From Flora: An illustrated History of the Garden Flower by Brent Elliott:
“In 1685, Chinese ports were officially opened to ships of all nationalities. Even then, customs regulations were so strict that foreign trade was effectively limited to Macao and Canton. Nonetheless, some Chinese plants began to arrive in Europe. Chinese chrysanthemums appeared briefly in the Netherlands in the 1680s, but soon disappeared from cultivation, while an Oriental hibiscus flowered at the Chelsea Physic Garden in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The hibiscus was introduced by the East India Company doctor James Cunningham, yet most early eighteenth-century introductions came from unidentified sources. Although Chinese plants had limited impact in Europe at the time, the accounts of Chinese gardens by Jesuit missionaries led to a fashion for Chinese-style effects in European landscapes.
“The early nineteenth century saw sporadic but enthusiastic attempts to introduce Chinese garden plants, importing to Europe the results of China’s centuries-old traditions of plant breeding. Chrysanthemums, China asters, camellias, peonies (especially tree peonies or moutans), and roses, all excited attention in Britain and Europe. Most were introduced by horticulturally minded sea captains. Sir Joseph Banks, the Director of the Royal Gardens at Kew, planted the first tree peony there in 1790. Sir Abraham Hume of Wormleybury in Hertfordshire was active in distributing peonies and chrysanthemums. Two founders of the Horticultural Society, the amateur gardener and collector Charles Francis Greville and William Townsend Aiton, the superintendent of Kew, helped distribute plants, the latter from specimens received at Kew. Among the results, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, were hydrangeas and tiger lilies. In 1818, John Reeves, a tea inspector at Canton, began to send plants to the Horticultural Society, among them some of the first wisterias….
“In the 1820s the Society sent two collectors to China: the first, John Potts, returned with seed of Primula sinensis; the second, John Damper Parks, was sent with specific instructions to look for the yellow form of Rosa banksiae.”
Hello!
This is the second of two posts featuring photographs of a rambunctious Lady Banks’ Rose from Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Lady Banks’ Rose, Spring 2025 (1 of 2).
As I’ve mentioned more than once here, I sometimes experiment with several AI tools to help me learn more about the plants and flowers I photograph. For me, it’s a shortcut to merge what I’ve learned about photography with what I continue learning about botany. And at this point, I’ve used them enough to recognize — despite appropriate misgivings about their future impact (as seen in aggressive marketing mixed with technological utopianism) — how they’ve improved over the past couple of years in areas that are relevant to me: photography and botany. I interact with ClaudeAI the most because in my experience it excels at explaining things in a botanical or historical context, and clarifying any questions I have or resolving what appear to be contradictions in its explanations.
Two years ago, I couldn’t get any of the AI tools to accurately identify flowers that are perhaps universally known to human beings. In other words, they couldn’t tell the difference (for example) between a daffodil and a tulip, despite each of those having easily recognized and distinct shapes. Fast forward a bit, and now Claude can tell me what’s in a photograph in detail — from the colors in the image, to the subject, to the shapes and structures in the background — and can usually identify a plant from one or two photographs, especially if the photographs contain other elements besides its flowers, like the stems, leaves, and surroundings where it’s growing.
At the same time, the tool understands characteristics of photography in surprising ways. It’s able to analyze a photograph, describe its compositional strengths and weaknesses using photographic concepts, and suggest improvements. I’ve used that capability to get recommendations about how to create better separation between subject and background in a photograph, how to most efficiently mask parts of a complex image before making adjustments, and how to use features in Lightroom in ways I hadn’t thought about before with step-by-step instructions. I’ve even uploaded two versions of the same image — one before I’d made any changes to it, and my final version — and asked Claude to explain the differences, which it did in terms of specific Lightroom steps I likely used to create the final version. And in one of the most useful conversations I had with it, Claude described how Lightroom’s Generative Remove Tool (which is also a form of AI) works, and how to influence its recognition of what’s in a photo so it provides better results when, say, I remove some dead flowers from a photograph of an iris and want them replaced with elements that look like nearby stems or leaves.
So to me this means I can do something like this: I can upload a few of my Lady Banks’ Rose photographs and ask for some observations both on the photographic characteristics of the image, and the botanical significance of what I photographed.
Using photos from this series, then, I inquired about three things: Rosa banksiae’s overall growth patterns; the arrangement of both opened and unopened flowers next to each other; and the red edging that appears on many of the leaves (most visible in the fourth, fifth, and sixth images below).
Here’s what Claude told me (that is, here’s what I learned):
Your photographic observations reveal some fascinating botanical principles at work, and I think exploring these visual elements will deepen your understanding of how this ancient rose species has evolved to thrive in its environment.
Let’s start with those dramatic architectural forms you’re capturing. When you photograph branches that seem to hang in midair or run in seemingly impossible directions, you’re documenting what botanists call “thigmomorphogenesis” — the way plants respond to physical touch and mechanical stress. Think of Rosa banksiae as nature’s sculptor, constantly feeling its way through three-dimensional space. Each branch that encounters a tree trunk, stone monument, or even another branch of itself will change its growth direction, creating unexpected angles and curves that make your photographs so dynamic.
The arched sweep pattern connects to something even more fundamental about how this rose conquers space. Picture the plant as following what we might call a “fountain strategy.” The main stems grow upward with vigor, but as they extend and become heavier with foliage and flowers, gravity naturally pulls them into those graceful arcs. This isn’t random — it’s an evolutionary solution that allows the plant to cover maximum territory while maintaining structural integrity.
