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

Category: exploring place

Anemone, the Winde-Floure (1 of 2)

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From “Of Wind-Flowers” in The Herbal, or General History of Plants by John Gerard and Thomas Johnson:

“The stock or kindred of the Anemones or Wind-flowers, especially in their varieties of colours, are without number, or at the least not sufficiently known unto any one that hath written of plants. For Dodonaeus hath set forth five sorts; Lobel eight; Tabernamontanus ten: myself have in my garden twelve different sorts: and yet I do hear of divers more differing very notably from any of these; which I have briefly touched, though not figured, every new year bringing with it new and strange kinds; and every country his peculiar plants of this sort, which are sent unto us from far countries….

“The first kind of Anemone or Wind-flowers hath small leaves very much snipped or jagged almost like unto Camomile, or Adonis flower: among which riseth up a stalk bare or naked almost unto the top; at which place is set two or three leaves like the other: and at the top of the stalk cometh forth a fair and beautiful flower compact of seven leaves, and sometimes eight, of a violet colour tending to purple. It is impossible to describe the colour in his full perfection, considering the variable mixtures….

“The second kind of Anemone hath leaves like to the precedent, insomuch that it is hard to distinguish the one from the other but by the flowers only: for those of this plant are of a most bright and fair scarlet colour, and as double as the Marigold; and the other not so….

“The [third] great Anemone hath double flowers, usually called the Anemone of Chalcedon (which is a city in Bithynia) and great broad leaves deeply cut in the edges, not unlike to those of the field Crow-Foot, of an overworn green colour: amongst which riseth up a naked bare stalk almost unto the top, where there stand two or three leaves in shape like the others, but lesser; sometimes changed into reddish stripes, confusedly mixed here and there in the said leaves. On the top of the stalk standeth a most gallant flower very double, of a perfect red colour….

“The fourth agreeth with the first kind of Anemone, in roots, leaves, stalks, and shape of flowers, differing in that, that this plant bringeth forth fair single red flowers, and the other of a violet colour….

“The fifth sort of Anemone hath many small jagged leaves like those of Coriander, proceeding from a knobby root resembling the root of Bulbocastanum or Earth Chestnut. The stalk rises up amongst the leaves of two hands high, bearing at the top a single flower, consisting of a pale or border of little purple leaves, sometimes red, and often of a white colour set about a blackish pointel, thrummed over with many small blackish hairs….”

Hello!

I had not previously known that anemone plants were also called “windflowers” — the recent learning of which sent me into a research tizzy about the source of the common name. With a little help from ClaudeAI, I discovered that John Gerard’s book The Herball, or, Generall Historie of Plantes — often retitled as The Herbal, or General History of Plants (or simply Gerard’s Herbal) — contained some of the earliest written references to anemones as windflowers. There are several variations of the book available online, some of which appear to be scans of an original 1700-page 1597 version, where “windflower” was written as “winde-floure” — which I’ve decided is pronounced “windy-flurry” even if it’s not.

Gerard’s Herbal describes eleven kinds of anemone. I quoted through the fifth since that one sounds like the anemone I photographed for this first post — because of their white color and notably for their tiny, sparse leaves that are shaped like coriander leaves, or, as I’ve read elsewhere, parsley leaves. This batch of anemone was growing in the corner shadows of the W.A. Rawson Mausoleum — which you can read more about here, or see some images of here — whose textured gray stone provided a nice background for the white flowers and wispy green stems.

While I often use some magic tricks to extract text from scanned books like Gerard’s Herbal, they didn’t work too well with this version since there are ghostly images bleeding through from other pages. Luckily I found a text version — which I used for the quote up-top, and where the language is partially modernized, though many “haths” and “doths” remain. And from there I found this delightful explanation for the genesis of “windflower” as the plant’s common name….

“Anemone, or Wind-Flower is so called for the flower doth never open itself but when the wind doth blow, as Pliny writeth: whereupon also it is named of divers Herba venti: in English, Wind-Flower.”

… followed by some notes about the plant’s medicinal properties — called “The Virtues” — which include:

“The leaves stamped, and the juice sniffed up into the nose purgeth the head mightily….

