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

Tag: clematis

Spring 2020: April Colors 5 (Clematis in Bloom, 1 of 3)

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With most of my nearby worlds still shut down, my spring photography will for some indefinite time alternate between my-garden photo shoots and Oakland Cemetery photo shoots, both locations presenting plenty of subjects to keep me busy. On a nice day earlier this week, I did go over to Oakland for a bit of iris-hunting — as irises are making an appearance in any spot sunny enough to encourage them to bloom — and encountered more than a dozen varieties in every imaginable color between white and black. I had never actually seen black irises in real life; the black is strangely reflective of surrounding light, picking up deep purples from other parts of the flower that glowed in the camera’s viewfinder. Ah, but that’s for another day; this post doesn’t feature iris photos — I’ve got plenty of work to do on them before I can share — but it is the first of three posts featuring clematis blooms in my back yard.

When planted in pots, the growth of clematis vines is somewhat restricted, so all the blooms they’re going to produce for the season tend to come and go in a week or two. Mostly they’re already gone, having dissolved and blown away during some recent thunderstorms, so they live only here on my blog now rather than in the back yard. The first gallery shows a few of the flower buds on the day before they bloomed; the rest are, of course, some of the blooms.

The previous posts in this series are:

Spring 2020: April Colors 4 (White, Orange, and Red-Red); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 3 (Purple and Yellow (and Yellow and Purple)); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 2 (Catawba Grapevine); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 1.

Thanks for taking a look!

Between Rainstorms: Little Green Leaves

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Me and the dog have been pacing around the dining room table chanting “rain, rain, go away” almost every day since the first of the year, but that magic doesn’t work as well as it did when I was a kid. What’s up with that anyway? In the first not-quite-two-months of 2020, we’ve accumulated more than twice the average rainfall, as shown in this fine image from iWeathernet.com, a site that lets you chart and graph historical weather data for parts of the south and southeast.

Source: iWeathernet.com (https://www.iweathernet.com/atlanta-weather-records)

Something similar happened last year — from December through January rather than January through February — but this year’s inundations have even surpassed that. I did manage a few hours in the garden one day last week, poking and peeking (with the camera) at some early spring growth.

These are baby Hydrangea leaves, emerging freshly for 2020.

I have one Honeysuckle in a large pot that last year got zapped by a late spring freeze and barely grew after that. This year, it’s going to try again.

Here are two photos of Climbing Hydrangea leaves followed by four Holly Ferns, The ferns really do appreciate all the rain; each plant has already pushed out a half dozen new fronds, so it looks like they’ll have a very good year.

Finally, here are a three tiny clumps of Clematis leaves — just starting to stand out — with the last photo stylized a bit to remove all the background.

Oakland Cemetery architecture photos return soon … thanks for taking a look!

What Remains: Clematis Transformations

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Clematis Season has pretty much come to an end here in Southeastern America; that is, the version of it that goes on in my back yard is almost over. I had written earlier about hoping to get another shot at taking some other shots of my President Clematis, since — when I wrote that post — there were a few unopened buds that looked like they would bloom up real nice. Unfortunately, however, we had several over-the-top hot-hot days in a row in April, and one afternoon when I wasn’t looking almost all of the buds … melted.

One did remain for a few days after the heat blast, so I got these three photos for a final presidential gallery … until next year:

The two Bernadine Clematis vines I added to my garden this year continued to bloom for a few weeks after the President dwindled. I had already taken quite a few photos of those blooms, so didn’t spend too much more time on that … except to assemble these three as a last look at Bernadine for 2019:

Every clematis bloom that appeared and drifted away since early April has been replaced by a tiny mophead. All of these seed pods — there are a dozen or more on each of the Bernadine vines — have a diameter about the size of a quarter or half-dollar, and they’ve already outlasted the flowers. The filaments are highly reflective, transitioning in color from silver to gold as the sun rises and moves to its noon-time high.

I took these photos the day after a couple of thunderstorms, which washed away most of the pollen that had collected on the filaments. My first attempt at a photo gallery — a few days before those storms — gave me a couple dozen photos so full of pollen dust that they weren’t usable. Normally I don’t mind spot-removing flaws and re-blending colors on my macro photos, but picking hundreds of pollen spots from these thin strands didn’t seem like a good way to spend my time. I deleted that first batch of images once I saw how much more photogenic they were after the rain.

Four of my clematis vines (all except the President) are in pots on my back steps, so I see clumps of these vibrant mopheads through my back door and every time I head into the garden. They make me smile quite a bit: they remind me of Truffula Trees from The Lorax by Dr. Seuss or the spiky clover from Horton Hears a Who. And yes, you guessed it: If I sit for a bit on the steps and lean in, I can just barely hear “We are here! We are here!” as the tiny residents of Whoville try to get my attention.

This may or may not be true. 🙂

Select the first image for a slideshow; thanks for reading and taking a look!