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From “An Impression of Chrysanthemums” in Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way:

“Among the bouquet of chrysanthemum-loving French Impressionists was the artist and gardener Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894)…. From an upper-class family background in Paris, he had started painting and drawing when the family bought a second country property in Yerres, also to the south of Paris….

“Caillebotte’s most famous image of chrysanthemums, painted in 1893 (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), was titled Chrysanthemums in the Garden at Petit-Gennevilliers, making it clear that these are plants grown in the gardens and not bought in as a still-life ‘prop’….

“It is an unusual close-up view of densely packed blossoms in colours ranging from white through yellows, golds and apricots to plums and rubies. The heads hang heavy and the grey-green foliage appears slightly wilted, as if battered by the sun of Normandy. As with so many of Caillebotte’s paintings, the viewer is at an odd angle to the subject, raised and slightly slanting, and the mass is cut off on the top right and the left as if to admit defeat when trying to crowd them all in….

“A rather different painting of chrysanthemums, less full and with tones of whitish blues and browns, was accomplished by Caillebotte in the same year, entitled White and Yellow Chrysanthemums, 1893…. This painting belonged to Monet during his lifetime. In return Caillebotte owned a still-life of chrysanthemums by Monet, one of those rejected by France in the bequest settlement following Monet’s death in 1926. Caillebotte also painted cut chrysanthemums, as Monet had done earlier in his career, most famously in a group of several Japanese ceramics on a bamboo woven table.”

From “Let Us Pray for Darkness O Sparking Stars” in Call Me By My True Names by Thich Nhat Hanh:

If, one day, you need me,
and I should be absent,
please listen deeply to the murmur of a spring
or the thunder of a cascade.
Contemplate the yellow chrysanthemums,
the violet bamboo,
the white cloud,
or the clear, peaceful moon.

All of them tell the same story
I tell the singing birds today.

From “Autumn” in Poems by Norine Spurling:

Yellow mums spatter the garden
gentle Monet spots of color
stars in a sea of green
they dance in the late-day breeze
nodding toward the northern sky
quivering at the scent of autumn
that giddy emissary of brooding winter….

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Hello!

This is the third of three posts featuring photographs of white and yellow mums and daisies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, from November and December 2024. The previous posts are White and Yellow, Mums and Daisies (1 of 3) and White and Yellow, Mums and Daisies (2 of 3).

Imagine my surprise when testing the links in this post that Oakland Cemetery recently launched a redesigned website — which looks pretty nice. But I was even more surprised that this redesign no longer includes a separate page with photographs and articles focused on their gardens, a page I frequently linked to in my posts. Actually, I’ve linked to it in 186 posts — which of course means that now I have 186 broken links to their ghosted garden page. Ah, well, these things do happen, I guess, and: I’m not gonna fix ’em! Unless eventually I do, which I may or may not.

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I’m not terribly familiar with different schools of painting, except perhaps the Hudson River School which I studied while pursuing my history degree several hundred years ago. But since I provided a quote about Monet and Impressionism in the previous post (see White and Yellow, Mums and Daisies (2 of 3)), I enjoyed reading of Gustave Caillebotte, about whom an excerpt appears at the top of this post. His paintings strike me as a little closer to realism than those of Monet — though both painters rely on our fleeting impressions of light and color in their framing of chrysanthemum flowers. If you’d like to see the two paintings mentioned above — Chrysanthemums in the Garden at Petit-Gennevilliers and White and Yellow Chrysanthemums — you can find them on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s page:

Caillebotte’s Chrysanthemums; or, Unexpected Encounters with Impressionist Interior Design.

Thanks for taking a look!

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From “An Impression of Chrysanthemums” in Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way:

“In 1890 the dramatist and art critic Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) wrote to his friend and fellow plant lover Claude Monet:

“‘If you can send me a few more dahlias, yes, I would like that, And next year I’ll make you a collection of chrysanthemums I have which are all wonderful with crazy shapes and beautiful colours, I found them at a brilliant gardeners in Le Vaudreuil.’

“Their correspondence reflected the fascination that the Impressionist artist-gardeners had for the exotic chrysanthemum. Monet collected Japanese prints and ceramics, which also appear in his paintings at Giverny and still decorate the house there…. Chrysanthemums were an especial favourite of Monet (1840-1926) with their links to Japan and Japanese art traditions….

“Other Oriental plants favoured by Monet included bamboo, tree peony and the delicate blooms of the Japanese cherry trees. Monet used his gardens to experiment with colours and hues as well as horticulture, indeed the writer Marcel Proust famously recorded that Giverny was a ‘garden of tones and colours even more than of flowers, a garden which must be less the former florist-garden than, if I can put it that way, a colourist-garden’….

“Chrysanthemums were the perfect autumn flower for this effect, especially when planted in the bold masses that Monet favoured…. Between 1878 and 1883, working from Argenteuil, then Vetheuil and eventually at Giverny, Claude Monet produced some twenty floral still-lifes — including four entirely focused on the chrysanthemum.”

