The Quinces of Oakland (1 of 3)

From “The Onset of Spring” by Elizabeth Lawrence in The Writer in the Garden, edited by Jane Garmey:

“In the South we go in quest of spring as soon as Christmas is past and the new year begins. The first days of January find us searching among the last fallen leaves for purple violets and white hyacinths and the yellow buds of winter aconite. And when we have found these frosty flowers close to the cold ground, we break off and carry into the house a few branches of Japanese quince with buds already swollen and ready to burst. By the time the quince buds have opened into flowers as pale as apple blossoms, their fellows in the garden may be in bloom too, if the days are warm.”

From More Than a Rock: Essays on Art, Creativity, Photography, Nature, and Life by Guy Tal:

“I characterize my work as creative explicitly to suggest that it may deviate from ‘the way it really looked,’ because I want there to be a sharp and honest division between reality and artifice. I care very much about the reality of the things I photograph, and I believe that to conflate that reality with the limitations of what may be expressed in a photograph most often leads to the diminishing of the former rather than the elevation of the latter. This is because such conflation always requires a degree of misrepresentation. Rather than relying entirely on characteristics of the subject, creative art draws its power primarily from the imagination of an artist. It does not aim to become a substitute for the real experience, or even an approximation of all its dimensions, many of which may be subjective.

“A creative image is not a record of a scene nor a substitute for a real experience. Rather, it is an experience in itself — an aesthetic experience — something new that the artist has given the world….“

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“The Quinces of Oakland” — haha! for some reason I think this is funny! Sounds like a family of Victorian aristocrats, doesn’t it?

I found the Elizabeth Lawrence quote a few weeks ago, and with her reference to Japanese quince in mind, I headed over to Oakland Cemetery (where I knew there were bunches of quinces) to see if it was true that they start blooming shortly after Christmas. I mean, she sort of promised, didn’t she? Turns out she was right; among the plants engaged in very early flowering, there were quite a few red and white quince blooms scattered around the gardens. This post features the red ones I found.

So we’re a year into The Apocalypse and I’ve made about 60 trips to Oakland, my safe space for taking pictures of plants and flowers. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter trips — about to circle ’round to spring again. Right now, I have just over 100 late winter/early spring photos I’m still working on, to wrap up over the next few weeks so that by the time April flowers start busting out, my photo backlog will be empty.

Returning to Oakland again and again, week after week, has seemed a little strange at times: everything is familiar, yet there are simultaneously endless variations. What sometimes feels like a dispiriting routine, as it turns out, is really just a state of mind and doesn’t reflect the space I immerse myself in. If the routine is limiting — which in some ways it is — then limitations must be powerful too because they just mean selectively including what will be seen and not seen, what will be shown and not shown, which stories will be presented and which ones will not. Our best public spaces have characteristics like this: they contain layers of meaning about nature, history, society and culture, cultural relationships, demographic distinctions, and even variations in color, shadow, and light that are there for the taking — the taking of pictures, that is.

I made up the idea of the Quince family, of course … or maybe I didn’t, since “Quince” (and a variation, “Quint”) is a surname and not just a plant name, and I now imagine their ghosts accompanying me on my photo-shoots. If I keep looking — don’t you think? — I may (or may not!) find a mausoleum or tombstone or other memorial with that name on it. Wouldn’t that be something?

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