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Rudbeckia triloba (1 of 2)

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From “Rudbeckia: Yellow Coneflower” in Armitage’s Native Plants for North American Gardens by Allan M. Armitage:

“Rudbeckias, along with echinaceas and gaillardias, are so common they don’t even need a common name. Approximately fifteen species have been described, all native to this country, from the eastern seaboard to the prairie states; perhaps fewer than six are known by gardeners, but at least a couple of those are known very, very well. The wonderful old-fashioned black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) has been so bred and wed it is scarcely recognizable; and then there’s that little-known variant (var. sullivantii) of a formerly little-known species (R. fulgida) that exploded on the garden scene when the Germans discovered it and called it ‘Goldsturm’ — no landscape is safe from its yellow and black flowers.

“That rudbeckias are so common is testament to their toughness and their success and the reason we (or at least landscapers) keep planting these darn daisies. To be honest, I love most of them, and it is nice to know that, rather than scour the Internet, we can stroll up to almost any retail outlet, put our money down, and walk out with a native plant that was part of Lewis and Clark’s journey….

“Of all the coneflowers, I admit to liking [Rudbeckia triloba] the most. It doesn’t match the flower power of ‘Goldsturm’, or the stature of Rudbeckia maxima or the fragrance of R. subtomentosa — it is simply a doer. They are short-lived to be sure but seed around sufficiently to always provide a plant or two. The leaves are three-lobed mainly at the base, losing the lobes as they ascend the stems. The yellow flowers are small and surround a black disk. Literally hundreds of small flowers can cover a single plant in mid to late summer…. This is a cottage garden rudbeckia and looks at home in any informal garden, including a meadow.”

From “The Wagon Train” in The Great River and Small, and Other Poems by Welborn Hope:

Like a long snake, the wagon train
Wound across the lush-green plain.
Beside it, ready for alarm,
Outriders rode, rifle on arm.
Toward the sunset, it crawled on,
And flowers of the Southwest shone….

Golden rudbeckia burned afar
To brand on the plain a flaming scar;
Modest centaurea were scattered about
Among gaillardias‘ gleaming rout;
Pink phlox plaited the prairie’s hem,
And coreopsis made a diadem.
Savage and hushed, a beautiful land….

Hello!

This is the first of two posts with new photographs of Rudbeckia triloba from Oakland Cemetery. The Rudbeckia genus has an extensive presence as a native plant throughout nearly all of North America (see this Rudbeckia distribution map), with an equally extensive presence as an introduced plant in much of Europe and parts of Asia. The Rudbeckia triloba species distribution is somewhat more limited: it’s considered native in eastern North America throughout the United States and Canada and parts of the central United States, though isn’t as common to western states or provinces (see this map for the species).

Regardless of where in the world you’re reading from, there’s a good chance that this plant or its relatives and variants look very familiar, given how widespread the genus is and how adaptable the species are to both landscaped and wild environments. Coneflower, Thin-Leaved Coneflower, Three-Leaved Coneflower (“three-leaved” being synonymous with “triloba”), and Brown-eyed Susan are among the common names for R. triloba, and R. triloba can often be distinguished by its flower petals. Each one is a richly saturated yellow with orange tones close to the center disk structures. Usually the petals are present in numbers between five and seven, and — distinct from many other Coneflowers — they’re short, overlapping, and have rounded (as opposed to pointed) tips.

There are several kinds of similar Coneflowers at Oakland, but for this shoot I hunted down only those I believed were R. triloba because they can be especially photogenic. I produced several compositions like this one…

… where a single plant with quite a few flowers of its own is far enough from those in the background to show some flowers up close and in focus with others presenting a color show behind them. There’s no editing trickery here: I took the shot with an f/8 aperture, which provided enough depth of field to capture the foreground bunch while reproducing those behind it with a soft, smooth blur.

On the other hand, it’s easy to find single and separated plants — especially at the edges of a large grouping — where it’s possible to examine some in isolation. Photos like these two, for example…

… show how long the thin stems of R. triloba can get, and how — as they curve downward from the weight of the flowers or just from age — they start to take on an almost vine-like appearance, something I’ll have more examples of (and will point out) in the second post in this series.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Revisiting Zinnias (3 of 3)

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From “The Colour Out of Space” by H. P. Lovecraft in H. P. Lovecraft: The Classic Horror Stories, edited by Roger Luckhurst:

“It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor’s fall, and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds…. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.

“It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable.

“Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard….

“And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless…..

“The asters and golden-rod bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinnias and hollyhocks in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum’s oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to the woods….”

From “Spider Compared to Star” in Kudzu and Other Poems New and Selected by Dorothy Donnelly:

…In June a golden garden-spider floating
slowly across a sky of irises,
neither aimless nor idle, her net nailed
to rafters of roses, shakes with her foot
the diamond outline specked with a black and gold
     enamel of gnats,
impassive moves in the midst of a meteor shower of bees
and comet wasps stinging the air with fiery whips.

In autumn when dahlias light their ruby lamps
and the gilt grape-leaf hangs, worn to a web by
     waves of weather,
the spiders stir among the yellow zinnias
and tall chrysanthemums, cinnamon-colored and curved
petal by petal inwardly to solid globes,
moving from point to point in their orbits, sure-footed
     over chasms
like the high stars across invisible bridges….

Hello!

This is the third of three posts with new photographs of Zinnias from Oakland Cemetery. The first two posts are Revisiting Zinnias (1 of 3) and Revisiting Zinnias (2 of 3).