From “Thirteen White Chrysanthemums” by Chou Meng-tieh in The Isle Full of Noises: Modern Chinese Poetry from Taiwan, edited and translated by Dominic Cheung:

I partake of the universe’s feelings,
I partake of the maternal water and earth,
The paternal wind and sun.
I partake of you, chrysanthemums!
When grass sears, or frost deadens,
You bloom neither for one nor for everyone;
You, with sleepless eyes of autumn,
Multipetaled, multilayered,
The hearts of those who are dead you brighten
With your hosts of cold, flickering fires.

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Hello!

This is the second of three posts featuring photographs of white and yellow mums and daisies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, taken just before the onset of our last winter. The previous post is White and Yellow, Mums and Daisies (1 of 3).

If the quotation up-top about Monet, his gardens, and Impressionism interested you, you can see some of his chrysanthemum paintings here…

List of paintings by Claude Monet

… by using your browser’s find function to search for the word “chrysanthemum.”

There will be a number of paintings of chrysanthemums in vases, but once you get to those Monet created in 1897, you’ll see the four paintings of mums in a garden referred to above. To my photographer’s eyeballs, the paintings allude to close-up photographs I might take to fill the frame with flowers, while changing the camera’s zoom level to get shots at different distances… as I often do, right here!

Thanks for taking a look!

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From “The Honourable and Imperial Flower” in Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way:

“There is a legend that the original ‘golden daisies of the Orient’ first arrived in Japan from China in a boat washed ashore on an island in the Japanese archipelago. Within the boat were twelve maidens and twelve boys, carrying a precious cargo of chrysanthemums which they were to trade for the Japanese herb of youth in order to save the life of their revered Chinese emperor. Finding the island uninhabited, the travellers settled down to build an empire and plant the chrysanthemums. As legends often do, this one contains both elements of truth and unanswered mysteries. The story correctly puts the birthplace of chrysanthemums in China and also rather neatly explains the tradition that the flowers were for centuries the exclusive possession of the Japanese emperor….

“However, once in Japan, by whatever means, the chrysanthemum was embedded in the heart of the cultural and political system. In the twelfth century the Japanese emperor Go-Toba (1180–1239) took the flower as his personal imperial symbol, and by the late thirteenth century it had become the official flower and symbol of the royal family, who from then onwards were said to inhabit the Chrysanthemum Throne. In the castle of Osaka in Kyoto, constructed by the Japanese leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536/7–1598), is an apartment known as the Chrysanthemum Room or the Kiku-no-ma, which was used as a waiting room for guests. It is decorated with yellow and white chrysanthemums and autumn grasses on a gold background…. Soon everything associated with the rule of the country, from money to warships, had the chrysanthemum symbol embossed or printed upon it…”

From “My Father” in Cartwheel to the Moon: Poems  by Emanuel di Pasquale:

My father worked at a mine where they
would make cement; they would break
large rocks and shatter them
into cement powder; it was all to help build houses,
my mother said….

My mother began telling me stories of my father
after he left — died, she said.
He didn’t leave. He stood still,
my mother said. We would visit him where he slept,
unseen, in silence. There was earth
and a white rock and a picture of him
with his large mustache on the rock.
I would speak to him, but he would
(couldn’t, my mother said) never answer.
We’d always bring flowers.

Every night he’d bring some flowers home.
He’d pick them from the meadows on his way home
from work, my mother told me.
Daisies, lilacs, marjoram.
And so we’d fill his grave with meadow flowers;
in November, on the Day of the Dead,
we’d bring white and yellow chrysanthemums….

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Hello!

This is the first of three posts featuring more photographs of mums and daisies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, taken just before the onset of our last winter. This post and the next two include a motley mix of flowers in shades of yellow and white, mostly chrysanthemums but with a few Shasta Daisies scattered about. PlantNet identifies five variants among these photos, including Chrysanthemum indicum, Chrysanthemum zawadzkii, Chrysanthemum × morifolium, and Leucanthemum × superbum — but we’ve resisted any attempt here to nail down the names for each individual photo, especially those like the first three where there are some of those, some of these, and some of that.

As suggested in the quotation at the top of this post, yellow and white mums are closest in color to early wild chrysanthemums. While defining “wild” botanically or historically presents a lot of challenges, another way to think of it is that variations like the magenta ones and the red ones I’ve previously posted (as well as some orange ones I’m still working on) did not exist in nature and are the products of centuries of plant breeding around the world, including in China, Japan, Europe, and the United States.

The actual mechanisms are, of course, botanically and biologically complex; but I have this sense of being immersed in the history of this fine and culturally significant plant when I look at these yellows and whites. They’re closer in color to their original ancestors, while those of more saturated colors represent “modern” history, or at least the history of the past couple of centuries. With that distinction in mind, though, notice how some of the white and yellow mums in this post contain swatches of red or orange, the past presence of which enabled botanists to selectively breed the plants to enhance and emphasize those colors and gradually shift the flowers from white or yellow to red, pink, and orange.

Thanks for taking a look!

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