Gardening with my camera phone

No, I wasn't digging up dandelions with my camera phone. I was teaching it Latin.

Naturally as both a camera phone guru and an owl, I attended the ancient university of Oxford. Here my tutors made a valiant attempt to fill my head with useful Latin tags. I can't say they had a great deal of success. The one I remember best is Puella in herba est, which so far hasn't come in terribly handy. It means 'The girl is in the grass' (or 'on the grass', depending on whether the Romans were in the habit of mowing their lawns).

The people at the Royal Horticultural Society could probably tell me. I was wandering in a dream of delight through their gardens some months ago. To start with, this state of bliss was rudely interrupted at frequent intervals. The sequence went something like this.

See an especially fetching plant. Remove gloves. (It was a frosty winter's day.) Find notepad. Fish for pencil. Unearth reading glasses. Locate and peer at lengthy Latin label. Laboriously write this down. Defrost fingers. Add description of plant (which will probably be meaningless without a picture).

Daft, really, when all the time I had my camera phone with me.

Admittedly my first attempt at horticultural phone photography had not been too happy

I'd taken this picture the previous summer with my Treo 600 camera phone. It always helps to be able to read the label.

I rather loved the rainbow colours on this second try with the Treo

...But enough of such frivolities. On this one you can read the words. We seem to be looking at a vulgar purple cable car, but who's quarreling with the experts? If that's its name, it's staying on the list of plants for my projected gold award winning black and silver garden.

It was time to pull out my Nokia 6600 camera phone and do some winter snapping.

Luckily I'm better at English than I am at Latin, so I can fill in the blank on this one.

Small low growing subjects are the same scale as RHS labels.

Larger plants need two shots

One closeup of the name.

One of the whole vegetable in all its glory.

These days I have a better camera phone - well, two. A P990 (2 megapixel) and a K800 (3 megapixel), both by Sony Ericsson. Both camera phones have a macro setting and will render a very sharp closeup of the label. The only fiddle is switching between macro and normal view when the plant is too big to include in the label photo. That's most of them.

I'm now awaiting an Apple iPhone, which hasn't arrived yet in the UK. Bother. I don't believe the iphone has a macro setting for the camera. Oh well, that solves the fiddling problem. With its respectable 2 megapixel camera I'm waiting eagerly to see how good the iphone is at gardening.

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