Making a habit of photographing your own garden -- or gardens you visit -- helps you seize beautiful moments, tell stories and bring your ideas into focus.

Taking pictures sharpens your eye for details: for the deeply quilted texture of a hosta leaf, the bubbling exuberance of a cluster of cherry tomatoes or the playful face of a pansy. It helps you to be more aware of the changing patterns of sun and shadow across your garden. Garden photography also helps you appreciate views and perspectives, and exercises your design sense.

Professional photographers with expensive cameras and bags full of fancy lenses have an edge over enthusiastic amateurs, but great garden photography really starts with your own eye. You don't need a high-priced camera to capture a great image -- even the pros often shoot pictures with their phones, with beautiful results.

A picture-perfect day begins at sunrise, when the light is soft. The right light is crucial. Rob Cardillo, a professional photographer in Ambler, Pennsylvania, who has been photographing gardens and gardeners for more than 20 years for magazines, books and newspapers, calls light "the magical seasoning" in garden photography. "You can make something out of nothing in great light," Cardillo says. "You can make an average garden look stupendous."

In early morning light, colorful gardens are at their best. Your eye can appreciate a garden in the bright light of the midday sun, but a camera sees things differently; that brilliant light looks harsh through a camera lens, and it washes out the colors. Get up with the sun, Cardillo suggests, and "exploit great light."

Gardens also glow in the golden hour before sunset. Cardillo's rule of thumb for afternoon photography is, "I don't shoot until my shadow is longer than I am."

Taking pictures in your own garden is a great way to think about its design and document its development. Walking around with a camera in your hand allows you to take visual notes rapidly and easily. What better way to catalog your collection of irises, asters or garden art? Use a camera to capture the colors and character of seasonal combinations of plants in flower beds or in pots, or to record the story of your vegetable garden through the summer.

Before-and-after pictures of garden projects are also useful. When you're using your camera to document the construction of a pergola or the process of laying stepping stones, it helps to write down the important steps along the way and to shoot each one from several angles. The presence of people adds scale to these shots and brings the projects to life. Remember, you'll have many opportunities to show how your new garden feature looks once it is finished, but you have only one chance to capture the excitement it as it is being built.

When you visit a botanical garden or go on a garden tour, a camera will help you think about what you see and what you like. Pathways naturally guide your feet, but let your eye and your lens wander away from the path to catch great views and shoot the details as you walk through a garden.

Keep the camera in your hands. Frame your shots carefully, defining your subject and blocking out distractions. Don't just shoot randomly: If you spend a minute thinking about the best angle for a shot and then composing it through the lens, the results will be much more satisfying. Take your time. Wait for people to move out of the way.

On a garden tour, you might try to develop a running photographic theme, shooting different kinds of water features, for example, or designs for patios, or plant combinations in flowerpots. Of course, with a digital camera, you can keep several themes going at once and sort the pictures out later.

Cardillo likes to shoot from above, looking down on a scene, and from the low angles, through the greenery -- these are "bird's-eye" and "worm's-eye" views. From above, you eliminate problems like electrical lines. A worm's-eye view focuses on the foreground and makes even small plants look "grand and heroic," he says.

Practice makes perfect, Cardillo says. "Get one camera and use it. Make it second nature." Use the automatic settings while you get to know your camera, and "then learn how to tweak that," he says. "Figure out how to take everything off automatic, and try manual focus and exposure." His images in "The Layered Garden," by David Culp, with Adam Levine, unfold the beauty of Culp's own garden, seen through many seasons and from many angles.

Using a point-and-shoot camera or a phone to take pictures is great practice, too. Shooting with a phone "keeps me on my toes," Cardillo says. "It's like I'm doing visual push-ups, keeping my eye active and strengthened by looking for photos everywhere."

Cardillo's favorite garden photography "captures a garden moment," he says. These moments are more than a simple photographic record of the plants and lines of a garden's design. A great series of pictures is a distillation of your passing experience of the color, texture and light in a garden: the photographs capture the mood and the magic. It won't always be easy: You may have to get up on a ladder, lie down in the grass or wander off the beaten path. When the moment comes, grab it: Put down your trowel and pick up your camera.

