Marde’s Garden – video by Jean Wells
Marde Gardner Ross
Marde Ross, Economics B.A., Stanford University

As the proprietor of Marde Ross & Company, a distributor of flowering bulbs since 1985, I grow peonies and have a private “daffodil hill”  in Glen Ellen, California containing over 160,000 daffodils.

In 1985 in order to provide flower images for my catalog, I began studying photography. I use Nikon 35 mm and medium format Pentax equipment.

In 1997, after years of flower and garden photography, I began taking workshops from British photographers through the British company, Light and Land, and learned landscape photography with them in several European countries and the U.S., India, Hebrides Islands, Scotland as well as Yosemite, Death Valley and the red rocks of Utah and Arizona. I traveled  to Africa and Asia for wildlife, to Churchill, Canada, for polar bears, and Alaska for grizzlies and have been to all seven continents. Specific trips were made to Japan to catch the Japanese maples in Kyoto and to Giverney, France to photograph Monet’s water lilies on an artist’s day.

In 2004, I went to Alaska and Japan, and took Galen Rowell’s last two workshops using film before his untimely death. In 2006, I began using digital cameras in Antarctica and traveled to national parks in Chile and Argentina. Upon my return, I took digital printing and editing workshops from Stephen Johnson in Pacifica, California. In 2007 I went India for a month and also to Peru for a month and visited Machu Picchu and the Manu preserve in Amazonia. In 2008, India, Nepal and Bhutan were my destinations with my eldest son. That summer, after getting certified for scuba diving, I went to Papua New Guinea where I also photographed the old head hunter clans and dances.

Recently, in 2009, I visited Indonesia/Malaysia/Borneo and took some disappointing underwater shots (and plan to improve my underwater techniques) but got good images of Nepenthes, pitcher plants, on land in Borneo.

In the spring of 2010, I joined some of my British photographer friends for a workshop in the Lake District of the U.K. We had glorious days of beautiful light, and then I returned to London where I was caught in the Volcanic ash for three miserable days!

Most recently, I have spent a month in Turkey and visited Gobekli Tepe, the oldest area of worship known although it has yet to be explained.

I hope you enjoy my site.

Marde Ross

Exhibitions:
• London – 1998
• Palo Alto – 2000
• London – 2001
• Glen Ellen – 2008