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

Ten Days to Christmas: Peace in the Village

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From “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” in A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings by Charles Dickens:

“On the hill-side beyond the shapelessly-diffused town, and in the quiet keeping of the trees that gird the village-steeple, remembrances are cut in stone, planted in common flowers; growing in grass, entwined with lowly brambles around many a mound of earth. In town and village, there are doors and windows closed against the weather, there are flaming logs heaped high, there are joyful faces, there is healthy music of voices….

“Be all ungentleness and harm excluded from the temples of the Household Gods, but be those remembrances admitted with tender encouragement! They are of the time and all its comforting and peaceful reassurances; and of the history that reunited even upon earth the living and the dead; and of the broad beneficence and goodness that too many men have tried to tear to narrow shreds.”

From “Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid” in A Christmas Story by Jean Shepherd: 

“Early December saw the first of the great blizzards of that year. The wind howling down out of the Canadian wilds a few hundred miles to the north had screamed over frozen Lake Michigan and hit Hohman, laying on the town great drifts of snow and long, story-high icicles, and subzero temperatures where the air cracked and sang. Streetcar wires creaked under caked ice and kids plodded to school through forty-five-mile-an-hour gales, tilting forward like tiny furred radiator ornaments, moving stiffly over the barren, clattering ground.

“Preparing to go to school was about like getting ready for extended Deep-Sea Diving. Longjohns, corduroy knickers, checkered flannel Lumberjack shirt, four sweaters, fleece-lined leatherette sheepskin coat, helmet, goggles, mittens with leatherette gauntlets and a large red star with an Indian Chief’s face in the middle, three pair of sox, high-tops, overshoes, and a sixteen-foot scarf wound spirally from left to right until only the faint glint of two eyes peering out of a mound of moving clothing told you that a kid was in the neighborhood….

“Downtown Hohman was prepared for its yearly bacchanalia of peace on earth and good will to men. Across Hohman Avenue and State Street, the gloomy main thoroughfares — drifted with snow that had lain for months and would remain until well into Spring, ice encrusted, frozen drifts along the curbs — were strung strands of green and red Christmas bulbs, and banners that snapped and cracked in the gale. From the streetlights hung plastic ivy wreaths surrounding three-dimensional Santa Claus faces.”

Ho! Ho! Hello!

If you decorate for the holidays, you’ve likely had this experience: After extracting the packed-up boxes of Christmas globbles from the attic or closet you squoze them into ten or eleven months ago, you begin to open them and exclaim, over and over again: “Oh, I forgot about THESE!” In case you didn’t know, this is part of the job assigned by the universe to Christmas decorations: to dim your off-season memory so many things you come across the following year seem new, and delightful, once again.

Something similar happens when I start thinking about the “Days to Christmas” series of posts I first started six years ago, originally as a way of learning more about photography by experimenting with the colors and lights of the Christmas season. Last year, I explained the project in some detail; see Ten Days to Christmas: Peace from 2023 if you’d like to read more about it and how each year I would add some new whatnot to my photography kit just to explore its use it with my Christmas project.

This year, I didn’t buy anything new specifically to shoot for Christmas; but imagine my surprise to discover how useful a variable neutral density filter (that I purchased to control bright sunlight when photographing flowers outdoors) could be when photographing Christmas decorations. You see, I often add supplemental lighting with these Christmas scenes, but that lighting also brightens up backgrounds too much and ruins the mood. With a variable ND filter, though, I can reduce the overall lighting as much as I want then expose the image accordingly; and the actual effect is to keep most of the light I need on the subject but darken the background and create that little sense of Christmas mystery. The photos in this post — the first three inspired by the peaceful but “shapelessly-diffused town” described by Dickens above — were taken with that technique, which enabled me to keep the subject bright and well-focused with accurate colors, while keeping the backgrounds soft and shadowy.

Thanks for taking a look!

Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (3 of 3)

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From “Worcester: The Canal” in Under the Cliff and Other Poems by Geoffrey Grigson:

The autumn daisies dipped in the wind
In the olive water,
Oil patches, like a marbled fly-leaf,
Turned in the wind, on the water.

A swan; and the black, elegant bridge,
Like a theorem, over
The canal and the towpath: a circle
Over an arch, by a great arch.

And a black engine on the bridge, named
As a Princess, smoking. Rusty
Galvanised over the coffin yard,
A man passing with leeks….

Hello!