SIDEBAR

PICTURE PERFECT

When you photograph your garden regularly, you're documenting its development and your own changing relationships with plants and design. Pictures don't just freeze an image; they capture the passage of time. Here are some tips and ideas from Rob Cardillo to help you get the most out of your garden photographs:

-- Take a walk around a garden before you start shooting. Look at it from different angles. Find the obvious, designed views but also the unexpected angles.

-- Get an early start. "If you show up at dawn, you just get a magical look," Cardillo says.

-- Practice "the one-eyed squint," Cardillo suggests. Close one eye, and imagine what you're looking at is two dimensional, instead of three-dimensional. "It helps me put things together in a graphic way, with splashes of color and lines and forms," he says.

-- Get to know your camera. "Cameras today are sophisticated, small and menu-driven, and they have too many little buttons," Cardillo says. "You really have to read the owner's manual."

-- It's natural to be drawn to close-ups of flowers, but you need overall shots and medium-range vignettes to tell the story of a garden. Taking overall shots provides the necessary setting for the fine details.

-- Let your view-finder help you garden. If you are constantly working to block a view of the neighbor's rickety fence or a power pole, it's time to think about how you can use plants or design features to make the scene more beautiful.

-- Include people in your garden photos. People add scale and interest, Cardillo says. You may be more successful with a phone than with a fancy camera. "There's less technology and equipment between you and your subject," Cardillo says. "You can get a more genuine expression."

-- Whatever angle you choose, "fill your frame with beautiful things," Cardillo says.

SOURCES

To learn more about garden photography and get some practice, along with professional advice, take a class. Public gardens and botanic gardens often offer classes for photographers at every level of ability. Some even offer classes just for photography using cellphones.

Rob Cardillo and other photographers teach photography workshops at Chanticleer Gardens (chanticleergarden.org), outside Philadelphia in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Longwood Gardens (longwoodgardens.org), in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, also offers garden photography classes through the seasons. An Internet search on "garden photography classes" will lead you to many possibilities.

(For editorial questions, please contact Universal Uclick at -uueditorial@amuniversal.com)

Monarch butterflies have been in the news lately, but for all the wrong reasons. Loss of habitat has led to a precipitous drop in the monarch population. The brilliant orange-and-black monarchs are our most widely recognized butterfly, but they need our help.

It's easy to make a welcoming spot for them -- and for all butterflies -- in your garden: Plant the flowers they love. When you plant flowers that provide for their needs, you're essentially growing your own butterflies.

"We tell everybody we talk to that there are things they can do to help monarchs -- and what's good for monarchs is good for pretty much every pollinator," says Katie-Lyn Bunney, coordinator for the Monarchs in the Classroom program at the University of Minnesota's Monarch Lab. "The first thing we recommend is to plant milkweeds."

For monarchs, the most important function of milkweeds is as a host plant for the caterpillars: Milkweed is the only food monarch caterpillars eat. Many other pollinators also favor its nutritious nectar.

Milkweeds were once common roadside plants. They were plentiful in the margins of farm fields and in the wide-open spaces of rural areas. Development has claimed the habitat of milkweeds in many areas, and modern farming practices do not leave much room for anything but cash crops. Bit by bit, it has added up to a disaster for the monarch.

Home gardeners in cities, in suburbs and in the country can take an important part in this environmental rescue project: Many milkweeds are also terrific garden plants. The orange-and-yellow blooms of butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) are particularly striking, and it is easy to grow.

The "Bring Back the Monarch" campaign of Monarch Watch, another program dedicated to restoring butterfly habitat and reviving the monarch population, is working to restore 20 important milkweed species to their native ranges throughout the United States. The campaign, which started in 2010, is launching a "Milkweed Market" this year to help gardeners find appropriate milkweed species for their area. In the process, they're promoting healthy habitats for all pollinators.

