Category: photography

From “Japanese Anemones” in A Family of Flowers: Clematis and the Ranunculaceae by Deborah Kellaway:

“The lightest September flower is the Japanese anemone. It looks positively weightless poised high above the herbaceous border on the tops of straight stems that never bend or tilt. If it is silver-pink its face shines in the light; if it is white it illuminates dark corners. It will grow and spread and flower in full shade, planted between shrubs….

“The white is always pure white, the pink is always cool pink with a trace of mauve in it, sometimes paler, sometimes deeper. There are no other colours, but there are many variants of shape, size and height, in a steady stream of new named cultivars. Some are relatively short; some (like ‘Luise Uhink‘) are semi-double with thin, slightly fussy sepals giving the flower the look of an aster….

“Among the whites, the old hybrid ‘Honorine Jobert‘ … is peerless; it is 100 cm/40 in tall, and its simple flower has five or more white sepals and a ring of golden stamens. It has adorned shady garden borders for a century, rising above hydrangeas and dull evergreens, robust in growth but delicate in detail, flowering for three successive months, almost too familiar to be showy, too obliging to be adequately cherished.

“Among the pinks, ‘Queen Charlotte‘ was E.A. Bowles’s special favourite. ‘It is so lovely’, he wrote, ‘that I cannot bring myself to root any of it out.’ It is not tall and has large, generous flowers, tip-tilted semi-double saucers….”

From “To a Windflower” in Selected Poems (from Moods) by Theodore Dreiser: 

Excellent gesture,
Rare symbol,
Evoked by the sun out of the soil,
Obeying a compulsion of light,
A compulsion of thought,
But
So fragile
And yet
So aglow with sensation,
Warmth,
Impassioned color,
Form,
You are —
You are
A reaction to what?
A thought of what?
Recording whose mood?
Gaiety?
Breath?

I will sit before you and ponder,
I will seek to image you
As pure form
As thought,
Color — without color —
As idea —
Or tone, only, maybe;
I will think of you as pure feeling.
Beyond sensation,
And then —
And then —
Maybe —

These inscrutable things
Out of which you take your rise
Will interpenetrate
And dwell in me.

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Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photographs of Eriocapitella japonica relatives that are very likely a hybrid called Eriocapitella × hybrida, from Oakland Cemetery. This hybrid glows in the shade with its bright pink colors, and — unlike the white Eriocapitella in my previous two posts (see Eriocapitella japonica, the Japanese Anemone (1 of 2) and Eriocapitella japonica, the Japanese Anemone (2 of 2)) — it produces multiple rows of flower petals, earning its characterization as a double or semi-double anemone.

When I photographed white anemones for the two previous posts in September, these pink doubles were nowhere to be seen. It appears that their bloom time is slightly different or environmental conditions altered their cycles, as they’re all fall-blooming anemones that flower for several weeks. But the later appearance of the pink ones meant I got a chance to photograph quite a few buds that were just coming in, and the photos below progress through buds from earlier to later stages.

The galleries wrap up with five shots of one of the many hoverflies — bitty buglets that like to imitate wasps as they flit rapidly among autumn blossoms — that joined my photoshoot. Despite its still appearance in the photo, this hoverfly was constantly in motion, so getting a stationary view meant using a high shutter speed (1/750 of a second) — but also: resisting the urge to get too close when taking a shot, which would either encourage the hoverfly to leave or would reduce the focal distance too much to produce a clear image. The five shots are actually derived from one image, which — because I stood back when pressing the shutter button — was sharp enough to permit some pretty extreme cropping in Lightroom. Here you see the size of the original image with the crop I applied to produce the fifth version, followed by the result.

The five images of the hoverfly, then, are a series of successively tighter crops, made possible by the level of detail the camera captured even from a distance of about five feet with the lens set to 55mm. As I started taking mainly close-up and macro nature images a long time ago — often using a macro lens to do so — it has taken some mental retraining to remember to back away from the subject for photos like this, and rely on the camera’s capabilities as well as Lightroom editing to get results like these. It is, as such, a straightforward example of a photography workflow that aligns shooting techniques with post-processing to achieve a creative effect that departs from, but still represents, the original experience in the field.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “Anemone” in Japanese Gardens by Wendy B. Murphy:

“The Japanese anemone, a perennial grown for its late-summer flowers, is actually a native of China — Hupeh, the source of one of its Latin names, is a Chinese province — but it is considered one of the classical plants of Japanese gardening. Traditionally it is grown in the shade of trees or against dark rocks, where the clear, light colors of its flowers can best be appreciated. Sometimes plants listed as A. japonica are actually hybrids of this plant and A. vitifolia (grape-leaved anemone), a Himalayan species; this hybrid is taller than either parent, up to 5 feet, and is generally too large for use in a Japanese garden.

“The Japanese anemone grows to a height of 2½ to 3 feet. It has slender, branching flower stalks and deeply cut dark green leaves that form a 12-inch mound of foliage. The 2- to 3-inch-wide flowers are generally pink or mauve, though there is also a white variety. For Japanese gardens single-flowered varieties are considered more suitable than those with double flowers. The Japanese anemone is long-lived, and if left undisturbed it grows more beautiful with age….”

From “White Anemone” by Bryllion Fagin in The Music Makers: An Anthology of Recent American Poetry, compiled by Stanton A. Coblentz:

I keep in memory one lovely hour
That stirs my heart through darkened days and fair;
Faint with the struggle to escape the snare
Set by the world’s grim, vision-crushing power,
By chance I found a garden where a flower,
Gold-chaliced, raised its face in fragrant prayer
In its own petaled shrine, and kneeling there,
Felt my bound soul fly from its grief-barred tower.

