Hello everyone. Many of you are probably familiar with my name from the NARGS wiki. I have been a member of NARGS about 15 years but just recently joined AGS. I have been a director of NARGS this past three years but my term ends shortly. In addition, I belong to the American Iris Society and SIGNA (Iris breeding is one of my many passions). I am also the chair of the Newfoundland Chapter...several of you were here in 2005 when we hosted the annual meeting. For those of you who have not, St. John's is the cloudiest, wettest, snowiest and foggiest place in eastern North America (what a thing to brag about!). We get 60 inches of precip a year...difficult to grow dry-land alpines to say the least! But we do well with Himalayans! Besides alpines and iris, I also have a passion for ericaceous plants and orchids and when not in the garden, I'm off on exotic trips looking at birds (the UK people will no doubt be familiar with the term 'twitcher').
Currently I am the research horticulturist at the Memorial University of Newfoundland Botanical Garden. Just recently we put in a crevice garden, thanks to a generous donation from the NARGS Norman Singer Fund. It has been great fun growing alpines to fill up this new garden. See the attached pic for a recent photo.
I hope to actually met many of the UK NARGS members (and no doubt AGS and SRGS) when I speak at the 2011 International Meeting (my head is still spinning over that invite!).
Meanwhile, as the administrator for the NARGS wiki gallery, I cordially invite you to submit images. If you have any problems with the galleries, do not hesitate to contact me. And lastly, I am also delighted to be one of the moderators for this wonderful forum! (meanwhile I do need to get a life :D )
Todd
Comments
Re: Greetings from Newfoundland
Hi Mark, I am a computer neophtye in the big scheme. Hugh is our master computer guru. I'll get him to address your comments.
Re: Greetings from Newfoundland
Hi Todd, and welcome. I'm another newcomer although I've been a NARGS member for over 20 years and have been rock gardening for longer than that. I loved your crevice gardens and wondered if you would share what kinds of plants have done well for you in this habitat. I started building crevice gardens 2 years ago and am always looking for new plants to try.
Anne Spiegel
Re: Greetings from Newfoundland
Hi Anne,
I must say that everything I've tried in the crevice garden has thrived...in some cases too well! So my advice is to try just about anything. The only real concern is to select small-sized plants. I grew a few Aquilegia and Penstemon that proven too large thus was out of scale. Otherwise, the skies the limit.
Hello Todd,
Been busy over at SRGC Forum, but will starting playing around here too! I like your crevice garden in-the-round! Very nice. Regarding images, rather than the mechanism by which clicking on a thumbnail image resizes directly within the message, here on NARGS it launches a separate window sized to fit the image. Because of that mechanism, are there any image pixel size limits here on NARGS? On SRGC they suggest maximum 760 pixels wide x 555 pixels high (they don't mention the 3rd part of image size, which is DPI, which I assumed must be 72 dpi, because that is how images size themselves on the internet).
On your two garden views, the images are quite large in size. Fortunately, depending on one's browser, it might have an option to auto-resize to fit the entire image within a single window (as it does for me, using Windows Explorer 8), but for some people, they might be required to scroll left and right, up and down, to see the images, which would be a pain.
Also, since you are also a moderator, can I ask why there is a limitation of 3 photo uploads per message? A popular feature on the SRGC version of this wiki blog software, is that members can post up to 10 images per message, useful for doing an photo exposé on a genus for example. And since members typically abide by the suggested image size limitations, it seems to work and prevents the uploads from being overly large.
Thanks for listening. I look forward to participaing here.