Since I’m publishing the last post in the series on Halloween, I decided to see if I could find a couple of excerpts to top it off that were appropriately Halloweenish while mentioning Zinnias. The “Spider Compared to Star” excerpt from the long, spidery poem by Dorothy Donnelly was just edgy enough to tip into arachnophobia by combining it with fantasy. The short story “The Color Out of Space” by H. P. Lovecraft blends “body horror” and science fiction, as it unwinds the tale of a meteorite landing on Earth causing malignant physical and psychological changes to the story’s characters while terraforming the landscape. That this influential story contained themes around “impossible colors” — colors that are theoretically conceivable but our eyes can’t see — resonated with The Photographer, who has written many times here about colors like magenta that are outside the visible spectrum but we still think we recognize them. In Lovecraft’s story, the color in the landscape mutates away, creating “blasphemous-looking things” that the characters destroy.

The full story — from an H. P. Lovecraft Archive site — is available here, and the story of the story (which got its own Wikipedia article) is here. I found the poem excerpt with its zinnia references a couple of weeks ago, and found the Lovecraft story just yesterday, so it seemed like an eerie coincidence that the two excerpts describe plants I photograph this time of year — and both excerpts start in June and end in the waning light of autumn….

Spooky! Spooky!

Happy Halloween!

Revisiting Zinnias (2 of 3)

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From “Gardens, botanical” in Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations by Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield:

“The Aztec, whose empire was established in what is now Mexico in about A.D. 1100, planted lavish botanical gardens featuring enormous collections of plants both native to the area and imported from the tropical coast hundreds of miles distant….

“These arboretums, containing varieties of medicinal, hallucinatory, and sweet-smelling plants, were for the amusement and education of those who visited these sites. Spanish historian Cervantes de Salizar described the gardens of the Emperor Montezuma as containing ‘medicinal and aromatic herbs, flowers, and trees with fragrant blossoms.’ Not only were plants collected so that they could be preserved and displayed, they were also actively used as the basis for an elaborate system of plant classification and as laboratories for the discovery of medical break-throughs…

“The Tetzcotzinco garden of the poet-king Netzahualcoyotl, who reigned over the mountainous area of the Aztec Empire between 1426 and 1474, was legendary in its time. In 1530 one of his descendants described the experience of visiting it as being like falling into a garden raining with aromatic tropical flowers. Many of the plants there had been brought from remote places. Several botanical gardens were also a feature of the capital city of Tenochtitlan, which was the largest metropolis in North America, and perhaps the world, serving as a residence for about a quarter of a million people. Dahlias and Zinnias were two of the flowers grown in Aztec gardens that still give gardeners pleasure today.

“The Spaniards were astounded when they saw these Aztec gardens. Although some European monasteries had collections of plants in their herb gardens, they were small in comparison to the Aztec gardens. Some historians believe that the impetus for European botanical gardens came from a letter, first published in 1522, that Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes wrote to Emperor Charles V (King Charles I of Spain) describing Montezuma’s gardens…. The Cortes letter may not have directly inspired European botanical gardens, but certainly the exploration of the Western Hemisphere with its exotic flora sparked a European interest in botany….”

From “Zinnias (Zinnia elegans)” in Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations by Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield:

“Zinnias (Zinnia elegans) are one of the three most popular garden flowers today. They are characterized by showy composite blossoms and are indigenous to the area that is called Mexico today. The blooms that zinnias produce vary in color, including white, yellow, gold, orange, copper, crimson, purple, and maroon blossoms….

“The Aztec, who established an empire in what is now Mexico in about A.D. 1100, held flowers in high regard. They cultivated several varieties of zinnias. Spaniards brought the first zinnias to Europe in 1753. The plants were named after botany professor, J. G. Zinn. In 1796 the first Zinnia elegans variety was brought to Europe from Mexico. This variety quickly became popular and is the stock to which all modern garden zinnias owe their start.”

Hello!

This is the second of three posts with new photographs of Zinnias from Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Revisiting Zinnias (1 of 3). In that first post, I presented distribution maps of the Zinnia genus and two well-known species — Zinnia peruviana and Zinnia elegans — and briefly described some of what I learned about how zinnias were native to parts of North and South America; how they migrated from there to Europe and parts of Asia, Africa, and Australia; and how Zinnia elegans was reintroduced to the Americas in conjunction with plant exploration upon the breeding of new variants after their European assimilation.

Researching these complex stories involves multiple disciplines like traditional history, botany, and social and cultural history — especially around European exploration, imperialism, and conquest, where plants went along for the rides. European or Eurocentric frameworks tend to dominate botanical literature for many reasons, the most benign of which was that botanists and scientists from about the 17th century forward sought to document their naturalist encounters in extensive detail. That included adapting local knowledge from regions they explored, producing extensive botanical tracts, and incorporating images (botanical drawings and art) before (and continuing after) photography was used for that reason. Yet even though much of this was geographically anchored to Europe, the migrations and reintroductions of plants like Zinnias trigger a way to expand that framework and include other regions, their cultures, and their histories.

With all that in mind, I was pretty happy to discover that a book I already owned — A History of Zinnias: Flower for the Ages by Eric Grissell — devotes about three chapters and nearly 100 pages to the Zinnia movement I had started exploring. Here are 5,000 words summarizing the author’s research.

Haha, just kidding. However, if you click the link above, the Kindle sample will get you to the beginning of one of the relevant chapters, and I certainly recommend the book to anyone interested in the kind of research I cover here about botany and plant histories. It was from that book that I learned about the one I excerpted above — Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations by Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield — which is available on the Internet Archive and, among other topics, covers hundreds of native North and South American plant species and describes their cultural, ornamental, or medicinal use. In the case of Zinnias, the two books together helped me anchor on and decide to include the two excerpts above, as they reposition Zinnia’s history outside the European frameworks and represent the significance of this plant species to American indigenous cultures for hundreds of years prior to being encountered by explorers from Spain.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!