This is the third of three posts with photographs of Persian (or Painted) Daisies (Tanacetum coccineum) and mums (Chrysanthemum zawadzkii). The first post — where I also wrote about the significance of mums and daisies at Victorian garden cemeteries — is Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (1 of 3); and the second post is Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (2 of 3).

Here we are on the last day of November (how did THAT happen?), right on the cusp of starting the month of curiosities and baubles, clouds of glitter, and the lights and candles we use to ward off winter darkness. For my part, I’ve engaged the services of my decorating assistant — The Small Dog — who supervised the work yesterday as I untangled the first of two strings of 900 (three sets of 300 each) lights and began shoving them into the Christmas tree. You can just barely see his head peaking around the wall in the first image, but the more I swore at the lights to encourage them to straighten out, the more interested he got!

Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (2 of 3)

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From “Sensory” by Marian Harmon in The Best Poems of the 90s, edited by Caroline Sullivan and Cynthia Stevens:

Eyes to photo flights of hummingbirds
As television lions mate, Vesuvius explodes.
Eyes to read the shape of breasts that swell
And turn to milk for one as yet unborn.

Tongues to taste new kernel corn
The bite of dill,
The sweet bright mouth of love.

Ears to hear the measured paragraphs of Bach
The stamping of the tiny hooves of deer.
Unfinished words that slither into nibbled cries.

Nose that knows delight in spring verbena,
Summer phlox and autumn mums,
The perfumed sweat that rises with my touch.

Yet all those wonders fade, become as garden weeds,
Or dust on lamps
When you no longer share
The scents, the sounds, the tastes,
The beating of my wings.

Hello!

This is the second of three posts with photographs of Persian (or Painted) Daisies (Tanacetum coccineum) and mums (Chrysanthemum zawadzkii) — all in shades of pink, starting with saturated blends of pink, purple, and magenta followed by those that are more purely pink. The first post — where I also wrote about the significance of mums and daisies at Victorian garden cemeteries — is Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (1 of 3).

Thanks for taking a look!

Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (1 of 3)

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From Old Fashioned Flowers by Sacheverell Sitwell:

“The pleasure garden would seem to have come through the fourteenth, fifteenth, and most of the sixteenth centuries, without many changes or additions to its stock of flowers. They had a few, a very few, Roses, and the simple stock-in-trade of Carnation and Pink. Daisies, Violets, Periwinkles, Poppies, Primroses, such were their flowers. They had but little, and of that little, less still is lost to us….

“And so it continued, until the period of great voyages began. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth many new flowers were introduced into our gardens. By 1580 or 1590 at latest, the Tulip had arrived from Turkey, with intermediate stopping places in Germany and the Netherlands upon the way. At about the same time the Auricula came from Flanders. And, by 1600, we may say that the florist’s cult had been established. The possibilities of these garden flowers were at once apparent. It was only a matter of a few years before regular nurseries were in being. So many qualities in the florist’s flowers made their appeal to the curious, if even precious, minds of the English Renaissance. For the reign of James I, even more than that of Queen Elizabeth, represents the flowering of the Elizabethan Age….

“This age, with its humanistic learning, was apt to look upon flowers as not less a part of the dominion of man than the beasts of the field, or the bricks and mortar of a human dwelling. All such things were given to mankind for his use or pleasure. They responded to his care and rewarded him with their plenty.”

From “October” in Leave-Taking: Poems by Marilyn Potter:

White-cloud ribbon crocheted through the sky’s
baby blanket. Cradles with pure fall day.

Pink mums, banked row upon row, a child’s picnic treat
— scoop upon scoop of ice cream — strawberry sweet.

The gingko’s leaves, fan-shaped and falling.
buttering the stones, the grass, earth’s dirty face.

A single rose, dark crimson, droops like a floppy hat.
Not here a week ago. She’s come back for the last dance.

Light breezes ripple water, sashay against her petals,
spin twirl after twirl fire-gold. Dizzy, giddy,

the sun totters. Stipples a shadow from the tallest
pine. Descends through leafless trees in a curvy,

winding line. Vanishes.
Like a flat-edged cloth, pale gray felts down.

Sudden gusts, leaf somersaults, the chase —
October escapes.

Hello!

Since it will be a busy week of glitterizing the house for Christmas each day around Thanksgiving, we have prepared three posts featuring 54 photos I took in late October that our Post-Processing Department (me!) finished up just in time, as in today. The flowers in these photos are a mix of Persian (or Painted) Daisies (Tanacetum coccineum) and mums (Chrysanthemum zawadzkii). Those with smaller, more compact bunches of flowers are mums; the embiggened ones are Persian Daisies. Wherever you can’t tell the difference, you may call them by either name.

