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

Tag: japanese quince

Studying Japanese Quince

 , , , , , , , , 3

From “First Flowers” in Making a Garden by Rita Buchanan:

“Fresh flowers are the most remarkable feature in a winter garden. Their petals seem so tender and delicate, their colors so rich and intense, and their sweet scents so unexpected and delightful.

“But plants that are called winter flowers in most gardening books may not bloom in your garden until spring, since bloom time depends on climate. The colder your winter, the longer you have to wait. Flowering quince blooms in January in Texas, February in Georgia, March in Maryland, April in New Jersey, and not until May in Vermont….

“Another of the earliest shrubs is flowering quince (Chaenomeles hybrids, sometimes listed under C. speciosa). There are many cultivars, with flowers like apple blossoms in shades of pink, scarlet, orange, and white. ‘Texas Scarlet‘ is watermelon-red ‘Cameo‘ has double flowers in apricot-pink. ‘Snow’ and ‘Jet Trail‘ are white. ‘Toyo Nishiki‘ has red, pink, and white flowers all at the same time….

“The flowers last for several weeks, especially if the weather stays cool, and may still be there when the leaves come out. Flowering quinces are tough, adaptable shrubs with upright, rounded, or spreading shapes. They can be left unpruned, sheared for hedges, trained up a wall, or sculpted into bonsai-type specimens. The crooked, sometimes thorny twigs are popular with flower arrangers, who cut stems early and force them into bloom indoors.”

From “Flowering Quince” in Collected Poems: 1937-1962 by Winfield Townley Scott:

If right in front of me,
Slow motion — fast motion really —
The cold branch of the quince
Should all at once
Start with a rash of buds
Then the thin green nudge
The brown back, then the color
Of the waxen flower, the flame,
Open everywhere the same
Golden-centered swirl
Of odor, sweet burning odor —
Performed in one day, one hour
Or even one minute
Which would then hold in it,
For more than sense or praise
Could say, all April’s days —
That would set my heart awhirl….

Hello!

In this post, we have photographs of one of my favorite plants to capture by camera at Oakland Cemetery, one whose blooming cycles span several seasons every year. While the quotation at the top of this post states that Japanese Quince (Chaenomeles speciosa) blooms in Georgia in February, I’ve seen this plant blooming as early as January and continue producing new flowers through late spring and even early summer. I took these photographs on March 4 and March 29, and on both dates, it displayed plenty of unopened buds waiting for their chance in the sun. It’s near the entrance to the cemetery’s gardens, where it tumbles over an old stone wall, spanning a distance of about 25 feet and shooting branches as much as five feet into the air. Its exuberant growth is matched by its volume of flowers and its resilience: in addition to its early spring and early summer blooming, I’ve caught it producing late fall, slightly smaller flowers in November and December.

There are a lot of photos in this post — possibly more than I typically share at one time — but I’m working towards wrapping up May with this and one more post before filling this site with over 300 photos I took of irises (we hope you like irises!) in April. Those iris photos are getting some last-minute retouching but will be ready for the first week of June.

Having observed this same Japanese Quince over several years, I paid extra attention to its structure and growth patterns on purpose, rather than solely focusing on its (very nice white) flowers only. Here are some of the visual characteristics of a Japanese Quince like this that I tried to intentionally capture in these photos, many of which are also reflected in the poem “Flowering Quince” above:

  • On each of the two days I photographed the plant, there were many clusters of closely spaced flowers (like in the first seven images) and many examples of one or two blossoms along the length of a stem. The clusters tend to appear toward the ends of branches, where they get the most sunlight and are positioned to grab the attention of pollinators. The yellow filaments at the flowers’ centers are pushed out from the base of each blossom, enabling those pollinators to scatter the pollen as they alight on the flowers.
  • Mature leaves on this plant are a rich, dark green, often edged with red. Scroll down a bit and you can see how the leaves look early in their lifecycle: they appear red to the eyes, but to Lightroom they’re mostly orange throughout the body of the leaf, yet still with red edging. Like I described for the leaves of Lady Banks’ Rose earlier (see Lady Banks’ Rose, Spring 2025 (2 of 2) / Notes on Visualizing Botany), the red serves multiple purposes: it helps protect the new leaves from damage as they grow in; it helps attract pollinators (who will notice the contrast between red edges and the green of the leaves or the background); and it gives photographers something more to look at. In some of the photographs, you’ll see what look like bright red or orange dots along the stems: these are the newest of new leaves that likely busted out a day or two after the photographer stopped looking.
  • The branches of this plant are more photogenic than they appear at first glance. In addition to contrasting nicely with the leaves and flowers, they actually contain a lot of color — ranging through shades of reddish-brown through purple. I typically add a little saturation to branches that have colors in this range, since our “eye reaction” may simply register them as brown, but the purple is there, and it shows up nicely with a little boost from Lightroom while still representing the plant’s natural colors. Their protective thorns contain similar though less apparent colors, and they’re stiff and quite sharp — ask me how I know!
  • You can see hints at the complexity of the plant’s overall structure in the backgrounds of some of the photos, where there are softened representations of its crisscrossing stems. That structure — along with the stiffness of the branches and the thorns — helps protect the plant from intruders. No beast nor human would attempt to walk into it — once again, ask me how I know!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Winter Shapes: White Quince

 , , , , , , 8

From “Not Everyone Wants to Go Whole Hog into Gardening” in On Gardening by Henry Mitchell:

“[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.”

From 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells:

“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….

🙂

Thanks for taking a look!

The Quinces of Oakland (3 of 3)

 , , , , , ,

From Through the Garden Gate by Elizabeth Lawrence:

“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.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!