“[As] they were passing by me into the garden, I asked them to let me be one of their company.
“The Gentleman of the house told me, if I delighted in flowers, it would be worth my while; for that he believed he could shew me such a blow of tulips, as was not to be matched in the whole country….
“I was very much pleased and astonished at the glorious show of these gay vegetables, that arose in great profusion on all the banks about us….
“Sometimes I considered them with the eye of an ordinary spectator, as so many beautiful objects varnished over with a natural gloss, and stained with such a variety of colours, as are not to be equalled in any artificial dyes or tinctures….
“Sometimes I considered every leaf as an elaborate piece of tissue, in which the threads and fibres were woven together into different configurations, which gave a different colouring to the light as it glanced on the several parts of the surface….
“Sometimes I considered the whole bed of tulips… as a multitude of optic instruments, designed for the separating light into all those various colours of which it is composed.”
I wanted to stay as I was, still as the world is never still, not in midsummer but the moment before the first flower forms, the moment nothing is as yet past —
not midsummer, the intoxicant, but late spring, the grass not yet high at the edge of the garden, the early tulips beginning to open….
Hello!
Sometimes I find a quotation that so accurately captures the experience of seeing and photographing a batch of flowers, that little else needs to be said. The first quotation above — originally published in a British journal called The Tatler in 1710 — could have been written about these red and multicolored tulips I found growing in the partial shade of some large oak, maple, and dogwood trees at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens a couple of weeks ago. On a bright spring morning, the sun created a lot of reflected light from all directions, producing the kind of backlighting and side-lighting that I like to work with, while still letting me preserve accurate color and detail in wide-angle shots.
From “Banksiae Lutea” in Old Roses by Graham Murphy:
“Banksian roses are named in honour of Lady Dorothea Banks, the wife of the renowned botanist, Sir Joseph Banks. These plants are vigorous ramblers, producing flexible, green almost thornless canes about 6 metres in length. Because the flowers are borne in trusses on side-shoots, most profusely when these are two or three years old, pruning involves removing any very old wood and some of the five-year-old canes, leaving the remainder to flower another two or three years. Rosa banksia lutea is the hardiest variety and flowers best on a sheltered south-facing wall; although only slightly fragrant, it is one of the world’s finest roses, with large hanging sprays of tiny, double, pale yellow flowers.”
“Britain was to play a major role in bringing Chinese roses to Europe, through the medium in which she felt most comfortable, foreign trade, spurred on by the scientific and practical curiosity of men such as Sir Joseph Banks, botanist, explorer, patron of the natural sciences, President of the Royal Society, friend and adviser to King George III and virtual director of the King’s garden at Kew….
“[The] British sent two diplomatic missions to the Chinese Emperor; the first set off in 1793, led by colonial administrator Lord Macartney and armed with much helpful advice from Sir Joseph Banks, who wanted to find out as much as he could about Chinese know-how in all spheres of science, manufacturing and the arts….
“Banks was particularly concerned to find out all he could about plants, and how the Chinese gardened.”
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered….
Hello!
Upon learning that the plant whose photos appear below was called “Lady Banks’ Rose” — also sometimes called “Banks’s Rose” and officially Rosa banksiae or Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’ for deeper yellow variations — I started digging around in my books, books, and more books to see what I might discover about the plant and its history. As with all plant history stories, things get complicated pretty quickly, and the two short quotations above barely hint at the challenges involved in relocating plants from the Chinese empire to Great Britain during the Victorian era.
The second book I referenced above — The Rose: A True History by Jennifer Potter — has one long chapter devoted to the efforts of Sir Joseph Banks and others to bring plants to the west, efforts that involved some intrigue, numerous failures, gobs of money, and months of travel. In Potter’s telling, it seems that only one rose plant that would ultimately be named after Lady Banks survived the trip, a white one from which seeds and further cultivation would eventually be used to create the yellow Lutea version — which is what I think I have pictured, as even those blooms that are lighter in yellow color looked more saturated depending on the angle from which they were photographed.
