“[However] common the flowering quinces may be, they are still first-rate shrubs. They come in pink, white, orange, and scarlet, and in time form globular plants six or seven feet high, but are easily pruned to lower heights if you prefer. The large occasional fruits can be made into preserves. I did that once but never ate the stuff; possibly you could send them for Christmas presents.”
“Japonica blossoms burst out of bare branches in earliest spring before there are green leaves anywhere. They are sometimes white, but more usually red or brilliant coral, and they seem more like an implausible statement against the darkness of winter than real flowers….
“The naming of the japonica itself is complicated. The first japonica was named by the Swedish botanist Carl Peter Thunberg, a pupil of Linnaeus…. After this, the japonica played for a while a kind of nomenclatural musical chairs….
“Finally japonicas came to rest botanically by being classed as Chaenomeles, from the Greek chainein (to gape) and melon (apple), referring to a perception that the fruit was split. Thunberg’s original plant and its descendants became Chaenomeles japonica, and the plant from China and its descendants became Chaenomeles speciosa. Both are more often called ‘japonicas’ or ‘flowering quince.’ Both produce brilliant blossoms in early spring, followed by a hard pear or quince-like fruit that can be made into jelly.”
Hello!
The white quinces are flowering! Normally that’s not notable, since it’s common here to see scattered quince blooms throughout the winter then busting out all over toward the end of January or in February. But after our late-December deep-freeze (see Plant Entanglements (1 of 2), where I wrote about the damage to flora and fauna around town), the quinces were pretty stagnant: most of the leaves had been burned off by the cold weather and there were only a few small, crumpled flowers remaining. But after a nice warmup recently and some scattered rain, they’re on their way back.
What may not be so evident from the photos, though, is this: the flowers are coming back faster than the leaves — something unusual that I see happening in my own garden where several large fringe flower bushes have produced flowers but have not yet replaced the leaves destroyed by the cold weather. They look so weird: imagine long, thin branches similar to those in the quince photos below, with no leaves but just a tiny pink tassel hanging off the end. I was going to take some photos of them in that stripped-down condition… but I didn’t want to embarrass them….
“In old gardens through the South there is a beautiful white quince…. It has bloomed out-of-doors as early as New Year’s Day, and can be forced very easily. The nice thing about these strong-growing varieties is that they can be cut ruthlessly. The white-flowered quinces in the trade are ‘Candida’, ‘Nivalis’ and ‘snow’, all forms of Chaenomeles lagenaria, and all vigorous. ‘Snow’ grows taller than wide, is almost thornless and has pure white flowers to two and a half inches across…. The way the quinces grow, thick and thorny and close to the ground, makes for a good hedge plant.”
This post is the third in a series with photographs of Japanese quince that I took at Oakland Cemetery. The first post is The Quinces of Oakland (1 of 3); and the second post is The Quinces of Oakland (2 of 3). I took extra photos of a few of the white quince blooms, specifically to convert the backgrounds to black; you can read a bit more about that and see before-and-after versions just below this gallery.
Here are the before-and-after versions of the same five photos. As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve gotten in the habit of using exposure bracketing to generate three images of each scene: one recorded at the manual exposure settings I’ve selected, one underexposed image, and one overexposed image. A surprising benefit of the overexposed image — which renders the entire scene brighter and with lightened colors — is that it’s easier to paint the background black, since it’s colors are less intense and therefore easier to blacken with Lightroom’s brushes. The camera still captured enough detail in the white blossoms that even though they look “washed out” in the before versions, they come through quite nicely by adjusting the images’ highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks, and adding a bit of texture to each one.
Select the first image if you would like to compare the before and after versions in a slideshow.
“In 1666, the same year that the Great Fire of London consumed the city, a 24-year-old Isaac Newton began experimenting with prisms and beams of sunlight. He used a prism to prize apart a ray of white light to reveal its constituent wavelengths. This was not revolutionary in itself — it was something of a parlor trick that had been done many times before. Newton, however, went a step further, and in doing so changed the way we think about color forever: he used another prism to put the wavelengths back together again. Until then it had been assumed that the rainbow that pours out of a prism in the path of a beam of light was created by impurities in the glass. Pure white sunlight was considered a gift from God; it was unthinkable that it could be broken down or, worse still, created by mixing colored lights together. During the Middle Ages mixing colors at all was a taboo, believed to be against the natural order; even during Newton’s lifetime, the idea that a mixture of colors could create white light was anathema.
“Artists would also have been puzzled by the idea that white is made up of lots of different colors, but for different reasons. As anyone who has ever had access to a paint set knows, the more colors you mix together, the closer you approach to black, not white….
“The explanation for the fact that mixing colored light makes white, while mixing colored paint makes black, lies in the science of optics. Essentially, there are two different types of color mixing: additive and subtractive. With additive mixing, different light wavelengths are combined to create different colors, and when added together the result is white light. This is what Newton demonstrated with his prisms. However, the opposite happens when paints are mixed. Since each pigment only reflects back to the eye a proportion of the available light, when several are mixed together more and more wavelengths are subtracted. Mix enough together and very little of the visible spectrum is reflected, so we will perceive the mixture to be black, or very close to it.”
I’m always fascinated when taking pictures of white flowers, and I had a little fun this morning poking around in my photography books and several web sites to read about the color “white” — what it is technically, how we experience it, and how representations of white in nature and in physical objects vary because of its reflective qualities and the presence of all colors in swatches of white light. Wikipedia lists nearly two dozen “shades of white” — many with clever sounding names; go to any hardware store to buy a gallon of white paint, and you’ll be greeted by many, many more. In nature, though — and certainly among flowers — white blooms are seldom pure white (if that’s even a thing), but are typically a mix of colors that change (often diminishing) as the flower opens. Yellow, green, and purple or magenta seem most common, as you can easily see if you take a close look at the white quinces below. Our eyes and minds tend to discount the color variations when we look at white flowers in nature, but the camera — it misses nothing!
