I’ve been trying to get to grips with the video editing side of Adobe Elements. I’ve use Photoshop Elements for picture editing for many years and through several versions of the program but only on my recent update of it did I plump for the video version as part of the package.
Like the picture editing program, it has far more capability than I will ever need or will ever discover. It’s nice to learn some new tricks though so I’ve put together a short film of the garden as it looks now, dipping in to a few fun techniques on the way. Who knows where it might lead.
garden ruminations 
Wonderful video! The birdsong is the perfect background music for it, and the captions great. Your garden Is an inspiration. I love the meandering paths, diversity, and the lack of lawn. I’m slowly but surely removing all of the lawn in mine while putting in a few more paths. Only problem is my garden is too small to hold all the plants I’d like it to!
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Thank you. Too small a garden is a familiar problem, though I’m about at the age when realistically it’s about the right size and dreading the looming prospect of it becoming too much to cope with.
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I can relate to that! Although I wish for a bigger garden, I know it’s just not practical. Luckily it’s on a gentle slope, not steep, which is a decided advantage as we age. We are trying to create a garden that we can hopefully manage well into our eighties. The garden is our oasis. We might just have to rethink the vegetable beds and make them a lot higher..
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Sometimes I worry about how I’m going to cope when I get older but I think I could be quite philosophical about watching it all spiral out of control and back to nature. I’d keep a bit of Roundup to hand to keep really weedy things down a bit but otherwise let it go.
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Ditto! My other inspiration garden jus around the corner went a little ‘wild’ as it got too much for the two owners to manage anymore. But then again it was about 2-3 times the size of ours. He was 86 when they sold up and moved to a retirement village in Maroochydore. I’d like to think that this garden will look fabulous as a ‘wild’ garden. A huge consolation is that there are older folks, some in their 90’s, up here who cope, and just get in a garden service to do the basic tidy up.
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I’ve got a good 25 years before I need to worry then.
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Very nice video Jim! And this bird song without car traffic throughout the video …. good job! (And so many pretty plants here and there!)
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Gotta get up early to be a sound engineer!
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Your video was fantastic. Your titles looked great, and it all flowed smoothly. It has been years since I tried to edit a video, and it was not easy. These days I just clip them to show the best part.
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Birds are noisy!
False Solomon’s seal is native here, but never blooms like that!
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We have raucous noisy birds like rooks and magpies, and shrill noisy birds like on the video, mostly blackbird I think. Having heard tui song in New Zealand it’s hard to think of our “songbirds” in quite the same way again. Then again, I’ve been woken by a dawn chorus of rainbow lorikeets in Australia on many occasions and they really are noisy. The false Solomon’s seal was in shade but I cut the tree down so it’s in sun. It’s flowering its head off but it’s not happy and it’s half the height it used to be.
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Ghetto birds can be an annoyance in the Los Angeles region, especially since I sleep on the roof while I am there.
It seems to me that false Solomon’s seal is difficult to move, at least in the wild. It is so deep down. It is difficult to locate while dormant (when it gets moved). It grows in odd places, and I do not even try to move it. I just pull the foliage up until it dies.
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Cornwall isn’t famous for ghettoes, thankfully, so ghetto birds are rare migrants. Oddly enough, there was one flying around yesterday evening.
I have three forms of false Solomon’s seal, the best of which is a form called ‘Emily Moody’. Dan Hinkley suggests the western (tetraploid) form is much showier than the eastern version so I assume all three are western forms. I moved one of them some years back, it took a while to recover but I don’t recall it being too arduous a task. Funny how other peoples wild flowers always seem more desirable than your own.
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The depth is likely a response to the arid climate. It may not go any lower than necessary, so if it gets water through summer, it could be shallower. Many perennials here are very deep.
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Very good video Jim. You have awakened my interest in Photoshop Elements. Did you add the birdsong ? Your garden is quieter than mine. Spring festival is going great guns, best I’ve seen. Before it became a posh cafe & gift shop you always did have a very good selection of pines at The Duchy Nursery. Your garden is an education in how to make things interesting on a relatively flat plot – my nearest and dearest couldn’t do without grass – do you suffer much frost ? Having taken plant pictures with my old Canon for years, then using a more complex Lumix and finally down to a Moto smart phone the difference in colour rendition is surprising. The old Canon is still the most accurate. Thanks for lightening the day, happy gardening.
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Thanks Mike. I find Photoshop Elements to be a fantastic program but I’ve been using it a long time and to start with you really need to get a book and work through all that it’s capable of. I did add the birdsong, recorded at a quieter time of day but the sound otherwise would have been fragmented because I’d mixed animated stills in with the video clips and they had no sound. We seem to get less frost with every year that passes, a completely frost free one is only a matter of time. It’s interesting how some things start growing weeks, even months too early and other things are barely affected. Our native plants aren’t easily fooled, they must rely heavily on day length. Funny how people cling to grass, having lived without any for twenty years or more, to put it back would be crazy. We never wish we had a lawn, ever.
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The garden is looking really good Jim. But at this time of year, in a great garden, it’s the birdsong that gives me the most pleasure. Thank you for sharing it.
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Thank you. I felt obliged to confess to a measure of subterfuge with the birdsong, see my reply to Noelle.
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Nice one Jim. The bird song is lovely too. Details captions etc very nice…and can see you are trying some fancy bits at the end. Enjoyed this very much, Thanks.
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Glad you enjoyed it. I should own up to cheating with the bird song. Some of the clips had birdsong and/or background noise, especially wind noise, some clips were animated still photos with no sound. I recorded about 15 minutes of dawn chorus a week ago, just birds, no traffic. I turned the volume down on the movie clips sound and superimposed the dawn chorus. It gave me a continuous sound track with enough other noises to make it sound authentic. They used to say that the camera never lies: nowadays it’s the biggest liar of all.
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Fantastic! Loved it!
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