lazenbyphoto.com

Category: Colors

  • Plainfield Flower Farm

    It was 20 below zero here this morning so, to warm you up, here’s a look at the Plainfield, VT, Flower Farm last spring. Bram Towbin and Erica Da Costa have an acre of peonies and about 50 acres of lilacs and snowball viburnum, grown for the cut-flower market. From their hillside in Plainfield their budding flowers travel to urban flower markets around the Northeast. They are picked before they bloom so that they open after they reach their destinations. It’s hard work, art and science to grow them and pick them at just the right time. I worked on a photo story about the farm from the time the lilacs leafed out and the peonies poked through the ground until harvest. Thanks again to Bram and everyone for helping me. More pictures below, and a gallery is here.  

    Link to gallery.

  • Morning, North Branch

  • RAGBRAI!

    Every July for 40 years the Des Moines Register and a legion of volunteers have put together a little event called the Register‘s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, better known as RAGBRAI, a week-long bicycle ride across the roughly 500-mile-wide state. It started with two Register employees and a few hangers-on and has grown into an Iowa tradition and a bicycling legend that this year drew 10,000 registered riders and perhaps 5,000 more unregistered ones from every state in the country and 15 foreign nations. It’s a tradition Iowans have embraced completely. It is gigantic, well-run and crazy. This year three of the seven days were above 100 degrees, which only added to the craziness. My friends Chip Stone and John Bollard and I rode it last week.  I will post more images and a gallery as I edit my way through them. Please feel free to Facebook or otherwise spread the link. Thanks! Above: sunrise on one hot morning — when the temperature’s going to hit 103 degrees, people start riding around 4:30 or 5 a.m.  Below: traffic on a rolling section of Iowa farmland (almost all of the route is closed to traffic other than bikes); an idea of the kind of Heartland food riders can get along the way; and some of the folks who make RAGBRAI what it is. More to come.

  • Spring Turns a Corner

    In the Vermont hills, we’re finally moving from the gray browns of March into the soft green pyrotechnics of Spring: East Montpelier and Calais roads, and one beautiful but unfortunate ruffed grouse, on the road, Calais.

     

  • Field Ski

    Craftsbury Nordic Center, Craftsbury, VT.

  • Hay!

    Hay barn, Craftsbury, VT.

  • Christmas Tree, Albany, VT

  • Santacon, NYC

    I hate to overdo Santas, but I happened to be in New York during the annual flash mob known as Santacon, also known as the Santa Pub Crawl. Thousands of Santa wannabes followed Tweets around the city, from South Street Seaport to City Hall Park, Grand Central, the public library, Times Square and bars in between, depending on the Santa, since not all Santas are in it for the bars.  More pictures of the event and NYC in general are here. More about this red-and-white all over phenomenon is here.

     

     

  • You Definitely Better Not Shout

    Nearly 1,200 Santas champ at their beards before the start of the first Ri Ra’s Santa 5-k Run and Walk on Church Street in Burlington, VT, Sunday. Let’s see: Beard: check! Hat: check! Santa jacket: check! Santa Belt: check! Baggy Santa pants: check! And off they went, to benefit the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Below, those beards can be a problem. Maybe some starch?

  • Back to Grass

    So maybe we jumped the gun a little on the skiing thing. East Montpelier, VT, today.

  • Fall Roliage

    Rolling through a Vermont autumn on a dirt road in Albany, above, and at dawn, below, on Route 100 in Granville.

  • PEI

    North shore, Prince Edward Island.

     

     

  • Nice!

    The site has been down and on and off for nearly a month with assorted technical problems, including being hacked into, but things seem to be resolved now. So, here is Nice, France, and those blues are why they call it the Cote d’Azur.  More pictures from the incredibly varied landscape of the Fifth Republic are here. If you mouse-over the individual thumbnails in the galleries, you’ll get caption info.

     

  • The Reward

    The reward for struggling through all the snow and mud came today. This is the same hill that was in the “April in Vermont” post below, just a little more than month ago. Today it was bursting with the arrival of spring.

  • Easter Rarebit

    Easter, Worcester, VT.

     

  • Snow & Sky

    That’s it: the snow and the sky. We have a lot of both right now.