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

Tag: hydrangeas

Baby Bluebird … Hydrangeas (1 of 2)

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From Hydrangeas by Naomi Slade:

“A thoroughly graceful and elegant hydrangea, the flowers of Bluebird take a classic lacecap form; shapely and understated with large, clear sterile florets around the periphery of a woad-blue dome of fertile blooms.

“The larger flowers are sometimes sparse, but their paucity serves only to emphasize their individual exquisiteness. As in a design, the space around something can be crucial, enhancing it and enabling the observer to fully appreciate the focal point. And should the plant be cruelly criticized for lack of impact, the fact that the flowers are scented should more than repair this deficiency.

“The blue colour is reasonably stable with variations in soil pH, too, although it can be more mauve or even pale pink on a very alkaline site. In autumn, the large sterile florets turn to face downwards and are infused with magenta and mulberry, complemented by the foliage, which turns copper-bronze towards the end of the season.

“The shrub is compact enough to suit small gardens and will also do well in containers. Like all serrata cultivars, it is moderately cold-tolerant but does not find exposed or coastal sites conducive, nor is it a fan of full sun.”

The galleries below feature a few close-up photos of Bluebird hydrangeas in my garden. I took these photos early in the spring, just as the first white petals began to appear, then set them aside while working through and posting many of the spring and summer photos (especially the lily photos) that I had taken at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. This and the next blog post — and several others whose photos I’m still working on — returned me from Oakland to my own back yard where I crept daily among the ferns and hostas to photograph my hydrangeas in their progression to summer from spring. Hydrangeas are mostly desiccated now; here in the southeast they tend to bloom early then lose most of their floweriness by late June or early July.

The lacecap hydrangeas have an interesting structure and biology, having developed a natural variation of the typical design of a flower. The central clusters of tiny buds are properly the plant’s fertilizable flowers; they’ll open a handful at a time (as you can see in the third and last trio of photos below) for pollinators such as bees (and occasionally hummingbirds) that flit from cluster to cluster. The white (or light-bright blue or purple) petals that emerge and often surround the clusters have no reproductive function but still they have a job to do: they’re brightly colored to attract the attention of pollinators who are more likely to notice their luminosity than the mix of darker hues among clusters of flowers.

Can’t you just see the little white petals waving at the birds and the bees?

Winter Shapes and Forms (1 of 3)

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From Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit:

“We tend to consider the foundations of our culture to be natural, but every foundation had builders and an origin — which is to say that it was a creative construction, not a biological inevitability. Just as a twelfth-century cultural revolution ushered in romantic love as first a literary subject and then a way of experiencing the world, so the eighteenth century created a taste for nature without which William and Dorothy Wordsworth would not have chosen to walk long distances in midwinter and to detour from their already arduous course to admire waterfalls….

“This is not to say that no one felt a tender passion or admired a body of water before these successive revolutions; it is instead to say that a cultural framework arose that would inculcate such tendencies in the wider public, give them certain conventional avenues of expression, attribute to them certain redemptive values, and alter the surrounding world to enhance those tendencies….

“It is impossible to overemphasize how profound is the effect of this revolution on the taste for nature and practice of walking. It reshaped both the intellectual world and the physical one, sending populations of travelers to hitherto obscure destinations, creating innumerable parks, preserves, trails, guides, clubs, and organizations and a vast body of art and literature with almost no precedent before the eighteenth century.”

From The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals by Dorothy Wordsworth:

“What a beautiful thing God has made winter to be by stripping the trees & letting us see their shapes & forms.”

This is the first post in a three-part series about … what Dorothy Wordsworth wrote above!

I was a little puzzled at first about the phrase “shapes and forms” since my dictionary and thesaurus seemed to treat the words interchangeably; but, guess what, shape is shape and form is form! See The Difference Between Shape and Form or Shape and form (visual arts) if you, too, would like to be unpuzzled about these words.

These desiccated hydrangeas (probable either oakleaf or bigleaf hydrangeas) seem to keep many of their spent petals for the entire winter season, at least here in the southeast. I took these photos in late February, after quite a few winter rain and windstorms, yet their dried blossoms are mostly intact. Hard to shake the feeling the one of more of these is a cluster of moths (or bees!); and I half expected them to flitter away before I finished taking the photos.

The five photos below show the remnants of bluebird and blue billows hydrangeas, plants with fragile flowers that barely make it through the dog-days of summer here yet keep a few bleached-white, slightly shiny petals hanging around through fall and winter. These are from my garden (which is why I know their names) and it was fun to position them suspended in my macro lens against the muted backgrounds.

I’ve not yet identified these tiny yellow flowers, one hanging near the tip of a branch … and one in a black hole!

