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

Category: photography

Bearded Irises in Purple and Blue (1 of 2)

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From “The Historical Drama of Bearded Irises” in A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris:

“The development of bearded irises is a long-running historical drama, a major production with countless acts. The stories behind the plants, the legends lurking in the garden, imbue the rainbow flower with far more than just cultural planthropology. From pastoral scenes in Europe dotted with clumps of wild irises to the suburban streets of America lined with clumps of prize-winning hybrids, the glamorous rise of the bearded iris is a feel-good tale of starry ambition. Classically beautiful stems waved tailored forms of simple colors — purples and lavenders — for millennia. But the introduction of the human eye, ever in search of beauty, set in motion a 300-year adventure that would turn Italian and Caucasian meadow wildflowers into one of the western world’s most familiar herbaceous perennials.

“The next time you stare at a bearded iris, know that it didn’t just get there by happenstance; its arrival in your garden involved a cast of characters with as much or more personality than the flower you behold….”

So it seems I’ve been not-blogging over the past couple of weeks: spring is a very busy time filled with post-winter garden cleanup, transplanting or transpotting overgrown plants, puzzling about wayward perennials that didn’t come back this year, and plotting new purchases and planting new things. Having a garden is like having a never-ending project, of course; and so none of these tasks are actually completely done yet, there just never-endingly in progress.

But this is also a time for capturing fresh blooms with the camera — and I’ve accumulated, like I always do, many more photos than our post-processing “department” can keep up with. I’ve been reliably informed that Post-Processing is about 500 photos behind at the moment; and, though many of those will get cut, that cutting doesn’t happen without effort so there is quite a bit of effort yet to be expended. Around a quarter of those unprocessed images are photos of about ten different late-spring iris varieties from my favorite “haunted” green-space, so I return from not-blogging with a couple of posts featuring some of the purplest and bluest ones I found.

Lately I’ve been fascinating myself (!!) with the realization that some people write books about a single type — or, more properly, genus — of flowers. The book I quoted above is one of them, one that I found just recently while scrounging the internet for some new quotations about irises. The quotation is a chapter-opening paragraph, one that did a good job of whetting my appetite for a twenty-page fast-moving iris biography.

What I look for in books like this is not just gardening information, but at least some substantial coverage of the plant’s history (especially its discovery) as well as its cultural significance and distribution or dissemination over time. So far I’ve accumulated a handful of books like this, such as…

A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris

Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower by Noel Kingsbury

Hydrangeas: Beautiful Varieties for Home and Garden by Naomi Slade

Lilies: Beautiful Varieties for Home and Garden by Naomi Slade

… and keep a few others on an Amazon list for future purchase. I typically don’t read them cover-to-cover, but use them as reference material when I want to learn more. Books — unlike internet articles or even online encyclopedias — always provide context, especially historical and cultural context, that is much more compelling in long-form nonfiction than any other form. Here, too, are some of the books I keep browsing to learn more about botany (and its history) more generally, which trace the development of plant and flower exploration and discovery over several centuries:

Flower Hunters: Adventurous Botanists and the Lasting Impact of Their Discoveries by Mary Gribbin

Garden Flora: The Natural and Cultural History of the Plants In Your Garden by Noel Kingsbury

Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding by Noel Kingsbury

The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants by Anna Pavord

The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives by Stephen Buchmann

If these subjects interest you at all, you can’t go wrong with any of these books. All are highly accessible, filled with stories and character narratives requiring no specialized knowledge about plants or gardening or botany. And either in e-book or tree-book form, they’re all filled with gorgeous images, or, in some cases, full-color drawings or illustrations.

In a way, I keep exploring photography simultaneously with botany and cultural anthropology, since every set of photo galleries I post here is preceded by some amount of new research on the subjects of the galleries. At first that wasn’t intentional — I just stumbled on bits of learning while looking for quotations to open my blog posts — but now I do it on purpose and spend at least as much time on that as on picture-taking and post-processing. It’s what keeps photography and blogging relevant and intriguing for me; otherwise, I would just post multiple photos a day without words but not enjoy the personal experience nearly as much.

From the quotation at the top, I thought “planthropology” was an interesting new word; or, well, not actually a word but I suppose a “portmanteau” combining two unrelated concepts into a new word. Plant anthropology is probably the proper term, though ethnobotany also seems to cover some of the same scientific and cultural paradigms. I’m obviously not formally studying botany; instead, I’m just gathering gems of information from different sources, and now and then it seems like I’ve discovered something new. Learning is like that, though, or at least can be: with a general approach in mind, it’s relatively easy to eventually combine this gathered moss into something that makes more and more sense with each and every new photographic outing.

Thanks for reading and taking a look! More soon!

Yellow Iris Variations

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From “Flower-de-luce” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in The RHS Book of Flower Poetry and Prose by the Royal Horticultural Society:

Thou art the iris, fair among the fairest,
Who, armed with golden rod,
And wingéd with the celestial azure, bearest
The message of some god.

