“The first order of business for a flower is to attract the attention of potential pollinators…. To attract pollinators, flowers use visual and/or chemical bait, or often both. Both chemical and visual cues can be outside our human perception, but technology can help us ‘see’ and ‘sniff’ like a pollinator.
“Visual cues include flower color and movement. Often the contrast of the color against the foliage is important, along with the contrasting colors within the flower. The vision of the animals plays a role in the evolution of flower colors. Hummingbirds have vision similar to ours, but bees do not. Bee vision is shifted toward the shorter wavelengths, so they see UV but not red. Research has shown that bees have a preference for blue flowers, which they see very well. Hummingbird-pollinated flowers are often in shades of red, which means that the flowers are mostly ignored by bees (although honey bees can learn to forage on red flowers). Hoverflies prefer yellow flowers. Flowers pollinated by nocturnal animals (bats, hawk moths) are typically white, which shows up well in the dim moonlight….
”Some plants supplement the color display of their inflorescences by surrounding their flowers with colorful bracts as in poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) and dogwood (Cornus florida)… Others supplement the display by holding onto old flowers, but to prevent pollinators from visiting these spent, unrewarding flowers (and depositing precious pollen), pollinated flowers turn a color different from that of virgin flowers. Pollinators quickly learn the difference….
The word “lantana” always reminds me of the word “banana” — but I’m not convinced that there are any members of this plant family properly called “Lantana Banana” even if it seems there should be. I did purchase two shrubs of an almost-banana annual variety called Lantana Bandana Red in May and potted them both, but they never produced any photographically suitable flowers. It may have been too bloody hot for too long, even for heat-tolerant lantana. Maybe they’ll try again next year; annual lantana sometimes comes back here, often for two or three seasons before they decline to return.
If there was such a thing as “Lantana Banana”, I could imagine it being incorporated into The Name Game song, as “Lantana Banana bo-bana, fee-fi-mo-mana” and so on. You’re probably familiar with The Name Game — originally written and performed by Shirley Ellis — which was incorporated into an American Horror Story episode by the same name. A delightful song-and-dance performance by the cast took place in an insane asylum, led by Jessica Lange as her character was prompted out of a stupor by another character — one named “Lana Banana!” I mean, that’s SO close!
These lantana are from one border of my courtyard, in a spot that gets plenty of morning sun and some filtered light in late afternoon to early evening. They’re Mary Ann Lantana (officially Lantana camara ‘Mary Ann’) — and I’ve had them for more than a decade. I didn’t know if they’d survive the freezing temperatures we had over the 2022 Christmas holidays, but the plant did bounce back if a bit smaller than usual, producing about a dozen clusters of their late summer blooms.
I was intrigued to find the quotation above about lantana color changes and what that means to pollinators. I always wondered why some of the flowers faded from multicolored to soft pink (reducing the number of colors and making sterile or previously pollinated flowers less visible to pollinators) — and now I guess I know!
“One day a group came by bicycle; there were two women and a man, and two children. They parked their bicycles in our driveway and lay down on our front lawn, pulling at the grass and talking while they rested. The children ran up and down our driveway and over and around the trees and bushes. This was the day that we learned that the vines were growing over the burned roof of our house, because one of the women glanced sideways at the house and said that the vines almost hid the marks of burning….
“We learned, from listening, that all the strangers could see from outside, when they looked at all, was a great ruined structure overgrown with vines, barely recognizable as a house. It was the point halfway between the village and the highway, the middle spot on the path, and no one ever saw our eyes looking out through the vines.”
“The storm above them flashed down another series of bolts and then moved on away. Once again there was only the rain, which rapidly cleared the air of the charred smell, and in a moment the three remaining men were sitting and waiting for the beat of their hearts to subside into quiet once more.
“They walked over to the body, thinking that perhaps they could still save the man’s life. They couldn’t believe that there wasn’t some way to help the man. It was the natural act of men who have not accepted death until they have touched it and turned it over and made plans to bury it or leave it there for the jungle to bury in an hour of quick growth….
“Even as they stood over the body it began to vanish, for the vegetation was edging in upon it, little vines and ivy and creepers, and even flowers for the dead.”
“Ahead of them is the roadway leading through the forest. Untrimmed branches reach into the corridor of light above it, opportunist weeds push into it from the margins, renegade vines overhang it. Out of the swelling foam of vegetation the curved dome rises like the white half-eye of a sedated patient. It must once have seemed so bright and shining, that dome; so much like a harvest moon, or like a hopeful sunrise, but without the burning rays. Now it looks barren. More than that, it looks like a trap: for who can tell what’s hidden in it, and what’s hiding?”