As is so often the case when I go on these little research expeditions, I stumbled across a word that was new to me in the book Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders: Pteridomania. Pteridomania has nothing to do with roses (or dinosaurs, which was my first thought). It instead refers to “a Victorian craze for ferns” — a startlingly specific definition to describe Victorian obsession with the shapes and forms of ferns: fern plants; big ferns in pots and little ferns in windows; pictures, photographs, and drawings of ferns; and the incorporation of fern-form into the design elements of everything from household goods to carpet, and building structures to wallpaper. While it is equally likely that fern motifs pre-date their appearance in Victorian Britain or Victorian America, it is just as likely that any representation of ferns you might see in the design of a pot or a mirror, or a window frame or a door cornice, had its cultural genesis in the Victorian era’s pteridomania.
The idea that there was a botanical mania associated with certain historical periods was also new to me. Yes, I’d heard — and you likely have too — of “tulip fever” or “orchid mania” (which is actually and delightfully called “orchidelirium“), but I hadn’t really thought of them as distinct historical periods that intersected with or overlapped periods of botanical exploration, imperialism, and transplanting plants from one country to another. So far I’ve learned about twenty such periods from the seventeenth century onward; I won’t name them all but I imagine I could spend a lifetime studying them.
Such an intersection of history, botany, and obsession occurred for roses too: “Rose Mania” is the title of a thirty-page chapter in The Rose: A True History, which opens with the author’s rousing description of rose-wilding in Europe and the United States:
“Rose mania, which gripped Europe and America in the mid to late-nineteenth century, may not have been as sudden or as catastrophic as the tulip fever that flared among the Dutch in the 1630s, but it defined its age just as dramatically. Accumulation, expansion and conspicuous display were the new watchwords, as breeders competed to bring the newest, largest, most spectacular varieties to market, and consumers of all classes sought to acquire the latest breeds.
“By the 1880s, rose parties were all the rage in Britain (or so an editorial in the Gardeners’ Chronicle would have us believe), held ‘every day, all day long, and far into the night’. If rose parties at midday were apt to be hot, dusty and exhausting affairs, ‘Roses at break of day — a dewy one — are simply divine — so full of beauty, freshness, and fragrance, as to fill and satisfy and soothe our every sense of pleasure. Roses by moonlight offered even greater pleasures, when they seem ‘so different in colour and even form as to appear altogether new and different flowers. The perfume, too, is fuller, richer, sweeter; and perhaps, to enjoy Roses to the full, it would be well at times to meet them in the gloaming or by moonlight alone.'”
“Rose mania” doesn’t have its own fancy name like “pteridomania” — but that’s true for a lot of the floral eras, most of which are called by the name of a flower followed by “mania” or “fever”. So I thought I could make up my own name for rose mania, one you can use when you’re standing amidst a batch of blooming roses, getting pleasantly lightheaded inhaling the rose scent, all while wondering who your Victorian ancestral flower-manics might have been. Let’s call rose mania: the Rosencrazies.
Beautiful stream! by the village side; But windest away from haunts of men, To quiet valley and shaded glen; And forest, and meadow, and slope of hill, Around thee, are lonely, lovely, and still. Lonely — save when, by thy rippling tides, From thicket to thicket the angler glides; Or the simpler comes with basket and book, For herbs of power on thy banks to look; Or haply, some idle dreamer, like me, To wander, and muse, and gaze on thee. Still — save the chirp of birds that feed On the river cherry and seedy reed….
Ye may simper, blush, and smile, And perfume the aire a-while: But (sweet things) ye must be gone; Fruit, ye know, is comming on: Then, Ah! Then, where is your grace, When as Cherries come in place?
Hello!
When you live in an area with cherry trees aplenty, and they insist — as trees often do — on being photographed, it seems like your photoshoots need to include those trees. So this post features cherry blossoms from two of my recent trips to Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, toward the end of March.
I selected the first five photos from a batch I took on a seriously brighteous day. That light was a bit too harsh for my personal taste and led to some washed-out colors, though the pinks in the blossoms held up fairly well. I threw out most of the photos I’d taken from that shoot and went back on a second day when the sun was on a break, using the overcast skies and some slightly underexposed camera settings to capture more saturated colors and the level of texture I like to see.
“A faint green mist hangs in the treetops. Then redbud darts into bloom, mauve blossoms on stark black boughs. The petals are pastel but seem shocking amidst gray shadows of winter lingering in the woods.
“The eastern redbud tree may stand up to fifty feet tall, squeezed thin in wooded areas but spreading broad when given space. Its range extends from the central Atlantic coastline into the Midwest. A shrubby cousin grows in California and a larger western redbud graces Texas and New Mexico. All redbuds flower bright and early, before their leaves arrive.