“The root champed or chewed procureth spitting, and causeth water and phlegm to run forth out of the mouth.“

Good to know, I guess! 🙂

Across this post and the next one, the plants appear to be Japanese Anemones (Eriocapitella hupehensis) or Snowdrop Anemones (Anemonoides sylvestris) — both of which tend to be fall-blooming anemones in warmer climates, and I normally see them flowering here in the southeast from late summer through late September or early October. I took these photos on October 6th and October 19th — when many of the flowers had already bloomed yet there were plenty still preparing to open.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Sunflowers and Goldenrod (2 of 2)

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From “Sunflower” in History of the World in 100 Plants by Simon Barnes:

“Sunflowers were cultivated in North America long before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. They were grown for food, but no doubt their dramatic appearance was part of the appeal. Certainly it was the look of the plant that prompted Europeans to take sunflowers back across the ocean. Once there sunflowers became a crop plant all over again, useful and humble. But now the plant is ineluctably associated with the cult of genius and the legend of the tormented artist.

“There are seventy species in the genus Helianthus, but it’s the cultivated species Helianthus annus that mostly concerns us here: the one with the flower-head that looks like the sun. It’s not technically a flower but an inflorescence. Each head comprises many individual flowers; each of the outer flowers, which most of us refer to as petals and a botanist calls ray heads, are in fact individual flowers. These outer flowers don’t do sex, being sterile: they are a come-hither signal to insect pollinators, which feed from the many tiny flowers arranged in cunning spirals on the central disc.”

From Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katherine S. White:

“[Goldenrod] is as sturdy and as various as our population; there is delicate dwarf goldenrod, silver goldenrod, tall yellow goldenrod in a multitude of forms and shapes-spikes, plumes, and panicles of native gold….

“Descend into a bog and there, growing wild, is goldenrod; climb a mountain and there, between the crevices of boulders, is goldenrod; follow the shore of the sea and goldenrod gleams along the edge of the sands; drive along our highways from coast to coast in August and September and the fields and ditches are bright with goldenrod….

“The very ubiquity of the flower has given it a bad name as an irritant to hay-fever victims, but I’ve recently read that it is the ragweed and flowering grasses growing alongside goldenrod that are the villains during the late-summer hay-fever season. The goldenrod also has the great advantage… of owing nothing to man, of enriching no seed company, or companies, and of being as wild as our national bird, the eagle.”

From “Journals (1853)” in The Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau:

“I see the sunflower’s broad disk now in gardens… a true sun among flowers, monarch of August. Do not the flowers of August and September generally resemble suns and stars? — sunflowers and asters and the single flowers of the goldenrod. I once saw one as big as a milk-pan, in which a mouse had its nest.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of sunflowers and goldenrod; the first post is Sunflowers and Goldenrod (1 of 2). For the photos in this post, I zoomed in on individual sunflowers or sprays of goldenrod — except for the three photos of a sunflower trio from behind (which are actually my favorites of this series).

As some interesting botanical info-bits:

Both the goldenrod plant and the sunflower plant are members of the Aster family Asteraceae. Sunflowers are in the Helianthus genus; goldenrod is mostly in the genus Solidago, but there are goldenrod varieties in other genuses also.

PlantNet identifies these sunflowers most consistently as Beach Sunflower or Plains Sunflower — sunflowers whose blooms are smaller than their more famous relative, the giant sunflower Helianthus annuus.

I first thought the photos were of either Black-eyed Susans or Brown-eyed Susans (see Black-Eyed and Brown-Eyed Susans (1 of 2); and Black-Eyed and Brown-Eyed Susans (2 of 2)). But while the flowers are similar in appearance (and the blooms about the size of Susan blooms), the form of the unopened buds, tall stems, and distinctly-shaped leaves give these away as sunflowers. And, unlike Susans, these tend to appear not in groups or clumps but — as you can see — as a single stem, or two or three stems. 

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Sunflowers and Goldenrod (1 of 2)

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From “Sunflowers” in The Story of Flowers and How They Changed the Way We Live by Noel Kingsbury:

“For many of us, sunflowers are plants to grow for children. They are also important for the cut-flower industry, but are primarily an agricultural crop. Charred remnants of sunflower seeds from ancient Native American cave encampments have been pored over by archaeologists trying to work out when, where and how the plant was first domesticated. Current thinking is that this was in the region of the Ozarks (in the state of Arkansas), with hunter-gatherers collecting the protein-rich seeds to eat. Domestication reduced a large number of small heads to a smaller number of larger ones, and eventually to just one great big head. The plant spread across North and South America, and then, following the arrival of the conquistadores, by the sixteenth century it was in Spain and rapidly being taken up all over Europe — but initially only as an ornamental.”

From “Rough Goldenrod” in The Story of Flowers and How They Changed the Way We Live by Noel Kingsbury:

“Goldenrods — for many the quintessential autumn flower — were one among the many daisy-family plants introduced to Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the end of the latter century, various forms of two particularly vigorous species, S. gigantea and S. canadensis, were thriving as late-season border plants; they were popular as cut flowers, too. Both species are very vigorous, and by the middle of the next century they had well and truly escaped. They began to cover areas of waste ground in Germany, while in Britain it was the suburban rail network that took them far and wide, helped by domestic gardeners throwing unwanted plants over the back fences of gardens that lined the railway cuttings.