“They emerged into the atrium, into sun so bright they blinked against it. The room was like a forest. Nearly every surface was choked with fat green vines; in the center a stand of palms reached toward the open ceiling. More vines dripped from the exposed struts of the ceiling, like coils of living rope….”
“The deserted village had so sunk into the natural landscape of the coast that I did not see it until I was upon it. The trail dipped into a depression of sorts, and there lay the village, fringed by more stunted trees. Only a few roofs remained on the twelve or thirteen houses, and the trail through had crumbled into porous rubble. Some outer walls still stood, dark rotting wood splotched with lichen, but for the most part these walls had fallen away and left me with a peculiar glimpse of the interiors: the remains of chairs and tables, a child’s toys, rotted clothing, ceiling beams brought to earth, covered in moss and vines.”
Hello!
For this post, I took a few of the grapevine photos from the previous two posts (see Plant Entanglements (1 of 2) and Plant Entanglements (2 of 2) and reprocessed them on black backgrounds. Lightroom keeps making it easier to get good results with this technique, and yet there is still a bit of tedium associated with each one. As precise as Lightroom masking can be, I always end out cleaning up around the fine edges of each element of the photo, once I decide which parts to keep and which parts to smother in darkness. As with other repetitious tasks, the mind wanders while the brushes flow — and I started wondering about how often I’ve seen vines represented in apocalyptic scenes in books and movies, where they’ve taken over buildings and cities.
While I usually lead off each of my posts with quotes from poetry or nonfiction books about plants, nature, gardening, or photography, this time I went a-searching my collection of fiction books for references to vines. A lot of my fiction reading occurs in the dystopia, science fiction, or horror genres — this is probably because I first read Bram Stoker’s Dracula when I was a baby — yet I was still surprised at how often nefarious vines appeared in these books. The five quotes above are just a small sample; scary vines, apparently, strike many writers as darkly metaphorical — and as especially potent symbols of nature reclaiming civilization.
Botanically, the appearance of vines swallowing a cityscape would indicate a fairly advanced stage of reforestation. Vines would certainly not appear at the outset; they would, instead, be preceded by a variety of plants generally known as rosettes — small plants with leaf structures at ground level — whose growth helps create conditions for later, larger plants to take hold in the soil. Vines would probably show up around the time that shrubs and the first shoots of future-trees appeared, but the vines would have the distinct evolutionary advantages of rapidly growing upward as they reached for the sun, attaching to and climbing any structure they encounter, and “outrunning” plant-eating animals. That they evolved to avoid herbivores is probably speculation; but, hey, why not, let’s give them their agency.
With a little bit of “googling” I was surprised to discover a robust body of research on plants and the arts. Try searching for phrases like “plants in movies” or “plants in literature” if you’d like to see what I mean. The last search led me to this article: Plants and Literature — a fine overview of the subject — which covers both historical references to plants in prose and poetry, and also connects to contemporary movies and books. Scott Smith’s novel The Ruins and the 2008 movie by the same name (where (spoiler alert!) the vines consume the humans) and Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation, also adapted into a movie (where humans get blended into plant-person hybrids, among other astonishing things) are both mentioned. Vines have at least co-starring roles in both books and both movies — but their visuality is more flagrant in the movies. A fun comparison could be made between those books and films, and that of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House — where there is only one incidental reference to a vine, yet the various movies based or loosely-based on her book typically feature threatening attack-vines twisting among the woodwork of the house and capable of doing-in the human interlopers.
What is it about vines that get so much literary attention? Vines, grapevines, and ivy are often potent religious symbols, and also frequently represented in cemetery garden designs and funerary art (see Stories in Stone by Douglas Keister) — so culturally, and across cultures, that gives them some special oomph. Many vines get designated as invasive species; yet those same vines can be purchased at garden stores in tiny pots and transplanted into our gardens. On one hand, we can’t control them; on the other hand, we think we can. My own property features about five different vine varieties that I subsequently learned are considered invasive in the southeast, including English ivy and wisteria — both of which I only find “personally invasive” (that’s not really a thing) when I get behind on my landscaping and they do what they naturally do: try to take over anything they can get their tendrils on.
Eighteen years ago — as a new homeowner and extra-amateur gardener — I thought the wisteria growing near one back corner of my house was just delightful, until I realized that in a few summer weeks it had grown up the side of the deck, along the back walls of the house, and into the attic through a roof vent. Me and the wisteria got in a fight after that: I pulled about fifty feet of vine from the attic and cut the rest back, then thought I might be better off to down it entirely… which I tried to do by sawing through the vine’s ten-inch-diameter base, and, failing to make much more than a dent, went to Home Depot and bought a trellis for it instead. For the vine, in other words, the battle was won.