As is so often the case, I went a-hunting for some interesting historical tidbits about the flowers whose photographs I was planning to post, and searched Books to Borrow at the Internet Archive for the phrase “pink daisies.” It wasn’t until I was copying and pasting the up-top quotation from Old Fashioned Flowers by Sacheverell Sitwell that I realized “Pink” was the last word in the second sentence and “Daisies” was the first word in the third sentence. In other words, the excerpt wasn’t about “pink daisies” at all, but about a flower Sitwell was calling “Pink” — even though, if you drop the period between “Pink” and “Daisies,” the sentences seem to work as one anyway.

I had no idea what “Pink” meant as the name of a flower. So, as one does, I turned to my imaginary research assistant ClaudeAI and learned that “Pink” was often used as a common name for flowers in the Dianthus genus, many of which (no surprise here) were actually pink in color. Dianthus plumarius is a typical example, where you can see a fine pink flower with serrated or scalloped edges if you click the link. So even though my excerpt from Old Fashioned Flowers wasn’t about “pink daisies,” I kept it anyway because I liked how it provided a brief tour through the very early history of plant exploration and the British empire — one of my favorite subjects to dig into when I’m researching flower ancestries.

I have to say I sometimes get carried away with my ClaudeAI conversations, and I ended out asking twenty questions about the Old Fashioned Flowers excerpt, the history of imperial Britain, and how that intersected with the movement of plants and flowers around the world. Eventually the conversation swirled into a discussion of the use of daisies and mums, specifically, at cemeteries like Oakland Cemetery that were originally designed as Victorian garden cemeteries. (For more on this, see In the Garden Cemetery: The Revival of America’s First Urban Parks, which describes how early garden cemeteries came about, and includes Oakland among those discussed.) While I knew quite a bit about the design of public spaces like this, I didn’t realize that these flowering plants — daisies and mums — and their placement among the cemetery’s architectural elements was intentional. Here’s what I learned when I told ClaudeAI that I had photographs of these flowers situated among some of their surrounding stone structures and monuments:

Victorian-era garden cemeteries like Oakland Cemetery were revolutionary spaces that blended mourning, horticulture, and landscape design. These were not just burial grounds, but carefully designed landscapes that reflected complex cultural attitudes toward death, nature, and memorial.

Daisies and chrysanthemums were particularly meaningful in this context. Victorian flower language (floriography) assigned specific symbolic meanings to plants. Daisies traditionally symbolized innocence and purity, making them poignant choices for memorial plantings. The pink varieties you’ve photographed would have been especially significant — pink often represented gentle remembrance and tender emotions.

Chrysanthemums in Victorian culture had layered symbolism. In European traditions, they were associated with death and mourning, while in Japanese culture (from which many varieties were imported), they symbolized longevity and nobility. In American garden cemeteries, they represented both memorial and hope.

Oakland Cemetery is an exceptional example of this Victorian garden cemetery aesthetic. Established in 1850, it reflects the era’s approach to commemorating the dead through carefully designed botanical landscapes. The use of ornamental flowers like the pink daisies and mums you’ve photographed would have been intentional — creating spaces of beauty and reflection that transformed mourning into an almost aesthetic experience.

At places like Oakland Cemetery, each planting was essentially a form of three-dimensional storytelling. The positioning of flowers in relation to monuments, paths, and stone structures wasn’t random but carefully calculated. Pink daisies and chrysanthemums would be placed to soften hard stone surfaces, create visual rhythms, and provide emotional nuance to what could otherwise feel like a stark memorial environment.

In these spaces, plants were chosen not just for aesthetic reasons, but as living symbols of human experiences. Pink daisies and chrysanthemums represented nuanced emotional states. Their delicate, somewhat ephemeral nature mirrored Victorian contemplations about life’s transience. The pink color specifically — neither bold red nor stark white — suggested a liminal emotional space of remembrance tinged with hope.

Botanical placement was deliberate. These flowers weren’t randomly scattered but carefully positioned to create narrative landscapes. A cluster of pink daisies might symbolize a child’s innocence, while chrysanthemums could represent a mature life’s complexity. The layered meanings allowed mourners to ‘read’ the landscape as a form of emotional expression.