“A branch of redbud offers pleasure to many senses. Clusters of lavender flowers dangle from dark twigs, which curve like Oriental brush strokes. You sense its odor in the air. Draw closer and taste a single bloom, penetrating its inner center of sweetness. That flavor, subtle as spring’s morning light, can adorn this season’s menu.”
“Why is the redbud tree not called a purplebud tree? All the flowers are purple.”
Hello!
The galleries below feature photos of several redbud trees that I took a few weeks ago just as the trees were entering their blooming cycle.
The first three photos are heavily backlit; imagine the sun just above the horizon to the left of where I was standing. The leaves caught my eye, so I tried to capture the scene as I saw it: off in the distance with the background heavily shadowed, the purple-pink blossoms rich with color, and the leaves glowing as if they were individual heart-shaped lightbulbs.
In the middle galleries I focused more closely on individual flowers and leaves. At this stage, the tree produces blooms from surprising places on some of its thick stubs, along with wispy clusters of flower buds running the entire length of thinner branches. And nearly every longer branch is tipped with two or three luminous, yellow-green leaves.
The last gallery shows three images of two of the trees I photographed for some of the closeups in this series.
“One theory holds that the name descends from the Old English word for dagger, the wood being hard enough to fashion into goads and arrows as well as skewers and spindles. It furnished shuttles for the textile industry, which flourished in our village until the Civil War, when, as Kelby Ouchley notes in Flora and Fauna of the Civil War, the wood was used for ‘charcoal, engraving, mallets, tool handles, wedges, plane stock, harrow teeth, hames [the curved pieces of a harness], horse collars, ox yokes, wheel hubs, barrel hoops, machinery bearings, and cogs in various types of gears.’ Also gunpowder and toothpicks….
“There was no connection to dogs in the origin of the name, the canine element emerging only with a change in the language, when the a in dag became an o. Dog-tree, Dog-berry, Dog-timber, Houndberry — these names were coined, possibly because the bark was said to make ‘an excellent wash for mangy dogs,’ or because of the barking sound created by branches rubbing together in the wind.”
I remember, in the week of the dogwoods, why sometimes we give up everything for beauty, lose our sense and our senses, as we do now for these blossoms, sprinkled like salt through the dark woods.…
At the end of this post, I’ve included before-and-after versions of four of these photos. Photographing large, bloom-filled trees can be an interesting challenge: there are often so many flowers in both the foreground and background that you end out with no apparent focal point for the images. I often address that by zooming in on individual branches and their flowers; but sometimes I want to include larger sections of the tree with multiple branches and blooms. Doing that, though, causes the camera to further merge foreground and background elements together, especially since I will likely use a higher f-stop, and that tends to flatten the appearance of the image and reduce any sense of three-dimensional depth. I may see certain branches and flowers as the photograph’s subject, but the camera thinks differently: it includes, at least partially in focus, all the elements of the tree that are within the range of the f-stop I selected.
So to give the image a better focal point — which you will perceive as the image’s subject — I use Lightroom’s masking tool to first select the background, a task it does with remarkable accuracy as long as some elements are in focus and they contrast well with the foreground. I then soften and smooth out the background by reducing texture, sharpness, and noise; followed by adjustments to highlights, brightness, and shadows to darken it just enough to create greater differentiation from the foreground. Since I’m effectively pushing the background farther away from you, I may also reduce saturation, because objects that are farther away from our eyes tend to be perceived as containing less color.
Before proceeding, I’ll turn the mask off and on a few times and verify that I’ve included all the background elements I want, and that unmasked areas represent what I will want in the foreground as the subject. For the last photo of the four, then, the masked background looks like this:
I want this background mask as precise as possible, and may adjust it with a brush if it’s included or excluded unwanted elements. I then duplicate and invert the mask (that’s why I wanted it to be so precise), which flips it from a background mask to a foreground (or subject) mask, to look like this:
I can now adjust the appearance of the image’s subject, which — in the case of these dogwoods — typically consists of decreasing shadows and blacks to subtly brighten the flowers, without making them excessively bright. I am generally doing the opposite of what I did to the background, including adding texture (instead of removing it) to give the flowers some additional detail. And since white flowers tend to reflect colors from their surroundings — typically, yellow and green from nearby tree trunks, branches, and leaves; or blue from the sky — I’ll reduce yellow, green, and/or blue from the image overall to whiten the flowers.