Now, let’s examine those clusters of flowers mixed with unopened buds pointing skyward. This arrangement demonstrates what botanists call “determinate flowering” combined with “sequential bloom timing.” Think of each flower cluster as a carefully orchestrated performance where not all the actors appear on stage simultaneously. The buds pointing upward are positioned to catch maximum sunlight as they develop, while the opened flowers below them have already completed their primary function of attracting pollinators. This staggered timing extends the overall flowering period and ensures that some flowers are always at peak attractiveness to insects, even within a single cluster.
The red-edged leaves you’ve noticed represent one of the most overlooked aspects of Rosa banksiae’s botanical sophistication. That thin red margin isn’t merely decorative — it’s a sophisticated adaptation that tells us several important things about the plant’s physiology. The red pigmentation comes from anthocyanins, the same compounds that create red autumn leaves. In Rosa banksiae, these pigments serve as a natural sunscreen, protecting the delicate leaf edges from damage while also potentially deterring certain leaf-eating insects.
Think about what this means photographically and botanically. Those red edges create visual definition that helps each individual leaflet stand out against complex backgrounds. But from the plant’s perspective, this edge pigmentation represents millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning. The red compounds can also act as antioxidants, helping the plant manage the chemical stress of photosynthesis in bright sunlight.
Here’s a mental exercise that might enhance your photography: next time you’re capturing the plant, try to think like the rose itself. Where would you position a branch to capture maximum sunlight while avoiding competition with neighboring growth? How would you arrange your flower clusters to attract pollinators most efficiently? When you start seeing the plant as an active participant in shaping its own form rather than a passive subject, you might discover new angles and compositions that reveal the intelligence built into its growth patterns.
The combination of these elements — the space-conquering architecture, the strategic flower timing, and the protective leaf margins — creates what we might call the “visual vocabulary” of Rosa banksiae. Each photograph you take is essentially documenting a conversation between the plant’s genetic programming and its immediate environment, written in the language of form, color, and spatial relationships.
If you read all that (you did, didn’t you?), you can likely see what I’m talking about. I didn’t just get a description of the characteristics of a Lady Banks’ Rose; I got them in a wider context of my own observations from photographs I’d taken, which the AI’s response blends into a discussion of the plant’s botany by examining my photographs, then creating a bridge between photography and botany. And the idea of “thinking like the plant itself, seeing the plant as an active participant in shaping its own form rather than a passive subject” is something I’ve probably done without realizing it; but intentionally composing a photograph to reflect both its visual interest and its botanical characteristics is something I can expand on. Instead of just considering how it looks, I would consider how its appearance demonstrates its behaviors, its evolutionary strategies, and how it has adapted to its environment — and how to capture that when taking a shot.
Coincidentally (or possibly not!), I’ve been watching a fascinating documentary about plants called The Green Planet (2022). Yet another excellent David Attenborough production, this five-part documentary takes a similar approach to that suggested by Claude: it “flips the script” to show plants as active directors of their own behaviors as they engage with their environments. Attenborough describes it as filming plants, over time, in ways similar to filming animals for other nature documentaries. If you’re interested in plants at all, this documentary is worth watching (I’m on my second viewing), and here are a few sections I found compelling to whet your appetite:
- The first episode — “Tropical Worlds” — shows how vines use their tendrils to latch onto other plants, push them out of the way, and pull themselves upward toward the sun. If you have any vines in your garden, I think you’ll find the video representation of their movement quite compelling.
- Episode 2 — “Water Worlds” — has a segment about giant water lilies (Victoria boliviana or Victoria amazonica) that send a jagged spike from beneath the water to the surface. The spike (which reminded me of a morning star or flail weapon) then rotates in the movement of water and wind in increasingly larger circles, to clear away other plants and make room for the water lily to come — which will need a lot of open space because it’s a giant!
- The same episode describes how a carnivorous Bladderwort (Utricularia) creates small bladders beneath the water’s surface, that are triggered upon being touched by tiny prey, after which they snap open and vacuum the prey into the bladder to consume it.
- Episode 3 — “Seasonal Worlds” — includes a vignette that shows how nettles and brambles (which have thorns or hooks), and climbing vines like hops, appear in sequence as the first plants to fill out wild landscapes in spring, using their various “climbing appendages” to make their way through other plants and capture light, before large shrubs and trees produce leaves that cover them in shade. It also includes a segment on the parasitic dodder (Cuscuta), a tiny-leafed vine that attaches itself to other plants, punctures their stems and leaves, and sucks nutrients from the plants it attaches to. “Vampire vine” is sometimes used to describe this plant; to learn about how it works, see Scientists Find a Gene That Enables a Plant to Become a Vampire.
- Also in this episode are examples of unusual relationships between plants and insects. The Hammer Orchid (Drakaea) produces no nectar so is incapable of summoning insects the traditional way for pollination. Instead, it produces a flower that resembles a female thynnid wasp, thereby attracting the male wasp of this single, specific species to have its way with the orchid and scatter pollen. This section of the Wikipedia article about Drakaea describes how that happens. Not to be outdone by Drakaea’s enticing escapades, the Silver Arrowreed (Ceratocaryum argenteum) produces and flings seeds that match the size, shape, color, and odor of antelope dung — which are gathered and buried by dung beetles (who have a preference for antelope droppings) to ensure the plants’ offspring germinate.
These are just a few highlights, but you can probably see — given my so-far six-year project of botanical photography — why I like this series. And each episode ends with about ten minutes explaining the techniques behind the videography, how it was filmed in part on-location and in part by recreating those locations in studios in the United Kingdom. Imagine, if you will, the complex effort required to replicate giant water lilies growing in a pond, in a studio. That’s a lot more complicated than my photography shoots at Oakland Cemetery — but I’ll bet it’s just as much fun!
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
