Helen Stephenson's RHS Wisley Garden Pictures - May 9th, 2009 - General

On entrance to the gardens, you pass along the terrace in front of a main building. There's a wheelchair-friendly route which turns off before the main water feature with the fountain playing in it, but you can get all the way along the terrace for viewing before turning around. (This is important to us, because we may be returning later with Stephen's Mum.)

These pictures were taken looking back towards the main building when we were on our way towards the exit, but they make a good starting point for my mini-tour of RHS Wisley in here!

I was hoping for a people-free shot when I took the picture on the left; and was standing waiting until the last couple of people walked out of shot when an RHS employee appeared ringing a bell to signify closing time and people appeared from all directions!

The two pictures with the fountain playing were taken with the camera supported on a beanbag so that I could achieve a 1/10 second exposure and make the water in the fountain flow - much to Stephen's disgust, as he has a horror of "fluffy water". Actually, this exposure isn't anywhere near long enough to make the water "fluffy", and I think it looks realistic. The human eye doesn't see flowing water as a 1/250 second snapshot!

The next two pictures were taken from the terrace at the start of our visit and look down the water feature past the fountain to a covered area with wisteria climbing over it. Now here's some water captured in a split second: I don't think this looks as natural as my flowing water, but Stephen and I probably won't agree over this!

There was an area of vegetable gardens protected by a hedge, and the huge wicker onions in the picture on the left stand guard on the outside of the hedge. On the right is the main greenhouse with Stephen standing in front of it, while Stephen in close-up takes centre stage.

After visiting the greenhouse, we walked along a pathway by a series of narrow ponds and rustic bridges. There were fish in the ponds, and I would guess that the ponds were separate as the fish varieties were different in some ponds from others. The first three images are of Koi Carp which I would guess to have been up to 18" long, while the next three images are of less colourful fish. The white fellow was quite large though some of his black cohorts were under a foot long.

The terraced garden had several water features running through it. For the picture on the left, I set the camera to ISO 100, stopped the aperture down as far as it would go and relied on shake reduction, and I have to say that Pentax came up with the goods. For 1/10 second without external support, this is remarkably good.

Near to a walled garden was a statue of Pan playing on his pipes. I expended quite a bit of storage card space on him, and am relatively satisfied with the portrait I ended up with. I probably should have got out my older camera and fitted the infrared pass filter and seen what he looked like in infrared, but it was getting a bit close to closing time. Anyway, we know where to find him, and we expect to be back one of these days, so that's a possible picture for our next visit.