenes in the vast collection of late college friend Deb Wagner

 

This post is way overdue. 

Years back, I’d done a couple posts in which I mentioned a college acquaintance named Deb Wagner. 

One of those posts actually was mostly to champion the use of newer technology in 2017 to restore light to dark, shadowy elements in photos I’d taken in Columbus, Wis., in 2007, the town where I began my journalism career. During the visit to Columbus when I took those pictures, I’d stayed a couple nights at Deb’s house just outside Columbus. Coincidentally, Deb had moved to the Columbus area only a few years earlier. 

The real reason for Deb and I and another college friend, Jenny Gruber, to meet there was to plan a 2008 reunion of guys and gals who became close friends while living in adjacent dormitories at UW-Eau Claire. 

The other post involving Deb, which went live in June 2012, was for much sadder reason. It recalled the life of Deb, who had died of multiple system atrophy the previous month. She’d struggled for almost a decade with MSA, a rare progressive neurodegenerative disorder that impacts the central and autonomic nervous systems. MSA causes severe issues with movement, balance and involuntary bodily functions.

For years after getting her academic degrees in the United States, Deb worked overseas, first with the Peace Corps in Niger, Africa, and then in the Baltic nation of Albania to help improve Albania’s agricultural economy and to direct the country’s USAID/ Land O’Lakes Dairy Development Project. 

While in Albania, Deb also volunteered for several organizations that were closed to her heart. The cause I remember hearing her talk about the most was the Organization for Support of Albania’s Abandoned Babies. During the 2007 visit to her home, she invited Jenny and I to purchased some beautiful handmade pashminas, luxurious cashmere wool scarfs. The proceeds of pashmina sales were used as a fund-raising mechanism for OSAAB. I bought a few pashminas and then gifted them to women in my family the following Christmas. 

And by the way, Deb adopted one of those Albanian babies. Her daughter, Lea, was about 11 years old when I met her on that 2007 visit at again at the reunion the following June. Today, Lea would be about 30 years old or close to it.       

But I digress ... 

While staying at Deb’s house in 2007, Deb led Jenny and I to a barn on her property where she had stored scores of beautiful nativity scenes that she had collected through the years. Being a shutterbug, I started taking photos of the ones that jumped out at me, which were quite a few. 

In the years since Deb died, I’ve wondered several times what became of that collection. I couldn’t help but hope that someone in her family found a museum or some such respectable place to display the scenes for Christmas-loving people to see and enjoy. 

It never occurred to me, until last night, to do a post featuring the pictures I’d taken of Deb’s nativity scene collection. So that’s what this post is about.

I know Deb traveled extensively while in Africa and Europe, and she told me she picked up quite a few of her scenes in the foreign countries during her travels ... sort of like a souvenir from each of the places she visited. I’m sure some were from Albania and the United States as well. 

She and her husband owned a home, a farm in rural Virginia, where they would stay when she came back to the U.S. periodically during her overseas career. So she had occasion to also add to the collection from places she might have visited in her home country. She moved back to Wisconsin permanently to be near family at the point where her MSA was causing more and more physical difficulties. 

Unfortunately, I do not know what countries any of the nativity scenes depicted in the photos here are from. But I still feel the pictures are worth sharing. At the very bottom of this post, I present a few perspective shots so you can appreciate how Deb had these displayed in the barn. A reminder: These do not represent the full collection. Even though there are many photos in this post, they don’t come close to constituting the entire collection.

And oh ... Jenny took a handful of her own pictures during our walk through the barn, and she kindly shared them with me. I sprinkled a few of her shots into this post as well. The two vertical orientation shots of nativity scenes were hers. So was the horizontal shot of the duckies nativity scene. Also hers are the last five perspective shots in the post, starting with the one featuring Santa and the white teddy bear. 

Wagner's Nativity collection