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

Category: oakland cemetery

New Year’s Day 2026 (White Mums, Manipulated)

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From “A Way to a Happy New Year” by Robert Brewster Beattie in Poems for Special Days and Occasions, compiled by Thomas Curtis Clark:

To leave the old with a burst of song,
To recall the right and forgive the wrong;
To forget the thing that binds you fast
To the vain regrets of the year that’s past;
To have the strength to let go your hold
Of the not worth while of the days grown old,
To dare go forth with a purpose true,
To the unknown task of the year that’s new;
To help your brother along the road
To do his work and lift his load;
To add your gift to the world’s good cheer,
Is to have and to give a Happy New Year.

From “The Snowman’s Resolution” by Aileen Fisher in More Poetry for the Holidays, selected by Nancy Larrick:

The snowman’s hat was crooked
and his nose was out of place
and several of his whiskers
had fallen from his face,

But the snowman didn’t notice
for he was trying to think
of a New Year’s resolution
that wouldn’t melt or shrink.

He thought and planned and pondered
with his little snowball head
till his eyes began to glisten
and his toes began to spread;

At last he said, “I’ve got it!
I’ll make a firm resolve
that no matter WHAT the weather
my smile will not dissolve.”

Now the snowman acted wisely
and his resolution won,
for his splinter smile was WOODEN
and it didn’t mind the sun.

Hello!

While I’ve been taking photographs regularly at Oakland Cemetery for about six years now, it wasn’t until 2022 that I discovered the large volume of late-blooming asters and mums that are featured throughout the property. Most of them initially flower from late October through late November, include a wide variety of species and colors, and persist into early December if we don’t have too much cold weather. They tend to fill the gap between the emergence of fall color among trees and shrubs in autumn, and those plants — mostly flowering shrubs and trees like quince and plums — that are capable of producing blooms as early as January or February. As these asters and mums put on their best shows just before the holidays — and just before I start my annual Christmas project posts, I tend to accumulate several hundred photos that I don’t work on until after the holiday project, and the holidays themselves, are in the rearview mirror.

So this is the first post (of a presently unknown number) of some of those asters and mums, and I picked the white ones to share today since I’ve gotten in the habit of associating white flowers with New Year’s Day. Subsequent posts will bring in rainbows of hues, including some rather amazing mums where the single stems of individual plants produce three to five flowers, each one a different color.

While members of these plant families are highly resistant to cold weather — which is of course what makes them so suitable for late autumn and early winter growth spurts — we’d had several days below freezing right around the time many of the plants were starting to bloom. You’ll see the effects of those freezing temperatures in three ways: some of the flowers formed non-traditional shapes that reminded me of what coastline trees look like when blown by wind off the water for decades or centuries; some of the blossoms (especially at the tips of their petals) had their colors shift from white to light pink or light red; and many of the stems and leaves froze to the point where they produced swatches of yellow or turned completely brown. The leaf color change is similar to what happens to many plants as autumn approaches, where a plant’s ability to produce chlorophyll (and stay green) is reduced by the cold and its leaves eventually desiccate, detach, and fall to the ground. The shape-shifting is a chemical reaction to reduction in water fluidity that contracts cells and collapses the flower structure; and the color-shift is a reminder that few flowers are actually pure white but instead are suppressing the appearance of alternate colors when they’re at optimal blooming stages.

All this means that this year I accumulated hundreds of aster and mum photos that are not entirely photogenic. Naturally, I was aware of that when I took the photos (how could I not be?), but took lots of them anyway, in part because I wanted to see what I could create from them once I had time to spend editing in Lightroom. While I’ve long been accustomed to using Lightroom’s healing tools to remove spots, pollen, bits of debris, or unfocused photobombing bugs from my images, the kind of repair and reconstruction needed for heavily damaged plants is beyond the capabilities of those tools.

Such reconstruction is not, however, beyond the capabilities of Lightroom’s Generative AI Remove tool, which was added to the software in mid-2024 and I’ve been experimenting with it since. Simply put, this tool lets you select parts of an image that you want to replace, and it fetches three potential replacements you can pick from to let you properly match colors and textures. It lets me think of an image’s creative reconstruction like this: what might have been in the photo if the damaged flower, broken leaf, or dead stem wasn’t there?

Here are some examples to help illustrate that thinking, three photos showing how the image looked before I selected elements to remove and replace (sometimes dozens of individual selections), and after. Select the first image and page through all six if you’d like to see how the changes worked out. Note, especially, how the tool generated new leaves for the plants that are botanically accurate: they not only match the colors and textures present in other parts of the photo I didn’t change, but are correctly rendered not as some generic leaf shape, but with the distinct appearance of chrysanthemum leaves.