“By the late twentieth century the plants were thoroughly unpopular, and had given the whole genus a bad reputation. That is a shame, because many are garden-worthy plants, such as… S. rugosa, which spreads only slowly, looks very elegant and attracts butterflies in hordes…. There are many other species for a variety of habitats, and since all are good pollinator plants, their rehabilitation — particularly in the context of the current interest in native plants and ecological planting — seems well on the way and much deserved.”

From “The Garden in September” in The Poetical Works of Robert Bridges by Robert Bridges:

Now thin mists temper the slow-ripening beams
Of the September sun: his golden gleams
On gaudy flowers shine, that prank the rows
Of high-grown hollyhocks, and all tall shows
That Autumn flaunteth in his bushy bowers;
Where tomtits, hanging from the drooping heads
Of giant sunflowers, peck the nutty seeds;
And in the feathery aster bees on wing
Seize and set free the honied flowers…

From “Three Songs at the End of Summer” in Collected Poems by Jane Kenyon:

Cloud shadows rush over drying hay,
fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine.
The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod
brighten the margins of the woods.

Hello!

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been trying to more accurately identify the plants and flowers I photograph — and also trying to learn about their history and distribution — but I just realized this year how so many plants in the Aster family (Asteraceae) mark the transition from summer to autumn. Here in the middle of Georgia and further south in the state, there’s very little fall color until well into November, the autumn reds and golds typically held at bay until temperatures remain low over several days or weeks.

The timing of Asters’ flowering seems quite intentional, as a result, with late coneflower, daisies, and Black-eyed Susans appearing in the last of August through early September; overlapped then followed by sunflowers and goldenrod; and those followed (with a few early exceptions) by legions of tiny asters that keep flowering into late November or even early December. For The Photographer, it’s an abundance of color that rivals spring and the early weeks of summer; and I’ve already accumulated several hundred photos of asters in purple, magenta, peach, white, and yellow colors that are patiently waiting their turn in Post-Processing.

From these collections, I pulled out the photos of sunflowers and goldenrod first, shown below and in the next post in this series of two. Many of the sunflowers were standing guard over large battalions of goldenrod, enabling me to produce some interesting combinations of foreground and background, with a single sunflower backgrounded by yellow-orange goldenrod. Much of the goldenrod seemed enormous to me, so I included a couple of photos showing it in front of an ancient Magnolia tree, where it stood as tall as five or six feet, with horizontal spans in the twenty- to thirty-foot range. For a plant that is often derided as a weed (how rude!) or as a wildflower — with its tendency to grow along roadsides or railroad tracks in expansive numbers — these cultivated batches of flowers and their thousands of dark green leaves are quite a sight to see.

I often find it challenging to develop an appropriate focal point for goldenrod photographs, simply because of the length and depth of their flowering stems and their voluminous leaves. To get larger sections of the flowering portions in front-to-back focus, I have to use aperture settings that also bring the backgrounds into focus, and I end out with somewhat flat-looking photos with too many distractions around the subject. Here, for example, is one of the images as it came out of the camera…

… where I imagine it’s apparent what I intend as the subject, but that subject is barely separated from the background. As a “first draft” for a photo like this, I’ll usually reduce shadows and increase contrast to try and pop out the subject; then reduce the saturation and brightness of the color green to create the appearance of greater distance in the background.

Together, those changes got me about halfway there with these images, but I followed them with two careful (very careful!) masks of both the background and the flowers so that I could adjust each separately, further darkening the background and adding color saturation and texture to the flowers in the foreground. I also removed a few visual distractions — like the yellow sprays in the lower left and upper right corners, as well as an intruder leaf toward the top left. Then I polished it off by using healing brushes to reconstruct a few of the goldenrod leaves that were bent or broken, disappeared some random rust spots or blurry pollinators, and ended out here, with the final version of this image…

… or here, where you can compare the two:

For all of the goldenrod and sunflower photos, I shifted the yellow color toward orange a little — partly because Lightroom detects orange in the flower petals but the bright yellow tends to hide it; and because — especially in lower light of a cloudy day — my eyes detect some warmer orange shades that seem to disappear when I adjust brightness and shadows. Or, in other words — I saw some orange so I’m showing you some orange too!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Zinnia Elegance (4 of 4)

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From A History of Zinnias: Flower for the Ages by Eric Grissell:

“Garden zinnias, though among the most commonly grown annuals, are one of those flowers whose influences are greater than might easily be recognized. Originating as a lowly Mexican wildflower, they have held sway over subjects as far ranging as music, social customs, community design, larceny, art, battles at sea, and even outer space.