Similarly, after a multi-year drought afflicted the southeast around 2008, a new vine appeared embedded within the English ivy in my front yard, a plant I’ve not been able to identify but is probably a creeper variation, based on its behavior and appearance. Its leaves are tiny — the largest ones only an inch or two wide — and it produces skinny, strong, and fast-growing stems that are both self-entangling into a pyramid shape and will wind themselves around individual English ivy leaves or any plant, tree, or shrub they encounter. While it dies off every winter (its only redeeming characteristic), it’s become one of my summer rituals to get rid of as much of it as I can, since it will choke off the ivy if I let it. To the English ivy then, this anonymous vine, I imagine, is an invasive species. To me too!
So I suppose some of our darker experience with vines — especially invasive or obnoxious ones — is about our uneasy relationship with nature: we want to tame what will not be tamed, but we keep trying anyway. Their silent violence and tenacious exuberance affords them a special place in literature and film, considerably more prominent than just setting the mood or establishing the scene. Given their unique abilities — especially that of rapid growth (that seems to happen as we watch); their ability to envelope large structures and landscapes (see, for example, kudzusmothering trees near Atlanta); and their tendency to be only temporarily manageable — they can be twisted into a powerful metaphorical choice for books and movies.
Maybe there should be a separate Oscar category for Best Vine in a Feature Film….
Wasn’t that fun? See what happens when my mind wanders!
What wondrous life is this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons as I pass, Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade.
Hello!
This is the second of two posts with photos of grapevines from my garden, taken in April, 2022 and recently discovered entangled the backlog of my Lightroom library. The first post is Plant Entanglements (1 of 2). As with the previous post, the first batch of five photos shows the tendrils and leaves of a Concord grapevine; and the rest are from a Catawba grapevine.
Hmmm… I’m thinking I might sling a few of these grapevines onto black backgrounds just to see how they look; although — given the very tiny and fine details in some of the images — this may take some time….
“Left to their own devices, your plants’ vines will branch and rebranch and then rebranch some more, crisscrossing each other while growing several inches a day into a wrist-thick spaghetti of vinery. The plants will also want to develop lots of leaves, which are as big as serving platters and hover above the vines on two-foot-tall stems. Your vines will also want to produce many small (relatively speaking) fruits that can hide under those leaves…
“A rampant tangle of vines and leaves means some leaves will shade others, and shaded leaves are slacker leaves when it comes to the business of gathering sunlight. So it’s your job to go into the patch every day and prune, arrange, and stake, the rapidly growing vines so that they conform to your ideal….”
I stopped the car to let the children down where the streets end in the sun at the marsh edge and the reeds begin and there are small houses facing the reeds and the blue mist in the distance with grapevine trellises with grape clusters small as strawberries on the vines….
Hello!
In a previous post (see Found Blooms! (1 of 2)), I mentioned that I had been tidying up my Lightroom library at year’s end, and found a couple of sets of photos of cherry blossoms from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens and some photos of grapevines from my back yard. The grapevines have appeared here before (click this link if you’d like to see all the versions), and that may be why I didn’t attend to them last spring — you know: so many plant photos, so little time! I took the photos in this post (and the next one) last April, and spent a bit of time last week polishing them up and trying to give their leaves and tentacles a bit of flair. I’ll likely take another set of similar photos in a couple of months… however….
The historic winter storm that created havoc throughout much of the U.S. in the days leading up to Christmas brought about four days of below freezing temperatures and below-zero windchills (brrrrrr!) to much of Georgia — something that hadn’t happened since the 1980s and therefore not since I’ve lived in my house. The extreme cold for that extended period severely damaged a lot of plants that normally continue to grow (though more slowly) over the winter. My front yard and about half of my back yard, for example, are covered in carefully-curated English ivy, and nearly all of its thousands of tiny green leaves have turned black and crumble in your fingers if you touch them. Many other “evergreen” plants have done the same; on my property alone, azaleas, boxwoods, autumn ferns, holly ferns, jasmine, and fringeflower bushes have all turned black. It’s all very strange and somewhat disconcerting, even moreso when I walk around the neighborhood and see that yard after yard has turned dark gray or black. These plants are all perennials, though, so I guess it will be interesting to see how well they regenerate — and to photograph new life when it pushes out the dark, dusty remains.
Since the grapevines take winter naps anyway — losing all their leaves and turning their vines to sticks in October or November — I won’t know until late March if they survived the storm. I’m hoping they did, of course, since I’ve had them for so long — and I’m guessing they will since the ground didn’t freeze. I could replace them, naturally, but there’s something delightfully nostalgic about having the same plants coming back every spring for so long — for over a decade, in the case of these grapevines. I’m sure I’ll be out there with the camera, should the first swatches of green appear in about eight weeks.