Of course, the end result departs significantly from what I photographed, which generates all sorts of interesting questions at the intersections of photography, creativity, image manipulation, and even artificial intelligence. A photography theorist bound to originalist or documentary conceptions might think this distance between what I photographed and what I chose as an end result violates some picture-taking laws, but I’m not one of those theorists. I do, however, try to approach these changes intentionally, with the idea in mind that we — as humans who observe plants and flowers in real life — tend to focus on parts of a scene we consider the subject and worth contemplating, while disregarding those parts of that scene that we consider irrelevant. To the camera, everything it captures is equally significant or insignificant, though it may help us with subject isolation when we vary focal lengths, apertures, and other settings — so it’s up to us and our discretion, not the technology, to decide what matters.

If you’ve been following me here for a while, you’ll likely recall that I have in the past often produced galleries of images where I’ve removed the backgrounds behind the subject I wanted you to see by converting them to black. This was a different kind of image manipulation serving the same goal: presenting a photo based on what mattered to me when I viewed the subject, while discarding distracting or irrelevant items. Given the Generative Remove tool’s capabilities, I look back on that now as a transitional period in my own development, one that I’d probably still be using had this new tool not been invented, and one that permits me to take wider shots than I did in the past while knowing I can remove aberrations while still preserving the botanical accuracy and garden context of the original scene.

Because its operation is quite opaque — like a black box in technological terms — using it is heavily experimental, but with a lot of ambiguity since you can never get the same results twice even if you try to make an identical second selection. And while you can’t tell it what to do with words that represent your thoughts or your vision, eventually it sinks in through that experimentation that you can influence how it acts. I’ll explore that more fully in a later post, but here are two things I discovered that have turned out to be consistently true: if I want to repair damage to a particular leaf, I should first remove any small spots or blemishes on adjacent leaves, or the tool will incorporate nearly identical spots into its replacement; and, if I want the tool to construct something like a new leaf in an otherwise nearly blank location, it will do that accurately if I include a sliver of a leaf nearby in my selection. These two techniques tell me that the tool is contextual: in determining potential replacements, it’s looking at what else is in the photo in conjunction with what I’ve selected before providing replacement options.

Here’s another way to understand that. For this image, I selected everything in the sixth photo above for replacement — therefore asking Generative Remove to recreate the entire photo. What does this result tell us about how it works?

I’m glad you asked! We can see that — even though I’ve told the tool to replace all the image’s content — it still recognizes that the primary subject was a white flower of a particular shape, the background leaves were unimportant, and that the most prevalent colors in the image were white and shades of green. It probably knows nothing specific about objects we would identify as chrysanthemums, but takes the pattern it found in my photo’s subject and repeats it while varying the pattern to simulate randomness. It applies this same approach to the grass in the background: note how each swatch of grass is very similar though not precisely identical.

This arrangement of recurrent but slightly varying patterns is one of the reasons we would recognize this implausible field of flowers as likely created by an image generator: the patterns are too uniform, and any given section of the image looks nearly identical to any other. That has two implications: first, that when editing photos and using this Generative Remove tool, I have to keep an eye out for unnatural patterns or patterns that aren’t a logical fit; and second, when you see an image with patterns like this, your conclusion that it’s AI-generated is most likely correct.

Thanks for reading and taking a look…

And Happy New Year!

Montevidensis Returns!

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From “Descriptions of Vines” in Landscaping with Vines by Frances Howard:

“Lantana montevidensis (Trailing Lantana, Weeping Lantana): Trailing lantana is a prostrate plant with brittle, twiggy, spreading branches. The leaves are rough and rather dull, but they are almost completely obscured by the wealth of rose-lilac flowers which appear in compact heads and literally cover the foliage. The plant is almost everblooming — from spring, through summer and fall, and even into the winter months in protected locations….

“Trailing lantana is perhaps most effective when planted at the tops of low walls and allowed to cascade over them. It is beautiful in hanging baskets, and may be trained on trellises to provide design patterns. Although the plant is an excellent ground cover, it loses its leaves in even mildly cold areas and is killed to the ground by freezing temperatures. It grows back readily from the roots the following spring, if properly mulched….

“Trailing lantana tolerates cold to central Texas and South Carolina. It grows well in Florida and the Gulf States, the southwestern desert areas, and the warm subtropical regions of California. [It] loses its leaves in cold spells and dies to the ground with frost…. If cut to the ground, the plant will grow back readily the following spring.”

From “Flowering Plants for Color on the Ground” in Color for the Landscape by Mildred E. Mathias:

“Lantana montevidensis (Trailing lantana): This species of lantana has long trailing stems with small leaves and bears clusters of lavender-purple flowers in profusion throughout the entire year. It is considered tender but is sometimes seen in interior valleys in sheltered locations. It stands much drought and neglect and is one of the most satisfactory and ornamental plants for slopes in areas with a favorable climate. It is best in full sun and is attractive when draped over a wall…. For a spectacular bloom over a whole year it is difficult to surpass the bush or trailing lantanas.”

Hello!