Since I have found the path to beauty’s place
My peace-enamored self shall never know
Again the haunted cells of loneliness.
For I have looked upon an angel’s face
Incarnate in anemone’s pale snow,
Fair as a spirit, and as passionless.

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Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photographs of Eriocapitella japonica (previously named Anemone japonica) from Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Eriocapitella japonica, the Japanese Anemone (1 of 2).

The tropical storm formerly known as Hurricane Isaias left behind some cool, breezy, and mildly overcast weather this past Sunday — finally introducing some autumn-adjacent conditions The Photographer was pining for toward the end of September. Autumn photography at Oakland is something that took me a few years to fully appreciate, but I’ve come to see it as a season of color equal to spring and early summer, far beyond how its oaks and maples change. This past Sunday’s photography haul included images of Aromatic Asters, Gaillardia (unexpectedly blooming late), Goldenrod, Rudbeckia, Tanacetum, Zinnias, Zephyr Lilies, and a new encounter with a giant tree called Cunninghamia lanceolata, the Chinese Fir Tree whose pine-needle branches turn bright orange and yellow before they drop to the ground like piles of leaves.

On this Sunday trip, I revisited the location where I’d found the Eriocapitella japonica for these two posts and was happy to discover that their double pink relatives (Eriocapitella × hybrida) had come into bloom since late September, just around the corner. I had only photographed a few of the double-pinks one other time (see Eriocapitella, or: The Plants Formerly Known as Anemone (1 of 2)), and on this trip found many more than the eight I’d photographed last year. I’m still working on those photos, but here’s a sample…

… and here’s another sample where a hoverfly joined the photoshoot and stood still long enough for me to get several shots, including a pretty tight yet still well-focused closeup. Little pollinators everywhere seem to like the cooler temperatures as much as I do, and this particular one’s black and orange striped body provided a nice color contrast to the flower’s pink petals.

While it’s still a little early for the bulk of Oakland’s most colorful asters and mums — except Aromatic Asters and a few Tanacetums — here’s a hint showing flowers of the near future in one location where they fill part of a large raised memorial garden and are probably less than a week from opening in full.

I passed about a dozen similar areas on the grounds where the flowers were at this stage of preparing to bloom, so I expect I’ll be romping through the property again this weekend to see what I can find.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “Begonia and Other Flowering Herbs” in The Garden Flowers of China by H. L. Li:

“The anemone, a perennial free-flowering plant with pink and white flowers, is one of the most desirable herbaceous flowers of the autumn garden. It has a long period of cultivation in China, where it is known as Pai Tou Weng (White-haired Old Man), and is a familiar plant in the autumn garden. The plant was formerly used in medicine for a variety of diseases from rheumatic pain to dysentery.

“The anemones now ornament the Western garden, and these are mostly hybrids of European origin evolved from the Chinese species. Called the Japanese anemone, Anemone japonica, this, like many other garden plants, did not originate in Japan but was first noted by European naturalists in that country in the eighteenth century. These naturalists named many a species japonica that was only Japanese by cultivation but actually Chinese in origin (Bowles and Stearn, 1947).”

From “September’s Farewell” in My Garden in Autumn and Winter by E. A. Bowles:

“Anemone japonica is a plant I should like to grow every known form of, even some of the very double ones, but space forbids, so I have limited myself to a few. It is one of those plants that when first introduced to Britain was treated as a greenhouse plant, and instructions for so growing it may be found in old gardening books, of the date of Mrs. Loudon’s. Also, like so many introductions from China or Japan of that date, it was a garden form that came, a semi-double, crude pink one, still with us, but one of the least desirable. It is only within the last few years that the really wild type has arrived….

“It is a charming plant, perfectly single, of a soft tone of pink, with neat habit, round flowers about two and a half inches across, and one of the best of the many plants that have poured into our gardens lately from the Chinese province of Hupeh. It was at first called Anemone hupehensis, but is now generally regarded as a wild form of A. japonica. I like it as well as any of the larger forms, for it has the look of a species about it, and a wonderful substance in the flowers….

“Then there is the beautiful old white form, formerly known as Honorine Joubert, and a plant one should allow to naturalise itself among shrubs and in cool, half-shaded borders as much as it likes, for it will give nearly three months’ display of its well shaped pure-white flowers, which have the most lovely of golden centres, both for form and colour, of any flower I can think of except Rosa bracteata.”

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Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photographs of a plant from Oakland Cemetery that has come to mark the transition between summer and fall for me. I’ve so far encountered two (probable) species on the grounds, one of which (Eriocapitella japonica, formerly named Anemone japonica (among other names)) appears around September, and one (Eriocapitella × hybrida) that’s more likely to start blooming later in October. Since it’s still just barely September, this post includes only Eriocapitella japonica, but I’m sure I’ll hunt down the other species in a few weeks, and may even find some Eriocapitella japonica plants still producing blooms.

Like the Clematis from my own back yard (see Clematis Abundance (1 of 3)), plants in the Eriocapitella genus are members of the Ranunculaceae family, and they carry the distinctive center structure that earned the whole family the common name Buttercup. Coincidentally, one of the Eriocapitella japonica plant’s earliest botanical names was Clematis polypetala, perhaps as an observation that the flowers looked like tiny versions of Clematis blooms. This is of course something I just made up, yet it’s not an unreasonable theory given that Clematis polypetala goes back to the early 18th century and early scientific plant names were often developed around appearance similarities. For my part, I’m just glad I finally learned to spell the name of these delightful plants without having to copy and paste it from another document. And the pronunciation tip I created in last year’s post — see Eriocapitella, or: The Plants Formerly Known as Anemone (1 of 2) — has held up pretty well, which also helps me get the spelling right.

Farewell September!

Thanks for taking a look!

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