Hi, Cameron - DW and I visit Seattle at least once a year, and we spent a few days in Victoria last May, but I don't know much about the San Juans or Vancouver. I think that late spring through summer weather tends to be the best around there. Garden-wise, number one on my list would be the Butchart Gardens just north of Victoria. It is just amazing; you can get a great afternoon tea there, and I would go back in a flash. Figure on spending at least half a day there, and if roses are important to you, go later than I did. I've put a link below to my Butchart pictures that I posted in the Gallery. Another nice place to visit if you are in Seattle looking for something to do is the U.W. Botanic Gardens. It's very low-key, uncrowded and I especially liked their Japanese garden and koi ponds. There must be hundreds of koi in there. In Seattle, we have stayed at the Silver Cloud Inn at the east end of Lake Union and enjoyed it, but it's not very centrally located and one of the downtown hotels would probably be more fun if you're doing any shopping. In Victoria, we stayed at the Grand Pacific and it was really nice, but there are also great bed and breakfast places. Friends of ours stayed in one and I thought it looked more fun than a hotel. Hope this helps a little bit and I'd be happy to answer any more questions if I can. ThinMan Here is a link that might be useful: Victoria Pics

I too am in Australia (Adelaide) and have had huge problems this year with my somniferum poppies being eaten and the pattern of decimation changing. I have been growing somniferums for years from seed collected the previous year & have never had any such problems. I thought I would share my experiences over the last 5 week period and the strategies I used & outcomes that may, or may not be helpful to others. As I just love these poppies I was checking & photographing them morning & evening as new ones were developing & opening. I have poppies growing in four areas of the back garden, sown in succession to stagger & extend their flowering period. This area is fully fenced & there are no children. We do have possums in the neighbourhood & we've seen rats running along our fence top, but neither is anything new, usually we loose peaches to them, despite simple mechanical deterrants. For the first time this season, we've seen earwigs in the garden. As we have a dog, we don't use any poisons in the garden. The problem started when the first area of poppies was flowering and the spent flowers were developing into big, fat glossy seed pods that I was looking forward to harvesting when ripe to sow next year. One morning two big fat green pods were completely gone, the bare stems standing tall & straight, as if the pod had just been cut off the stem immediately underneath it. There was no evidence of the pod or any droppings on the ground. There was no damage to the rest of the poppy plants, or to nearby rose bushes, so based on this, I discounted it being a possum. No other poppy foliage had been eaten. The next morning there were a further 9 seed pods that were missing from the top of their stems. At first I thought it might be birds, but this was happening overnight. I then bagged all of the developing seed pods in nylon mesh bags (that onions are sold in here in Aus) but the seed pods continued to disappear overnight. A motion sensitive camera set up in the area captured both possum(s) and rat(s) near to this area, but no footage of the seed pods actually being eaten. Six various mouse & rat traps were set in the garden areas, laced with peanut butter, but not one mouse or rat has been captured, although peanut butter has gone, traps have been activated & even turned upside down. Camera footage even captured a rat jumping over a trap! I then covered all of the developing seed pods with sleeves made from nylon stockings & when I ran out of those, with sleeves fashioned with tightly woven but breathable mesh cloth kitchen wipes (eg Chux). This seemed to work, for a while. Then the developing flower buds started to disappear overnight, sometimes the bud only taken from the top of the stem, then the complete stem and bud was taken from where the stem emerged from the plant foliage. Then the sleeved pods & stems were eaten through the stockings, sometimes the internals of the seed pods were eaten, leaving only part of their shells. On seeing some earwigs on some of the sleeves I set an earwig trap containing olive oil & soy sauce, as described on a gardening forum, half buried in the garden. I also sprayed the poppy foliage below the sleeves & those flowering poppies that weren't sleeved with Pest Oil, and that night there did not appear to be any further losses. No earwigs were caught but the next day, during daylight hours, the entire plastic earwig trap went missing! It was sighted in a very narrow space behind a garden shed, (inaccessible to our dog), and when retrieved there were multiple holes eaten through the plastic, including a complete section in the base of the container. We attributed this to a rat. The Pest Oil application only worked for one night, then open flowers started to disappear overnight, mostly stems and all, and one large strong plant was broken in half, which we attributed to a possum, given the damage to the plant and the proximity to the peach tree. The culprits then started eating poppy foliage, destroying several smaller plants. Then they took to eating through the base of poppy plants close to the ground, so the plant would fall over with the sleeved pods at ground level, the sleeves being removed & the pods eaten. And then a couple days ago when I was in the garden, in broad daylight, I saw a big rat run up the stalk of a poppy plant to the base of the long sleeved pods & was surprised that the plant did not even sway with the weight of the rat, and there was no damage to the foliage it had climbed. I haven't been able to reapply Pest Oil in recent days as we have been experiencing a heatwave. This morning I am quite deflated that about 60 or so remaining sleeved pods have been eaten, by one of these means, including for the first time eating through the Chux sleeves, which until now had proved superior to the nylon stockings. So I am now resigned that I will have very few mature seed pods for sowing next year, so very disappointing. My conclusions. Probably a combination of culprits, but by far the biggest problem I think is rats. Very clever, determined rats, who have obviously got a taste now for all parts of the Somniferum plant & have managed to circumnavigate all my attempts to save my poppy pods & flowers this season.

The leaves are now mostly opened, so when I'm in the woods, it's almost too dark for my Canon EOS 40D. Guess I'll have to either upgrade cameras or start taking photos on the edges of the woods. Here's a Scarlet Tanager I took on Friday in the woods above our pond. I had to heavily edit/lighten the photo From 5-12-09 birds but the woods had more light the week before, a different tanager, same logging road, less editing From May 2009 To see the rest of the photos in the albums, doubleclick on each photos, click "Slideshow." You can edit the slideshow to include labels or not, or choose number of seconds per photo, etc.

Thank you for your kind comments! We visited the fish hatchery last weekend but didn't see one migrant. Yesterday morning we hit the bird lottery, though. A rare migrant and two lifers, as well as a warbler. I took so many photos (over 1700) that my computer has been barely functional, so have had trouble working on the photos. Time to install a second hard drive, just for photos (sigh)