“White balance” (or “color balance”) is a common photography term, of course, and can refer to a setting on the camera (or in the post-processing software) that alters the intensity of red, blue, or green applied to an image when it’s taken or developed — often interpreted as “cool” or “warm” color temperatures in a slighted mixed metaphor. I generally use the camera’s automatic white balance unless I know I have a specific reason to change it, something that I seldom do for nature photography but occasionally change when taking pictures indoors.
A challenge for photographers when taking pictures of white flowers is that it can be very easy to over-expose the white, resulting in “blown whites” or “blown highlights” for which detail can’t be recovered in post-processing. You end out with a bright blob of white, in other words, and shape but no texture in that portion of the photograph. To help eliminate that problem, I’ve gotten into the habit of using the camera’s exposure bracketing capability — to create three images at slightly different exposures from a single press of the shutter, from which I’ll pick the best one during post-processing.
This first pair of images below features a tiny blossom I noticed at the bottom of one large batch of quince shrubs, hiding among branches of the shrub and surrounded by winter debris from fallen leaves and sticks. It was so small that I had trouble getting it in focus without falling into the shrubs; but I kept the photo anyway because I liked how it seemed so determined to grow in the most inhospitable part of the plant. If you enlarge the image, you can see traces of green and bits of magenta tinging individual petals; and that it’s nearly translucent at this stage in its life.
Some of the quinces are very self-protective; it’s pretty common to see blooms like this nestled among a series of thorns. No fingers were pricked while taking these pictures, though the flowers were in full sun and The Photographer had to insert himself between the sun and the plant to get usable photos. I wasn’t able to determine why one of the flowers thought it was a good idea to bloom upside-down.
As the blooms get larger, the petals get thicker — and the appearance of white is more saturated and less translucent. These two pairs of blossoms grew farther up on the mass of shrubs, trailing a stone wall that shaded them from the midday sun. There is less magenta in the petals at this stage, though the center of each flower reflects back shades of yellow, some of which may also be pollen dust waiting for a bee to buzz by.
This pair shows my favorite photos in the series. The background was very simple without my intervention — always a plus! — and this single flower was in full bloom on a length of over-wintered wood that, in real life, was about five feet long. The light was just right for this one — it’s the purest white of the whites in this series — and the center looks like an ornately-dressed dancer, if you like to imagine flowers as other things.
From “The Onset of Spring” by Elizabeth Lawrence in The Writer in the Garden, edited by Jane Garmey:
“In the South we go in quest of spring as soon as Christmas is past and the new year begins. The first days of January find us searching among the last fallen leaves for purple violets and white hyacinths and the yellow buds of winter aconite. And when we have found these frosty flowers close to the cold ground, we break off and carry into the house a few branches of Japanese quince with buds already swollen and ready to burst. By the time the quince buds have opened into flowers as pale as apple blossoms, their fellows in the garden may be in bloom too, if the days are warm.”
“I characterize my work as creative explicitly to suggest that it may deviate from ‘the way it really looked,’ because I want there to be a sharp and honest division between reality and artifice. I care very much about the reality of the things I photograph, and I believe that to conflate that reality with the limitations of what may be expressed in a photograph most often leads to the diminishing of the former rather than the elevation of the latter. This is because such conflation always requires a degree of misrepresentation. Rather than relying entirely on characteristics of the subject, creative art draws its power primarily from the imagination of an artist. It does not aim to become a substitute for the real experience, or even an approximation of all its dimensions, many of which may be subjective.
“A creative image is not a record of a scene nor a substitute for a real experience. Rather, it is an experience in itself — an aesthetic experience — something new that the artist has given the world….“
“The Quinces of Oakland” — haha! for some reason I think this is funny! Sounds like a family of Victorian aristocrats, doesn’t it?
I found the Elizabeth Lawrence quote a few weeks ago, and with her reference to Japanese quince in mind, I headed over to Oakland Cemetery (where I knew there were bunches of quinces) to see if it was true that they start blooming shortly after Christmas. I mean, she sort of promised, didn’t she? Turns out she was right; among the plants engaged in very early flowering, there were quite a few red and white quince blooms scattered around the gardens. This post features the red ones I found.
So we’re a year into The Apocalypse and I’ve made about 60 trips to Oakland, my safe space for taking pictures of plants and flowers. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter trips — about to circle ’round to spring again. Right now, I have just over 100 late winter/early spring photos I’m still working on, to wrap up over the next few weeks so that by the time April flowers start busting out, my photo backlog will be empty.
Returning to Oakland again and again, week after week, has seemed a little strange at times: everything is familiar, yet there are simultaneously endless variations. What sometimes feels like a dispiriting routine, as it turns out, is really just a state of mind and doesn’t reflect the space I immerse myself in. If the routine is limiting — which in some ways it is — then limitations must be powerful too because they just mean selectively including what will be seen and not seen, what will be shown and not shown, which stories will be presented and which ones will not. Our best public spaces have characteristics like this: they contain layers of meaning about nature, history, society and culture, cultural relationships, demographic distinctions, and even variations in color, shadow, and light that are there for the taking — the taking of pictures, that is.
I made up the idea of the Quince family, of course … or maybe I didn’t, since “Quince” (and a variation, “Quint”) is a surname and not just a plant name, and I now imagine their ghosts accompanying me on my photo-shoots. If I keep looking — don’t you think? — I may (or may not!) find a mausoleum or tombstone or other memorial with that name on it. Wouldn’t that be something?
