Tag: photography

From “An Impression of Chrysanthemums” in Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way:

“In 1890 the dramatist and art critic Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) wrote to his friend and fellow plant lover Claude Monet:

“‘If you can send me a few more dahlias, yes, I would like that, And next year I’ll make you a collection of chrysanthemums I have which are all wonderful with crazy shapes and beautiful colours, I found them at a brilliant gardeners in Le Vaudreuil.’

“Their correspondence reflected the fascination that the Impressionist artist-gardeners had for the exotic chrysanthemum. Monet collected Japanese prints and ceramics, which also appear in his paintings at Giverny and still decorate the house there…. Chrysanthemums were an especial favourite of Monet (1840-1926) with their links to Japan and Japanese art traditions….

“Other Oriental plants favoured by Monet included bamboo, tree peony and the delicate blooms of the Japanese cherry trees. Monet used his gardens to experiment with colours and hues as well as horticulture, indeed the writer Marcel Proust famously recorded that Giverny was a ‘garden of tones and colours even more than of flowers, a garden which must be less the former florist-garden than, if I can put it that way, a colourist-garden’….

“Chrysanthemums were the perfect autumn flower for this effect, especially when planted in the bold masses that Monet favoured…. Between 1878 and 1883, working from Argenteuil, then Vetheuil and eventually at Giverny, Claude Monet produced some twenty floral still-lifes — including four entirely focused on the chrysanthemum.”

From “Thirteen White Chrysanthemums” by Chou Meng-tieh in The Isle Full of Noises: Modern Chinese Poetry from Taiwan, edited and translated by Dominic Cheung:

I partake of the universe’s feelings,
I partake of the maternal water and earth,
The paternal wind and sun.
I partake of you, chrysanthemums!
When grass sears, or frost deadens,
You bloom neither for one nor for everyone;
You, with sleepless eyes of autumn,
Multipetaled, multilayered,
The hearts of those who are dead you brighten
With your hosts of cold, flickering fires.

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Hello!

This is the second of three posts featuring photographs of white and yellow mums and daisies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, taken just before the onset of our last winter. The previous post is White and Yellow, Mums and Daisies (1 of 3).

If the quotation up-top about Monet, his gardens, and Impressionism interested you, you can see some of his chrysanthemum paintings here…

List of paintings by Claude Monet

… by using your browser’s find function to search for the word “chrysanthemum.”

There will be a number of paintings of chrysanthemums in vases, but once you get to those Monet created in 1897, you’ll see the four paintings of mums in a garden referred to above. To my photographer’s eyeballs, the paintings allude to close-up photographs I might take to fill the frame with flowers, while changing the camera’s zoom level to get shots at different distances… as I often do, right here!

Thanks for taking a look!

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From “The Honourable and Imperial Flower” in Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way:

“There is a legend that the original ‘golden daisies of the Orient’ first arrived in Japan from China in a boat washed ashore on an island in the Japanese archipelago. Within the boat were twelve maidens and twelve boys, carrying a precious cargo of chrysanthemums which they were to trade for the Japanese herb of youth in order to save the life of their revered Chinese emperor. Finding the island uninhabited, the travellers settled down to build an empire and plant the chrysanthemums. As legends often do, this one contains both elements of truth and unanswered mysteries. The story correctly puts the birthplace of chrysanthemums in China and also rather neatly explains the tradition that the flowers were for centuries the exclusive possession of the Japanese emperor….

“However, once in Japan, by whatever means, the chrysanthemum was embedded in the heart of the cultural and political system. In the twelfth century the Japanese emperor Go-Toba (1180–1239) took the flower as his personal imperial symbol, and by the late thirteenth century it had become the official flower and symbol of the royal family, who from then onwards were said to inhabit the Chrysanthemum Throne. In the castle of Osaka in Kyoto, constructed by the Japanese leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536/7–1598), is an apartment known as the Chrysanthemum Room or the Kiku-no-ma, which was used as a waiting room for guests. It is decorated with yellow and white chrysanthemums and autumn grasses on a gold background…. Soon everything associated with the rule of the country, from money to warships, had the chrysanthemum symbol embossed or printed upon it…”

From “My Father” in Cartwheel to the Moon: Poems  by Emanuel di Pasquale:

My father worked at a mine where they
would make cement; they would break
large rocks and shatter them
into cement powder; it was all to help build houses,
my mother said….