“Botanical placement was deliberate.” This insight fascinated me, especially since I photographed some of these daisies and mums at wider angles rather than as close-ups, to show their positioning against nearby stone. Some of the photos in this series, for example, show the flowers as they’re tumbling over walls and across memorial structures — something I just thought was aesthetically pleasing (the contrast between delicate flower petals and hard, grainy stone) — but now I know reflects intentional landscape design blended with the property’s monuments and other stone structures. I’ll likely bring a completely different perspective to my next photoshoot at the gardens….

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Discovering Zephyr Lilies (2 of 2)

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From “Atamasco Lily” in The Native Flowers and Ferns of the United States (1879) by Thomas Meehan:

“In spite of its English common name, [this] beautiful plant… has nothing whatever to do with the Lily family, as this family is now arranged. The name has simply adhered to it because the old botanists erroneously classed it with Lilium, together with so many other plants which have now been removed to other genera. ‘Atamasco,’ we are told by [Robert] Morrison, an early writer, was the name given to our plant by the inhabitants of Carolina, from whence it was first sent to England. The word is in all probability of Indian origin, but we have no knowledge of its precise meaning….

“Various other names are mentioned besides by other writers. Thus [Stephen] Elliott tells us, in his ‘Botany of South Carolina,’ that the plant is called ‘Stagger-Grass,’ from a belief widely prevalent that a disease in calves, called the ‘staggers,’ is produced by the animals’ feeding on it…. It is the Swamp Lily of the Georgians, and is called ‘Toonau’ by the Creek Indians, who use its bulbous roots as an article of food in time of scarcity….

“The genus Amaryllis, with which our plant was classed when its connections with Lilium were severed, was founded by Linnaeus in the year 1737; but so far as the name is regarded, it is as difficult in this case as it is in so many other cases to say precisely why it was chosen. Amaryllis is a Greek female name, derived from words signifying ‘splendor.’ Theocritus, the celebrated Greek bucolic poet, who was born about 300 B.C., gives the name to one of his shepherdesses; and the Roman poet Virgil, who was born in the year 70 B.C., makes a similar use of it. He sings of his return from the city to his country home as of a return to his first love, and personifies the former as a lady named Galatea, who had hitherto bound him fast by her unsatisfactory charms, while the home of his youth is introduced as a beautiful country girl, a shepherdess, — ‘my Amaryllis.’ The shepherdess, however, was not so easily won back….

“The whole genus Amaryllis… seems to be of a poetical turn of mind; or, to speak more reasonably, seems to have excited the poetic fancy to an unusual degree. One of the species belonging to it has its flowers growing on a slender, curved stem, and therefore, whenever the wind blows, the mouth of the flower turns away from the breeze, as if the coy maiden desired to escape the kisses of Zephyr, the wild west wind….

“In our Atamasco Lily, however, there is no such bending of the flowers, no timid or coquettish turning away from Zephyr, and for this reason chiefly the plant was taken from Amaryllis and transferred to a new genus, Zephyranthes, by [William] Herbert, a modern botanist. But it will be seen that Herbert still adheres to the ancient fancy, for Zephyranthes means ‘Zephyr Flower,’ thus implying that, while Amaryllis flies from the advances of her lover, Zephyranthes willingly suffers his embraces, and accepts his kisses.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring Zephyr Lilies (or Atamasco, Rain, Fairy, Swamp, Wild Easter Lilies, or STAGGER GRASS) from Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens. The first post is Discovering Zephyr Lilies (1 of 2). I’m especially fond of the first few photos where there are branches and thorns from a fallen rosebush behind and below the Zephyrs, as well as those where the delicate flowers contrast with architectural stone in the background. Lately I’ve been trying to pay more attention to how the background affects a photo’s composition, and I’m currently working on several batches of aster and mum photos (coming soon!) where the garden’s architectural elements are featured with equal importance as the flowers.

I included the (rather long) quotation from Thomas Meehan’s 1879 book The Native Flowers and Ferns of the United States because I liked its language and style, and it provides a nice overview of how a plant’s naming conventions change through refined and shared observations. That chapter also picks up on some of the Zephyr’s botanical and historical characteristics, and I was glad to see mention of the plants in the U.S. southeast states of North or South Carolina and Georgia — along with an additional explanation of the common name Stagger Grass, which, we now know, goes back to at least the eighteenth century. Those poor cows been staggerin’ a long time!

Thanks for taking a look!