Once upon a time in October, I posted a series of photos of a flowering vine I later identified as Lantana montevidensis, which I thought was either new to Oakland Cemetery or had previously been undiscovered by The Photographer. The plant — originally named after one of its native regions, Montevideo in Uruguay — is known for its trailing or weeping habits and its ability to bloom through multiple seasons. Yet I was nevertheless surprised to see that it was still producing flowers on November 16, six weeks after I originally photographed it (see Lantana montevidensis, Weeping or Trailing Lantana) and after we’d had a few days of below-freezing temperatures early in the month.

Compared to its condition in the previous photos, it’s true that the plant now has fewer blossoms, they’re a bit smaller, and some of the vine’s leaves are extra-dark green, likely from frost. Yet the fact that there are blossoms at all, they’re mostly undamaged by the cold, and there are still buds waiting to turn into flowers is quite a demonstration of this plant’s hardiness. Its sunny physical location probably helps, and the stone and brick around it would reflect ambient heat to keep the plant warm when temperatures drop. I’m intrigued to see if it’s resilient enough to continue growing and flowering through the winter, or will flower in those very early spring days when hardy plants like quince, plums, and the first daffodils mark the transition away from winter.

Thanks for taking a look!

Feverfew and Featherfew, or, Tanacetum parthenium (2 of 2)

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From “The Virtuous Plants” in The Origins of Garden Plants by John Fisher:

“Chrysanthemum parthenium, feverfew, was, as its name implies, cultivated as a herb for lowering the temperature, and its strongly aromatic foliage no doubt helped to sustain its image as a herb of considerable efficacy. Its white daisy flower and pale green chrysanth foliage can be detected on the fringes of many walled gardens. Its name is said to have been derived from an incident related in Plutarch’s Life of Pericles during which a man who fell while working on the Parthenon escaped death by grabbing hold of a clump of feverfew.”

From “Border Flowers” in Flowers and their Histories by Alice M. Coats:

“C. parthenium. Feverfew. This plant is generally accepted as a native, though some think that it was introduced by the Romans, on the ground that it is one of a number of trees and herbs whose Anglo-Saxon name is obviously derived from the Latin. In this case, feverfew is said to be a corruption of febrifuge, ‘taken from his force of driving awaie agues’ [according to John Gerard’s Herball.] But it is equally possible that the Romans found the plant already here, and merely brought its properties to notice.

A double variety was brought into gardens at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and was then regarded as ‘peculiar onely to our owne Countrey’. ‘It abounds in Britain’, wrote the Dutch florist Crispin de Pass, in 1614, ‘because it appears to be grown there with skill and industry, and indeed from thence many kinds of flowers composed of a manifold series of petals are first brought into the neighbouring countries.’

Later on, it became popular as a foliage-plant for bedding-out purposes, particularly the golden-leaved variety, C. parthenium aureum. As to its properties, it was held to be ‘a special remedy to helpe those that have taken Opium too liberally… In Italy some use to eat the single kinde among other greene herbes… but especially fried with eggs, and so it wholly loseth his strong and bitter taste.’ It was ‘very good for them that are giddie in the head, or which have the turning called Vertigo… also it is good for such as be melancholike, sad, pensive and without speech’.

It appears on garden lists in various spellings — ‘Double Featherfew’, ‘Double Feaverfew’, and ‘Febrefeu’ are among them — for nearly a handful of centuries…. It was called Parthenium by the early botanists because of a tradition (recounted by Plutarch) that it saved the life of a man who fell from a height — having presumably become ‘giddie in the head’ — during the building of the Parthenon….

The scent is supposed to be particularly distasteful to bees. Varieties of C. parthenium are sometimes listed as Matricarias.”

From “A Stroll” by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger in Harvest of Blossoms: Poems from a Life Cut Short, edited Irene Silverblatt and Helene Silverblatt:

The fields are merely clods of darkest brown
and here and there a bit of yellow-green,
and little sparrows, silly, fresh, and daring,
are darting over them like raucous children…
And far away the city with its towers,
with houses storming forth, so light and merry,

is like an image from a fairy tale.
The air is quiet, filled with yearning,
so that you wait for sky-blue larks
and want to ride in slender rowboats.

Here stand white asters, white and pure,
and there a head of cabbage, small and young.
They’re like a long forgotten parasol
in the middle of snow covered streets.
A rabbit, running past, cannot believe it….

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photographs of Tanacetum parthenium — a plant whose common names include Feverfew, Featherfew, Bachelor’s Button, and many others listed here — that I took at Oakland Cemetery in October. The first post is Feverfew and Featherfew, or, Tanacetum parthenium (1 of 2).

Alert readers (like you!) might notice that the two excerpts above — from books published in 1982 and 1971 — refer to the plant as Chrysanthemum parthenium, something that emphasizes what I wrote about in the first post: its current name Tanacetum parthenium is a recent enough change that even contemporary botanical references use the previous name. Those two excerpts also elaborate on the parthenium part of the plant’s name (which has remained constant) with rescue stories, though one might still puzzle about whether “grabbing hold of a clump of feverfew” would have mitigated against gravity.

Thanks for taking a look!