The first seven photos below are the tendrils and early leaves of a Concord grapevine; and the rest are the tendrils and leaves of a Catawba grapevine. With these photos, as I remember it, I tried to frame the subjects to create a little elegance and drama around them — to the extent that that’s possible with plant photographs — by making deliberate choices about framing the subjects.
The Concord displays more translucent colors than the Catawba, featuring mostly shades of yellow and green (with brief slashes of red) that glow in morning sunlight. The Catawba is less translucent and not as shiny, but all of its early growth shows many more colors. In the last couple of photos, for example, you can see yellow and green, as expected, but also streaks of red, orange, blue, and purple or magenta. The Catawba’s rainbow of colors — don’t you wonder why it evolved that way? — persist for about three weeks. As the plant matures, it gradually reverts mostly to yellows and greens, and even the tendrils — some of which will be a foot long — grow mostly in green by early May, though the backs of the individual leaves will still show silver or white for their entire growing season.
See! the lark starts up from his bed in the meadow there, Breaking the gossamer threads and the nets of dew, And flashing adown the river, a flame of blue! The kingfisher flies like an arrow, and wounds the air.
And the sense of my life is sweet! though I know that the end is nigh: For the ruin and rain of winter will shortly come, The lily will lose its gold, and the chestnut-bloom In billows of red and white on the grass will lie.
And even the light of the sun will fade at the last, And the leaves will fall, and the birds will hasten away, And I will be left in the snow of a flowerless day….
Hello!
This is the third of three posts featuring dipladenia flowers from my garden. The first post is Do You Know Dipladenia? (1 of 3); and the second post is Do You Know Dipladenia? (2 of 3). For this post, I took a few of the photos from the previous two, twisted them into slightly different crop formations, then painted the backgrounds black.
This post marks the last of my spring and summer photographs for 2022 — about 240 photos from my gardens, and about 480 from my ‘hood (mostly Oakland Cemetery’s gardens but also Grant Park’s Grant Park). Since I use Lightroom to organize my photo projects — and separate the projects by year and season — I thought it was fun to compare this year to last year, and found that I posted almost (within 10 percent of) the same number of photos as 2021. Weird, that, because in my imagination I thought I had posted a lot less this year… but I guess not! I’m blogging at a pace of six to eight posts a month — each with new photographs and many with new writing — which seems to keep me at a reasonable balance between maintaining a site and regular life.
A heightened level of new fall color has blanketed my city over the past couple of weeks, presenting between bouts of rain when the sun comes out. While some of the first-turning, more boring leaves had hit the ground early, Japanese and other maples in particular are just now absolutely glowing in red, orange, and yellow — waiting patiently for someone’s (I wonder whose!) camera. Late season flower-bloomers like mums, daisies, coneflowers, goldenrod, and anemone, however, have recently been photographed and are in my “to be processed” Lightroom collections. My back yard is covered with discarded oak leaves from my neighbor’s tree to the height of the dog’s knees, demanding (but not yet getting any) attention. At the same time — with Thanksgiving under our belts (so to speak!) — the boxes of Christmas decorations have been dragged from their oh-so-tight storage spaces and are strewn about the house in various states of disorganization. Is this what multitasking is supposed to be for? I always thought that concept was strange; I mean: isn’t it true that only one thing gets done at a time? Those decorations — as I write this — aren’t putting up themselves!
I treated myself to a second Christmas tree for my home office this year — a six-foot slim or pencil tree, as they’re often called — and stood it up a couple of weeks ago shortly after it was delivered (I couldn’t resist!), then festooned it with a few hundred multicolored lights and a delightful batch of red, green, and gold shatterproof ornaments. The Dog — or The Photographer on his behalf — is a big fan of shatterproof ornaments because one of us likes to walk by the tree and bat at the low-hanging glitterlicious objects with his paw. For some reason he believes that’s forbidden, even though I’ve never reacted or tried to correct him for doing it. Funny how they know such things, isn’t it?
I often see him out of the corner of my eye when I’m at my desk as he does this: he sneaks forward one step at a time, checks to see if I’m looking, takes another step or two until an ornament’s within reach, checks on me again and if I don’t make direct eye contact taps it with his paw to get it swaying… then rests on his haunches to marvel at the motion he’s made. I’ve tried to take a few photos to catch the little elf in action — but me picking up the camera he thinks is a signal we’re going outside, so he races to the back door before I can get the shot. Ah, well, we’ll keep trying; and since we bought the tree so we’d have something new to photograph (and play with!), we may still manage a shot of the pup pawing its decorations over the holidays.
(Haha! True story: as I was proofreading this post, he tried it again: snuck up to the tree and glanced toward me, but I looked right back at him and I swear he pulled a guilty face then ran into the kitchen for a drink of water. Dog-crime makes a canine very thirsty, apparently!)
