"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Red Mums and Daisies (1 of 4)

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From the Introduction to Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way:

“From philosophy to art, ceramics to silks, medicine to death: the chrysanthemum winds its way through ancient Chinese culture to the imperial courts of Japan and onto the canvases and pages of Western civilization. Often dismissed as the ‘showman’s flower’ it draws its allure from the gold of the Sun and the rule of emperors, with sunset shades beloved by East and West. The delicacy of its petals, combined with a long flowering period, gained it the affection of the ancient Chinese, who named it Chu, from which comes the name of the ancient city Ta-chu Hsien….

“Coming to Europe with the opening up of Chinese trade in the eighteenth century, the flower was given a new baptism and chu or kiku became chrysanthemum, named from the Greek for gold (chrysos) and for flower (anthos). Ironically, it was not until the importation of ‘Old Purple’, a plum-red variety, that the possibilities of the chrysanthemum were truly appreciated in the West as the cheering yellow colours of the original wild chrysanthemum multiplied into an array of autumnal hues….

“Filling the autumn months, they give rise to associations varying from remembrance of ancestors to the start of the American football season — the latter an occasion to which it was long a tradition to wear a chrysanthemum buttonhole. In America the tradition of Thanksgiving was soon regarded as incomplete without a bunch of chrysanthemums, despite the fact that they only arrived on the continent in the late eighteenth century.”

From “Chrysanthemums” in Shoes of the Wind: A Book of Poems by Hilda Conkling:

Dusky red chrysanthemums out of Japan,
With silver-backed petals like armor,
Tell me what you think sometimes?
You have fiery pink in you too…
You all mean loveliness:
You say a word
Of joy.
You come from gardens unknown
Where the sun rises…
You bow your heads to merry little breezes
That run by like fairies of happiness;
You love the wind and woody vines
That outline the forest…
You love brooks and clouds…
Your thoughts are better than my thoughts
When the moon is getting high!

Hello!

Here we have the first of four posts featuring photographs of mums and daisies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, that I took in late November and early December. My previous posts with pink and magenta mums and daisies from the same trips are:

Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (1 of 3)
Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (2 of 3)
Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (3 of 3)
Mums, Magenta Style

As I often do, I’ve organized the photographs by color: this set of four posts features blooms where the color red dominates — and these flowers seem to have produced just about every shade of red you could imagine. Some yellow, orange, and white collections are currently queued in my backlog, just waiting to be set free later this month and beyond.

According to PlantNet (and depending on which photograph you’re viewing), the plants will likely be Hardy Garden Mums (Chrysanthemum × morifolium), Persian Daisies (Tanacetum coccineum), or Indian Chrysanthemums (Chrysanthemum indicum) — so you have a one-third chance of getting the name right, as PlantNet attributes about the same probability to each of these three plant names upon examining my photographs. You could also just call them Asters — from their family name Asteraceae — and of course get it exactly right in all cases.

I was glad to come across the book I quoted briefly at the top of this post because I like discovering new books devoted to just one plant genus, especially if the books dive into the botanical and cultural history of the plants. Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way is part of a series of twenty-seven books, each taking a similar approach to botanical history. In my imagination, I like to think I’ll eventually own the whole series; but realistically, I’ll take a look at certain ones as the blooming period for those flowers approaches. We’re not just about photographs here (not that there’s anything wrong with that), so finding books about the dynasties of lilies, snowdrops (a book just about snowdrops!), tulips, rhododendrons, sunflowers, cherries, roses, and daffodils (forthcoming) — all plants that pose for my photoshoots — turns each nature trip into an exploration of not only photography but of plants and their relation to human histories. We are going to learn so many new things!

Thanks for taking a look!

Snow Day!!!

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From “Dogwood Snow” by Dorothy Thompson in The Music of Silence, edited by Alyssa R. Stokes:

Growing up in the South,
It’s such a rare thing
To see the snows of winter;
That’s why I like the spring.

All the flowers begin to bloom;
Colors explode everywhere,
Painting a scene of beautiful hues
No artist will ever compare.

Most of all I like the woods
With trees in green, pink, and white.
Looking like God sprinkled the seed
With a gentle show of might.

And there you see the Dogwood tree
With a history we all know;
White petals falling to the ground
Making our Southern snow.

Hello!

Well! I don’t get to take photos like this very often, since a photogenic snowstorm is such a rare event here in Middle Georgia. But I knew before even looking out the window this morning that we’d had some accumulation: a layer of snow has a way of softening the sounds of the neighborhood that is unlike anything else. I remember from my childhood years in northern New York — where we used to get tons and tons of snow most winters — that a certain kind of quiet morning meant it had snowed overnight.