Milkweeds are crucial, but, Bunney says, "for anyone looking to plant a pollinator or butterfly garden, you want to make sure there is nectar throughout the gardening season. If you only have some flowers in June or July, then you're not going to have butterflies all through the season." Plan ahead, and try to grow flowers to attract butterflies from the first spring bloom until the last flower succumbs to frost. Bunney recommends other native plants, too. Growing black-eyed Susans, coreopsis, coneflowers and asters -- lovely garden plants all -- is a great way to get started on a butterfly garden. Many summer annual flowers, even if they are not natives, also attract butterflies. Butterflies love zinnias as much as most gardeners do.

Good garden design benefits butterflies and other pollinators. Butterflies are attracted to plants growing in clusters, and garden designers often recommend the same technique: When you plant three or five plants of one species in a group, they have more visual impact. "Bright blotches of color are good," Bunney says.

Butterflies also need shelter. Tall shrubs, fences -- anything to break the wind -- will make life a little easier for butterflies. You could mix tall flowers, such as phlox or milkweeds, with low mounds of verbenas, for example, to create layers of nectar-rich flowers and at the same time provide some protection from wind. Planting densely also makes it easier to care for plants, and it helps shade out weeds.

You don't have to have a big garden to capture butterflies' attention. Alan Branhagen, director of horticulture at Powell Gardens, a botanic garden just outside Kansas City, worked with a local wholesale nursery this year on a design for a small and easy butterfly garden, using just three plants: butterfly milkweed, tall verbena and parsley. You could plant these together in a flowerpot, in a flower bed by the front door or at a garden gate. Parsley and other plants in the parsley family are the preferred food for swallowtail butterflies.

Branhagen designed another, more elaborate butterfly garden with purple coneflowers, catmint, Joe-pye weed, blazing star and black-eyed Susans.

It only takes a few plants to make a difference, because your friends and neighbors will be inspired by your pretty butterfly garden, Bunney says. If you join one of the monarch-support groups and post an official-looking sign designating your garden as a waystation for monarchs, "it gets people thinking about what they can do in their own garden," she says. "They will see there is a purpose to this." Before you know it, the neighbors will be making room for colorful butterfly-garden plants, too. The whole neighborhood will look the better for it, and you will be giving local and migrating butterfly populations a big boost.

SIDEBAR

KNOW YOUR MONARCHS' MIGRATION PATTERNS

The monarch butterflies we see in central and eastern North America migrate up from Mexico every spring. The journey begins when the temperature warms up enough for the first nectar plants to come into bloom. The butterflies breed as they travel north. Each monarch only lives for between two and six weeks, but, between April and August, four successive generations of monarch butterflies will have carried on the journey north. In the fall, the migration is back toward the mild climate of Mexico, where one generation overwinters.

West of the Rocky Mountains, monarchs migrate to locations along the Pacific coast. Hosts for the caterpillars and nectar plants for butterflies are crucial to both regional migrations at every stage of the monarchs' life cycle.

Monarch butterflies are "a flagship species. They are well-known and beautiful and people love them," says Katie-Lyn Bunney, who works with the Monarch Lab at the University of Minnesota. But all pollinators benefit from the effort to protect and restore monarch habitat, she says.

SOURCES

-- Monarch Joint Venture (monarchjointventure.org) is a good place to start learning more about the importance of monarch butterflies and other pollinators. The site includes links to many monarch and pollinator web sites, and it supplies butterfly garden ideas, lists of plants and places to find them.

-- Monarch Watch (monarchwatch.org) hopes to distribute thousands of milkweed seedlings this year through its Milkweed Market; if you do not know of a source for milkweed in your area, this website will help you find milkweed plants nearby.

-- Grow your own butterfly garden and have it certified as a Monarch Waystation through the Monarch Watch program. Almost 8,000 waystations have been registered. The organization also sells a waystation seed kit with tips and ideas, and a monarch waystation sign to display in your garden.

-- Monarch Lab (www.monarchlab.org) is a particularly rich site full of resources for teachers, students and schools.

(For editorial questions, please contact Clint Hooker at chooker@amuniversal.com or the Universal Uclick Editorial Department at -uueditorial@amuniversal.com)

Vegetable gardens don't have to be huge to be productive. The real measure of success is being able to nip out into the garden to pick fresh food when it's just at its peak.

