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

Category: atlanta

Not-Quite-Spring Spring Snowflakes (1 of 2)

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From “The Garden” in Hold Bright the Star: A Book of Poems by Sue McConkey:

Dreaming of springtime
she held in her mittened hand —
a single snowflake flower

From “Leucojum” in Garden Bulbs in Color by J. Horace McFarland:

“These are the Snowflakes of the early spring garden. Taller than many of our early-flowering bulbs, they grow best in small clumps, like violets. In fact, the genus name, which dates back to Theophrastus, means white violet. They were cherished in the seventeenth-century garden of John Parkinson, who considered them next in importance to the daffodils. Leucojum should not be confused with Galanthus, the Snowdrop; the former produces more abundant foliage and large flower-spikes.

“Leucojums are by no means difficult to grow, and seem to do well in ordinary garden loam, preferably in full sun. Set them at least four inches deep, in well-drained soil. As with other early-flowering bulbs planted in the shrub-border, they can be left undisturbed for many years, increasing into great clumps, from which arise the dainty blooms….

“The species Leucojum vernum is perhaps the best known, with its delicate white bells, dotted green, on twelve-inch stems. A later-flowering kind is L. aestivum, the Summer or Meadow Snowflake. Then there is a fall-flowering kind known as L. autumnale, but it is comparatively rare.”

Hello!

My frequently-visited favorite historical cemetery and garden was closed for the month of January and part of February — the first extended closure in the eighteen years I’ve lived nearby. There are several large reconstruction projects going on, many of which started last summer and will continue well into the year, including repair or replacement of retaining walls and brick drainage culverts, and repaving many of the roadways. When I was able to observe some of the repair work last fall, it was fascinating to see how the it’s being done with materials that readily match what was originally put in place, including brick and stone that match that of a hundred years ago yet is still available for purchase at your friendly neighborhood hardware store — and can also be found in many residential properties (including mine!) throughout Grant Park.

This work is taking place in parallel with the construction of a new visitor center that broke ground last fall and is expected to take 18-24 months to complete. Of several articles I read about the new center, this one from Rough Draft Atlanta has the most renderings of the proposed building, including this bird’s eye view of the property…

… which shows that the spacial orientation and layout (including the landscaping behind the building) is being designed to mirror the layout of the cemetery itself…

… reminding me of three research papers I wrote years ago about how the layout of the cemetery mirrored the geographic, racial, and ethnic divisions of the city of Atlanta throughout the early years of its founding and subsequent development. The research project is one I remember well, and from it I learned a lot about how to better observe public spaces and how to consider the relationships between those spaces and the people that (historically or currently) inhabit them. It will be interesting to see if the completed visitor center and its surroundings will help provide another reflective layer to that history.

While the work continues, the cemetery reopened a couple of days ago — it was only the road paving that necessitated a temporary close-up — whenst This Photographer returned to find a variety of late winter, pre-spring flowers, including the first light yellow daffodils, some white and red quince, and the happy little snowflakes you see in the images below (and in the next post). The snowflakes had popped up in two locations: the first ones (shown in the first five photos) were emerging in a shaded area filled with pine bark and were skinny and and a bit sparse; but the rest were in a sunnier area near the property’s entrance and exhibited the more robust clusters of white flowers and clumps of dark green leaves. These are officially called Leucojum vernum — the spring snowflake — which has a summer relative called Leucojum aestivum and an autumn version (that I just learned about from the quote above) originally called Leucojum autumnale.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

More Winter Red: Japanese Maples (2 of 2)

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From “Another Truth About Red Trees” in Primary Sources: Poems by Ann Staley:

Sweet fires, elegy to summer’s long goodbye,
you know them from the east side of the Alleghenies
Maple and Oak burnished by October’s flinty light.

They remind you of bronzed baby shoes, first crocus,
haunted Mars, blood count afterimage,
river water shimmering with late light —
unstoppable beauty, particular-and-everyday at once,
accidental signals, ballast for any doubt or regret you carry.

Red trees in the west now, Japanese maple sentinels, curbside,
that Big Leaf out along Decker Road nestled near conifer green,
and in the blurred periphery driving north past Ash Creek swale….

Today the trees signal autumn, its early, damp darkness,
wood-fire smoke in the neighborhood,
apples ripening in fruit-room baskets….

The painter set them down in acrylic;
the writer transforms them one more time.

From “Maple” in Lives of the Trees: An Uncommon History by Diana Wells:

“Many Japanese maples are red year-round, and almost all turn dazzling shades of scarlet in autumn. The Japanese celebrate their brilliant color with festivals, similar to those for spring blossoms. They love to tell a story about Sen-no-Rikyu, a famous sixteenth-century Japanese tea master, who had just finished sweeping the garden in preparation for a tea ceremony. It looked clean and soulless, so he flung two or three of the red maple leaves he had swept up onto the clear mossy ground.