Our last notable snowstorm was in 2014 — over ten years ago! — and it was such a disaster, it’s still remembered in great detail by people in the area. The city and state gained well-deserved notoriety for being so unprepared for a two-inch, early afternoon snowfall that the interstates clogged with abandoned vehicles stuck on untreated roads. Stories are still told today of people who had to figure out how to walk home from some random spot on the highway, sometimes walking several miles on the same roads they would normally drive, around all the cars that couldn’t move. If you search Google images for Atlanta Snowmageddon 2014, you’ll see some representative (and very accurate!) images that are part of the collective memory of that storm. We have fared much better this time around, though the overnight hours will likely bring some freezing rain, best avoided by most drivers.

My Little Dog, at six years old, has never seen snow. While I had hoped for a few shots of his perky self bouncing around in the yard while the snow was still fluffy, here’s what actually happened: I opened the back door, he took one look at the yard, gave me one of those well-known dog side-eyes, and trotted to his safe space under my desk. Ah, well, maybe he just knew this: a few minutes later, it started raining, and snow isn’t much fun in the rain….

Thanks for taking a look!

Mums, Magenta Style

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From “Chrysanthemum” in Garden Flowers by Matthias Hermann:

“The name chrysanthemum (golden flower) comes from the characteristic golden-yellow color which most species had, at least in the primitive types. But cultivation has so modified this genus that the yellow color has completely disappeared in a great many varieties. As typical of real chrysanthemums, there is the old garden chrysanthemum which came from Mediterranean Europe, it is a perennial plant cultivated as an annual. One variety with completely white flowers was obtained which is very hardy and comes up in any position. Its very abundant flowers bloom successively from June until the frosts.

“The most remarkable of all is the Indian chrysanthemum. This beautiful species has a considerable number of varieties, which differ in the size of the plant, the shape, sizes and color of the flowers and flowering season; among these are the common garden chrysanthemum with wide flowers and long spreading rays whose stems and flower-heads can reach enormous proportions, and the Christmas flower, which is interesting because of the strange arrangement of its florets.”

From “Transplanted Beauty” in The Exhilaration of Flowers by Jean MacKenzie:

“Magenta Mums.”
Sloppy abbreviated speech?
“Magenta Chrysanthemums.”
Translated from the Greek —
magenta “golden flowers.”
Startling confusion of colours….

I was given some plants to brighten
the southern bed in front of my house.
They gratefully flourished.

Shoots from those early plants
gladden the gardens
of many relatives and friends.

Like autumnal Painted Daisies,
magenta rays encircle golden centres
above multitudes of aromatic lobed leaves.

Hello!

Autumn seems like the shortest season of the year here in the middle of Georgia, one that flies by with a few flashes of traditional fall color in a matter of days. Unless we get cold weather in September (which is rare) or some freezing days in October (which is nearly as rare) then Atlanta’s trees don’t turn until mid- to late-November, then they promptly drop all their leaves. Delightfully, though, the few temperate weeks of November leading up to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays seem to give autumn mums and daisies a big boost — so I go mum-hunting around that time and save most of the photos for January. Then, during the most colorless time of the year, I still get to work with nature’s tints and tones for a few weeks before those of early spring start to appear.

I posted some of the mums I photographed on these trips around Thanksgiving (see Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (1 of 3), Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (2 of 3), and Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (3 of 3)) but saved the rest (about 200 images) to share throughout this month. Those in this post were a new discovery for me: I had never seen these richly magenta-colored flowers on any previous trips, and found them randomly scattered, somewhat hidden, among some red and orange mums I’ll be posting later.

In addition to their hot magenta color, this variant — most likely of Indian Chrysanthemum or Chrysanthemum indicum — has a noteworthy design, which becomes more evident as you scroll down through the views I used when taking the photographs. As the petals radiate from the centers of the flowers, the throat of each petal is pure white, a visual effect that looks a little like spokes of a wheel. If you are a bee, you might see this as a map to the yellow center of the flower: the contrast between magenta and white could lead you to treat this arrangement as a landing strip for the disc florets, the round cluster of yellow flowers where little bees like to forage and pollination wants to occur.

Magenta is fairly common in flowers, though we’ll often find shades of pink, light purple, violet, fuchsia, and related colors mixed throughout a flower we see as (or refer to as) magenta. This particular mum is one of the very few flowers I’ve photographed where Lightroom detects magenta only (other than white) among the flower petal colors. Many of the flowers in the three previous posts I linked to above appear to be similarly colored, but in those Lightroom also detects purple, red, and splashes of blue along with magenta — which is what I usually find among flowers displaying magenta-like colors.

If I analyze the colors more closely with something like the ColorSlurp utility, the same thing happens, though this tool identifies the color as heliotrope magenta — heliotrope being a color that has a cultural history of its own. Heliotrope’s Victorian background is described in The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, where the author explains how it came to be used as a color of mourning in the late 1800s, representing later stages of mourning or to show respect for more distant relatives for whom black mourning colors were considered too stark. I supposed it’s no surprise, then, that I found these among the monuments at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens — though I can’t help but wonder if their placement there was as an intentional remembrance, or if someone just liked the rich color and spoke-wheel design.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!