My friend Henry, an "old geezer" in his own words, has a smallish backyard garden these days, but years ago he lived on a farm, and "when I needed more room for crops, I just put a plow on the tractor and plowed up more space," he says. He still grows lots of different crops, but on a scale that requires neither plow nor tractor. He grows all he needs, and no more. During the gardening season, he and his wife eat produce from their garden every day.

There's an art to getting the most out of a small vegetable garden. It involves being realistic about the space available, how much time you have and, of course, what you like to eat. When you concentrate your efforts on a few crops you love, taking care of the garden is not a chore.

"If you have a small space, you want to plant things that don't take up a lot of room and have a big return," says Renee Shepherd, owner of Renee's Seeds. Plant your favorite herbs, she says, grow compact varieties of your favorite vegetables, and grow upward: Let cucumbers, melons and squash plants climb a trellis to make the most of the space and light.

"You can have a wonderful kitchen garden of the things you like to eat, and you can plant it for spring, summer and fall," she says.

Size is in the eye of the beholder, of course. Don Schreiner, a gardener in Overland Park, Kan., has six raised beds, each 6 feet by 6 feet, with room for tomatoes, lettuce, okra and beets. An entire raised bed is devoted to basil. But even just one bed, 4 feet on a side, will produce an impressive harvest of beans, greens and tomatoes. You can grow lettuce, eggplant, tomatoes, squash and cucumbers in flowerpots on a patio. In a window box on a balcony, you have plenty of room for carrots and arugula.

When space is limited, try to make your choices count, Shepherd advises. If you grow beets, you can eat both the roots and the tender leaves. Lettuce is easy and prolific, which is good, because you'll be eating it just about every day. Swiss chard and other greens produce over a very long season, so you get a lot of bang for your buck. Let your herbs bloom, Shepherd says. "If you want butterflies in your garden, that's an easy way to attract them."

Mark Gawron is in charge of the Heartland Harvest Garden, a 12-acre landscape devoted to all things edible, at Powell Gardens outside Kansas City, Mo. Inspiration is cultivated here in abundance. This year, Gawron is planning to show off the many ways small-space gardeners can take advantage of trellises and arbors: "We're going to do hanging melons; it's great for small spaces." Melon plants grown on trellises produce smaller fruit than melons that sprawl, he says, but more of them.

Edible pansies, calendulas or nasturtiums add lots of color and texture to a small-space garden, Gawron says, and they especially make front-yard vegetable gardens "appealing to your eye, and to your neighbor's." Shepherd recommends cosmos and zinnias. Gawron recommends growing lettuce as an edge in a flower garden, and slipping a few broccoli plants in among the daisies. "No space is too small. You will be surprised by how much you can grow," he says.

Small vegetable gardens are naturally easier to take care of than big plots. There is not as much room for weeds, and the weeding -- which is inevitable, no matter what -- takes much less time than you'd expend on a big garden. It's easier to manage pests, too: When you have only six broccoli plants, picking off a few caterpillars is no big deal. In a 30-foot row of broccoli, it can be overwhelming.

To get the most out of small gardens, you still have to give plants room to grow. It's easy to convince yourself that more plants will produce more harvest, but that's not always true, according to Shepherd. "If you don't thin your seedlings, you are torturing them," she says, "and they will never grow as vigorously."

Soil enriched with compost provides basic nutrients and micronutrients, but crops still need fertilizer, even in a flowerpot, Shepherd says. "Just a couple of times in the summertime will make a very big difference in productivity."

One of the most satisfying things about a small vegetable garden is the thrill of watching something grow from the time you plant the seed until you put it on your plate. When you start with a seed, "seeing it germinate is always a miracle," says Shepherd, "and then having it grow into a big plant makes you feel self-sufficient and self-reliant like nothing else can." The harvest from a small garden is a big deal.

Sources:

-- Renee's Garden Seeds, www.reneesgarden.com, includes many varieties chosen especially for small gardens. Look for the flowerpot symbol.

-- Gardener's Supply Co., www.gardeners.com, sells planters, raised beds and supplies for patio, deck and small-space gardens.

(For editorial questions, please contact Clint Hooker at chooker@amuniversal.com or the Universal Uclick Editorial Department at -uueditorial@amuniversal.com)