“Not all maples turn red in autumn, but many do. The color comes from anthocyanin, produced as chlorphyll is withdrawn from the leaves and the tree shuts down for the winter. The sharp points of these blood-red leaves are probably the origin of the maple’s ancient Latin name, and our botanical name, acer, meaning ‘sharp’….

“Carl Peter Thunberg, a Dutch botanist stationed on the island of Deshima when the rest of Japan was closed to foreigners… brought the first Japanese maple west. This maple, Acer palmatum (‘like the palm of a hand’), has green leaves that turn scarlet in fall. In spite of imperial edicts, Thunberg was able to collect Japanese plants, partly by sifting through hay brought to feed the livestock on Deshima (and collecting the seeds in it) and partly by trading information with young Japanese botanists. In exchange for plants he taught them rudimentary Western medicine, and the Linnaean system of classification.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring the last of my Japanese Maple photos from late autumn/early winter. The first post is More Winter Red: Japanese Maples (1 of 2).

Thanks for taking a look!

More Winter Red: Japanese Maples (1 of 2)

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From “The Japanese Maple” in Shade and Ornamental Trees: Their Origin and History by Hui-Lin Li:

“The Japanese maple is undoubtedly the most variable species, so far as foliage is concerned, of cultivated trees or shrubs…. While in other ornamental plants, especially in herbaceous ones, variation frequently occurs in flowers, here the ornamental feature depends mainly on the leaves, and sometimes also on the shape of the plant.

“This great variation is brought out by intensive cultivation and selection in the Japanese garden. The species has been cultivated there since very early times for the brilliant red foliage in autumn so frequently praised in poetry and depicted in paintings. The Japanese call it ‘Takao maple’ because it is especially abundant on the mountain Takao, famous since ancient times for autumn coloration. They use it extensively in their gardens and also as a potted dwarf tree…

“The Japanese maple is a shrub or small tree. It is native to Japan and adjacent parts of the Asiatic mainland. In the Japanese literature there are hundreds of named forms, many of which are now also in cultivation in Western gardens. The variation may be either in the color or the shape of the leaves or sometimes in a combination of these two characters….

“In color, the leaves vary from bright green to yellow and different shades of red or purple. They turn yellow to orange or red in the autumn.”

From “The Japanese Maple” in The Turn of the Mind to That Shaded Place: Poems by A. G. Mampel:

For decades you’ve lightened us
in every season of the year
Your small veined leaves
in early spring
speak greenly
of life and promise and health
so soundly standing there
of bare trunk and crowded limb
There in the prime of summer
your luring red leaves — flirting
with ripe appeal
And even more — my autumn beauty
you offer mature foliage
a russet-red unspeakable glimpse
beyond breath or word

Hello!

I took the photos in this post (and the next one) whilst gathering some outdoor winter color for my Christmas project (see Seven Days to Christmas: When Nature Does the Decorating) — but didn’t use them back then (which seems like YEARS ago, for some reason). The photos are of various Japanese Maple shrubs, trees, and leaves at their peak autumn color (or slightly past it) — which maybe fills in a gap as we wait patiently for the appearance of pre-spring buds and new flowers around the ‘hood.

Thanks for taking a look!

Nandina and Euonymus (in Winter Red)

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From “August” in My Garden in Summer by E. A. Bowles:

“Nandina domestica grows, as it should with such a specific name, close to the house, and as it does in Japan, where every garden, however small, possesses a specimen close by the door….

“One would like to think it was so favoured on account of its beauty, but I have been told that it produces wood with an aromatic flavour that is valued by the Japanese as being the most tasty and suitable for a toothpick. If this be true the poetry of the name domestica vanishes, so let us hope it is false….

“Anyway, I grow the plant for its beauty, and like to remember that Celestial Bamboo is one of its old names. It does well here, I believe, chiefly because it is shaded by a screen of Ivy from the southern sunshine, and it is practically evergreen, only losing its leaves after severe winters….

“My plant is five feet high and beautiful all the year, perhaps most especially so when the young leaves are every imaginable shade of crimson, copper, and bronze, and contrast with the deep green old ones…. The fine red berries that are produced freely in warmer countries, and especially in the gardens round Pau, where they are largely used for Christmas decorations, are never ripened here, or it might well be at its best in Winter.”