“[In] the early 1900s communities on the American side of the Atlantic recognized the importance of zinnias as they became more popular among designers. In 1913 zinnias were touted as elements of ‘Futurist designs’ harmonizing ‘with designs formed of cubes and triangles’ because of their rigidity and colors. The bright, clear colors of ‘this flower suggest those in the giddiest futurist silk,’ thus being used for fresh corsages and, in their artificial forms, as trimmings for hats and frocks. Zinnias were also being mentioned in the household decorations of society’s best….

“Most recently zinnias appear in yet another aspect of human endeavor, this time… in outer space. In January 2016 US astronaut Scott Kelly announced that a zinnia had bloomed on the International Space Station…. The purpose in specifically growing zinnias was as a testing phase for eventually more useful plants such as tomatoes because of the long growth periods and light conditions associated with both plants. It was also thought that flowering plants might raise the spirits of space station crew members.”

From “Garden in Progress” by Bertolt Brecht in Bertolt Brecht: Poems, edited by John Gillett and Ralph Manheim:

A lifetime
Was too little to think all this up in. But
As the garden grew with the plan
So does the plan with the garden.

The powerful oak trees on the lordly lawn
Are plainly creatures of the imagination. Each year
The lord of the garden takes a sharp saw and
Shapes the branches anew….

Around the vast tangle of wild roses.
Zinnias and bright anemones
Hang over the slope….

Hello!

This is the last of four posts with photos of zinnias that I took in the last week of September and the first week of October. The previous three posts are: Zinnia Elegance (1 of 4), Zinnia Elegance (2 of 4), and Zinnia Elegance (3 of 4).

So we’ve come to the end of the zinnias for this year. Or, perhaps not: I went on an aster-hunting expedition yesterday and saw that the zinnias were still going strong, waving in the breeze as bees and fritillaries bounced around, bloom-to-bloom. Since this is the first autumn I’ve given zinnias attention, I’ll keep an eye out to see how long they last — and also see if some new colors (or shapes!) appear that I haven’t photographed yet. If so, they may be back — nobody knows for sure!

Thanks for taking a look!

Zinnia Elegance (3 of 4)

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From “Zinnias” in Flowers and Their Histories by Alice M. Coats:

“The majority of the zinnias are natives of Mexico, where they were cultivated at a very early date. The horticultural art of the Aztecs was highly developed, and at the time of the Spanish invasion of 1520, the gardens of Montezuma equalled, if not surpassed, anything that was to be seen in Europe. Besides the zinnia, his flowers included the dahlia, tigridia, sunflower, and morning-glory; and he sent his gardeners to all parts of his realm to collect and introduce new plants and trees….

“When planting a shrub or flower newly imported from a distance, Montezuma’s gardeners were accustomed to prick their ears and sprinkle the leaves of the plant with blood. The new chrysanthemum-flowered zinnias, which have quite lost the neat French-millinery elegance of the older kinds, look as though they had been reared with the aid of some such ceremony.

“The plant was named in honour of J. G. Zinn, Professor of Physics and Botany at Gottingen University, who died in 1758 at the early age of thirty-two…. It is sometimes called Youth and Age; a name for which I can find no explanation.”

From “Summer / It Is Enough” in Reborn: Selected Poems by Louise Morgan Runyon: 

It isn’t always,
but at this moment, today,
it is enough

Enough, to stand in the sunlight of my garden,
to peel off the dead heads
of the yellow flowers
of the huge and glorious bush,
to bend down and examine
the brownish furry moth,
with its tiny pale iridescent
salmon-colored dots, as it pauses
on the pale, salmon-colored
zinnia….

Hello!

This is the third of four posts with photos of zinnias that I took over the past few weeks. The first post is Zinnia Elegance (1 of 4) and the second post is Zinnia Elegance (2 of 4).

Here we have some in lavender, purple, or pink — followed by a return to some of the red and orange ones that, perhaps, are descendants of those sprinkled with blood by the Aztecs as described in Flowers and Their Histories above. This may or may not be true, of course, but it can be fascinating to consider how generations of these plants made their way from Mexico in the 1500s, then to Europe, then eventually to the United States to land in a garden a mile from my house — transitions through time I had never really thought about until I started photographing flowers like this (obsessively!) and digging into their genesis and history.

Thanks for taking a look!