O! flower-de-luce, bloom on, and let the river
Linger to kiss thy feet!
O! flower of song, bloom on, and make for ever
The world more fair and sweet.

My first spring iris sighting for 2022 occurred in mid-April, where I stumpled upon these two large yellow beauties growing all by themselves in front of a thicket of boxwood hedges, set up from ground level behind one of the many stone walls at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens.

I couldn’t get too close without climbing over the wall (not an activity appreciated by the caretakers, for sure) so I took these with a zoom lens stretched out to 300mm. Even at that zoom level, the lens captured a lot of detail: the first two in each trio are the original photos, and the third is a very close-in crop of the second image that I created in Lightroom. Despite the big zooms (both the lens and the crop), I’m pretty satisfied with the texture and color that made it into the final images.

The first two galleries below are followed by the same images on black backgrounds (shades of yellow and orange do so well on black); and, finally, the same images converted to black and white with the same level of silver tone added to each one, which seems to reveal the translucence of the flower petals even better than the color images.

Thanks for taking a look!

A Collection of Daffodils (4 of 4)

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From “To Daffodils” by Robert Herrick in The RHS Book of Garden Verse by the Royal Horticultural Society:

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain’d his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray’d together, we
Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer’s rain;
Or as the pearls of morning’s dew,
Ne’er to be found again.

As a fitting marker for the last of this year’s series of daffodil photos, I found a poem (see up top) with the end of Daffodil Season as its theme. I may find a few more blooms around town — and if I do, I’ll ask them to pose for me — but as the pre-summer heat has started moving in (already!), they are likely “ne’er to be found again” as Herrick says in his poem… at least, not until next year.

This is the fourth of four posts featuring my 2022 daffodil photos. The previous posts are:

A Collection of Daffodils (1 of 4);

A Collection of Daffodils (2 of 4);

A Collection of Daffodils (3 of 4).

Next up: camellia or cherry blossoms or dogwoods or irises or plum blossoms or tulips or… I haven’t decided yet!

🙂

Thanks for taking a look!

A Collection of Daffodils (3 of 4)

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From Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower by Noel Kingsbury and Jo Whitworth:

“Daffodils have been a symbol of spring and rebirth in many cultures, not just because that is when they flower, but because of their persistence in coming back every year….

“As a spring flower, it is no surprise that daffodils are seen as a symbol of rebirth and new life in many different cultures. In China what are called paperwhites in English (various forms of Narcissus papyraceus) are used to celebrate Spring Festival (New Year), the most important Chinese festival, around late January or early February. Traditionally, bulbs are grown without soil, set out on pebbles in shallow plates with their roots growing down into water in the bottom of the plate….

“In western and central Europe, daffodils are often used to adorn churches as part of celebrations of spring and the resurrection of Christ. In Medieval Christian art, the flower is used as a symbol of paradise, and triumph over death; it is often associated with the Virgin Mary. In the Muslim Middle East it may, somewhat paradoxically, be seen as a symbol of death and planted on graves, because its growth in spring reminds people of the life to come. In classical Arabic poetry, Poeticus daffodils are seen as having ‘eyes’ and therefore of being the eyes of the garden as well as being symbols of love, longing, and desire….”

This is the third of four posts featuring my photographs of this spring’s daffodils. The first post is A Collection of Daffodils (1 of 4); and the second post is A Collection of Daffodils (2 of 4).

Thanks for taking a look!

A Collection of Daffodils (2 of 4)

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From Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower by Noel Kingsbury and Jo Whitworth:

“The word ‘narcissus’ is linked inexorably with that of the beautiful boy Narcissus in Greek mythology, who was unaware of the intense love for him felt by the wood nymph Echo, who was cursed by being only able to repeat his last words. Eventually she pined away for him to such an extent that she became only a faint voice in the woods. As a revenge and punishment on Narcissus, Venus, the god of love, sent Cupid to cast a spell over him, so that he would fall in love with the first face he saw….

“What happened, of course, is that he leaned over a pool to drink and fell in love with his own image. Like Echo, he began to waste away with unrequited love, but the gods took pity on him, and turned him into a flower — a daffodil, probably Narcissus tazetta, which we know to have been grown in ancient Greece. Not surprisingly, daffodils came to symbolize both unrequited love and egotism in the Victorian language of flowers, and narcissism has come to mean a pathological sense of preening self-worth.”

Well, there you have it: Boy doesn’t meet nymph, dimly falls in love with his own reflection instead, gets bewitched into a flower, and is linked with a pathology for centuries. Keep his fate in mind next time a wood nymph tried to get your attention.

This is the second of four posts featuring my encounters with this spring’s daffodils. The first post is A Collection of Daffodils (1 of 4).

I’m a big fan of the varieties in the first five photos (and in the last five, with black backgrounds). The others, though, have a different sort of charm: each was a single daffodil standing on its own in an odd place, as certain daffodils like to do.

Thanks for taking a look!