From “The Botanic Garden in the Nineteenth Century” in Botanic Gardens: A Living History by Nadine Monem:

“By the nineteenth century European botanic gardens, most notably the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, were sending botanists on plant-hunting expeditions and establishing colonial botanic gardens as outposts to hold and propagate plants destined to be sent back to parent institutions. Scotland’s Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh was also active in funding expeditions to remote areas. Its roster of intrepid botanical explorers includes David Douglas, 1799-1834, for whom the Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) of northwestern America is named, and Robert Fortune, 1812-1880, whose plant-hunting skills are immortalised in the Euonymus fortunei.

“Kew sent Joseph Hooker, 1817-1911, EH ‘Chinese’ Wilson, 1876-1930, and many other notable botanists to far-away lands, while the Royal Horticultural Society sponsored several plant hunters, including William Forsyth, 1737-1804, one of whose discoveries is honoured by the name of the shrub Forsythia. The Cambridge University Botanic Garden was the beneficiary of numerous herbarium specimens that Charles Darwin, 1809-1882, collected during his five year voyage on the HMS Beagle and later sent to its director, John Stevens Henslow, 1796-1861, his former professor and mentor….

“Partly because of the exciting discoveries of these explorers, botanic gardens also became horticultural showcases, thus stimulating the growth of the nursery industry and the introduction of exotic plants into private gardens during this period.”

Hello!

Both nandina and euonymus are considered evergreen shrubs, and easy to find all around the southeast (and in many parts of the world). I seem to see them most often in the winter, probably because the color of their leaves shifts along with the rest of the autumn leaves; but unlike trees, both shrubs tend to hang onto their leaves all winter. So I spy them as splashes and shades of red, purple, or pink from late winter through early spring, while much of the rest of the landscape has gone leafless. Some of their leaves will drop into colorful piles at the base of the plant, but those that stay put will do so until new leaves push them off their stems. The berries are often red or pink (see, for example, photos at the bottom of my post Seven Days to Christmas: When Nature Does the Decorating); but occasionally I see some that are especially adorable in yellow or orange.

Until I found the quote from E. A. Bowles about nandina above, I wasn’t aware of the Japanese custom of planting them near a front door. It surprised me because there is one nandina — the only one on my property — growing near my front door, oddly stuck and surrounded by concrete in a small space between the front porch steps and the outside wall of my living room. Despite being cut to the ground — and enduring waterfalls of rain from the roof just above it — it has returned every year since 2005, producing a handful of thin stems with slender green leaves, then changing color and producing berries every fall.

I had always thought my nandina was a displaced invader — assuming it had grown from a seed that had blown in and taken root — and have cut it down several times. Now, after reading Bowles, I wonder if someone planted it there on purpose — as an oriental greeting, a symbol that means “Welcome to my house.” I suppose I’ll treat it differently now — let it grow a little wild, I think — as this bit of mystery-history is something I won’t forget.

The first ten photos below are of several euonymus shrubs, “euonymus” being a word I kept misspelling as “eunonymous” (you know, like: I’m anonymous and you’re you-non-ymous) — but now I think I got it right. Their leaves tend to be round or teardrop-shaped, clearly different from the slim, pointed nandina leaves in the next seven photos. These seventeen images are followed by three of each shrub, with their backgrounds rendered in black.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Broke-Trunk Trees (and Other Tree Chunks)

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From “My Broken Tree” in My Great Oak Tree and Other Poems  by Liberty Hyde Bailey:

Over my cliff is a maple tree
That always delights my heart to see.

In some stormy day its smooth bole fell
And now lies prone where it started well.

Its trunk is scarred, and with branchlets weak
That struggle still to the light they seek.

But straight to the blue its new limbs rise
And spread their leaves to the rains and skies.

One would not know from the verdant crown
That winds had beaten the old trunk down.

Its neighbors stern in the forest grim
Stand stiff and strict and all churchly prim.

But its branches spread more wide than they
And fling their fruits to the winds away.

And panellings fine its bole will make
When the artist comes his part to take.

Over my cliff is a broken tree
That it always cheers my heart to see.

Hello!

I have on several earlier posts quoted (click here!) from Liberty Hyde Bailey’s botanical work The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture (which is so big I call it a “cyclopspedia”) — but had somehow missed the fact that Bailey was also a poet and published several books of poetry in the olden days. So I was pleased to come across his poem about a broken tree to go with the photos below: the poem seemed to mirror my brief obsession with photographing these damaged trees.

The first nine photos below feature the broken-trunk trees I came across in early winter — two that had likely split during last summer’s August thunderstorms; and one that must have come down during autumn’s similarly stormulous days, given that the leaves had switched on their fall shades before the tree came down. The color contrasts caught my eye — the dark fallen branches against red and orange groundcover, and the orange leaves against the pebblestone walkway. The first ones almost look like the tree dropped a section to rake up the leaves. I didn’t actually catch them raking leaves, to be honest — but maybe they only do that when no one’s watching.

Thanks for taking a look!