Japanese Maple trees and shrubs produce the most delightfully shaped leaves throughout the year, even in winter when they keep their fall color for a couple of extra months, shrivel up a bit, yet are still fascinating enough to capture my camera’s attention. The third photo below shows where the first two closeups came from: the branches of one maple hanging over a thick batch of English Ivy, which covered the length and height of a long, four-foot high stone wall. English Ivy is everywhere in my neighborhood (and much of Georgia, including many homeowner’s yards (like mine)), and is often used in place of grass (especially on homes built in the early 1900s) as a hardy, low-maintenance alternative to grass. Many people say you can take some cuttings, throw them on the ground, and they’ll root and grow — though I did try that and it didn’t work.

The leaf color below may appear a bit unnatural, but it’s what English Ivy looks like here in the early morning, after a night with below freezing temperatures. It will stay that way for a few hours, unfazed by the cold except for the color change, until the sun warms it back to a brighter, greener-green.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Fourth of July in America, 2020

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From America at War with Itself by Henry A. Giroux:

“The rise of dystopian politics … must be exposed and challenged on the local, national, and global planes. What is crucial is that the mechanisms, discourses, policies, and ideologies that inform authoritarianism must become part of any analysis that is willing to challenge the anti-democratic forces metastasizing within the United States today….

“This means, in part, focusing on the ongoing repressive systems that have been developing in American society for the last forty years. It also means drawing connections between historical forms of racial, ethnic, and economic violence that have been waged against indigenous communities, people of color, and the economically disadvantaged…. 

“It means finding a common ground on which various elements of an ethical society can be mobilized under the banner of multicultural democracy in order to challenge the interconnected forms of oppression, incarceration, mass violence, exploitation, and exclusion that now define the militant self-interest of corporatized American politics. It means taking seriously the educational nature of politics and recognizing that public spheres must be advanced in order to educate citizens who are informed, socially responsible, and willing to fight collectively for a future in which democracy is sustainable at all levels. This suggests an anti-fascist struggle that is not simply about remaking economic structures but also about refashioning identities, values, and social relations as part of a democratic project that reconfigures what it means to desire a better and more democratic future….”

I don’t have any firecrackers or sparklers, because I know better; I’d probably burn down the house, or at least set a few pine trees ablaze. I do, however, have red, white, and blue hydrangeas! And if you blink your eyes fast enough, they look like fireworks… or not! 🙂

Happy Independence Day, America! Let’s get our act together, okay?

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!

Walk, Work, Discover: Hydrangeas in Winter

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From “The Walker’s Waking Dreams — Rousseau” in A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros:

“Rousseau claimed to be incapable of thinking properly, of composing, creating or finding inspiration except when walking…. It was during long walks that the ideas would come, on the road that sentences would spring to his lips, as a light punctuation of the movement; it was paths that stimulated his imagination….

“Walk, work, discover…. Trampling the earth with his heavy shoes, disappearing into the brush, wandering among ancient trees. 

“Alone, and surrounded — or rather filled — with the quiet murmur of animals and trees, the sigh of wind through the leaves, the rattle and creak of branches. Alone, and fulfilled. Because now he could breathe, breathe and surrender to a well-being slow as a forest path, without any thrill of pleasure but absolutely peaceful. A lukewarm happiness, persistent as a monotonous day: happiness just to be there, to feel the rays of a winter sun on his face and hear the muffled creaking of the forest.”

I’ve been prowling my neighborhood, hunting for splashes of winter color. I’ve ended out with a large, slightly unwieldy batch of photos that I’m organizing into a half dozen galleries, that I’ll be working on and posting over the next week or so. Unlike summer and spring here in the southeast, green no longer dominates the scenes that become my photographs. Where green is present, it’s typically found in hardy grasses; or more commonly, among the ivy varieties whose color shifts from deep green to a shadow-filled version, where aqua or blue are emphasized by seasonal changes and the softer light of a winter sun. Backgrounds, especially, transition toward muted gray, chocolatey brown, and pastel variations of yellow, orange, and gold. My eye moves toward the surprising shapes and textures of plants in their dormant stages, and how those forms stand out as abstractions of their growing season versions.

The two galleries below include images of hydrangeas — bits of hydrangeas — that I found shaded by the trees of Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first gallery features those where pink and red was still present on the leaves, after their fall turn and while still barely attached to their stems. The white filaments on some of the leaves — a form of mold or fungus — presented some interesting (that is, frustrating) challenges for the photographer because their contrast with the red shades created a difficult-to-overcome sense that they were out of focus … fuzzy, that is. To (attempt to) improve their appearance, I used radial filters in Lightroom individually over each of the leaves, reducing whites, highlights, and saturation then adding a bit of texture and sharpening to emphasize the veins in the leaves over the cottony fungus.

Except for the last photo below, this second gallery shows side-by-side pairs of the same clumps of spent flower clusters, framed differently. I did very little post-processing on these nine images, mainly some brightness and shadow changes to soften and darken the backgrounds and emphasize the remnants of the buds — which through the zoom lens looked almost like they were suspended in mid-air, held up as they were by tiny threads. Our eyes tend to pass over sights like this; but zoom and macro lenses provide a view of the world that our unaided sight typically misses.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!