My mother began telling me stories of my father
after he left — died, she said.
He didn’t leave. He stood still,
my mother said. We would visit him where he slept,
unseen, in silence. There was earth
and a white rock and a picture of him
with his large mustache on the rock.
I would speak to him, but he would
(couldn’t, my mother said) never answer.
We’d always bring flowers.

Every night he’d bring some flowers home.
He’d pick them from the meadows on his way home
from work, my mother told me.
Daisies, lilacs, marjoram.
And so we’d fill his grave with meadow flowers;
in November, on the Day of the Dead,
we’d bring white and yellow chrysanthemums….

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Hello!

This is the first of three posts featuring more photographs of mums and daisies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, taken just before the onset of our last winter. This post and the next two include a motley mix of flowers in shades of yellow and white, mostly chrysanthemums but with a few Shasta Daisies scattered about. PlantNet identifies five variants among these photos, including Chrysanthemum indicum, Chrysanthemum zawadzkii, Chrysanthemum × morifolium, and Leucanthemum × superbum — but we’ve resisted any attempt here to nail down the names for each individual photo, especially those like the first three where there are some of those, some of these, and some of that.

As suggested in the quotation at the top of this post, yellow and white mums are closest in color to early wild chrysanthemums. While defining “wild” botanically or historically presents a lot of challenges, another way to think of it is that variations like the magenta ones and the red ones I’ve previously posted (as well as some orange ones I’m still working on) did not exist in nature and are the products of centuries of plant breeding around the world, including in China, Japan, Europe, and the United States.

The actual mechanisms are, of course, botanically and biologically complex; but I have this sense of being immersed in the history of this fine and culturally significant plant when I look at these yellows and whites. They’re closer in color to their original ancestors, while those of more saturated colors represent “modern” history, or at least the history of the past couple of centuries. With that distinction in mind, though, notice how some of the white and yellow mums in this post contain swatches of red or orange, the past presence of which enabled botanists to selectively breed the plants to enhance and emphasize those colors and gradually shift the flowers from white or yellow to red, pink, and orange.

Thanks for taking a look!

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From “Gathering the Harvest in Societies and Shows” in Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way:

“With such a range of colours and shapes, and the lure of being able to develop even more, it was not long before the chrysanthemum came to the attention of the flower fanciers who were generally known into the nineteenth century as ‘florists’. Unlike the modern meaning of someone who will sell you a flower or deliver a whole bouquet, ‘florists’ and florists’ societies were then dedicated to the raising and showing of a limited number of flower types. In the eighteenth century, when the societies originated, these types were restricted to the auricula, carnation, polyanthus, ranunculus and tulip; in the late eighteenth century they were joined by the pink….

“By the time the chrysanthemum had become popular, however, this range of florists’ flowers had been expanded to include the anemone, hollyhock (surely a difficult flower to bring to a show table), pansy, picotee and latterly the dahlia, such that the inclusion of its autumnal cousin the chrysanthemum was almost inevitable. Nevertheless, in the early decades of the nineteenth century there was some reluctance to welcome the foreign chrysanthemum to the European florists’ table.

“By the late nineteenth century, the gardens of the working and middle classes in London and other large conurbations were suffering from the effects of smog and pollution — a combination of acids and blanketing soots that resulted in grey and grimy gardens. The chrysanthemum, suggested [James Shirley] Hibberd, would bring a golden cheer to these otherwise dull gardens at the worst time of year, when mists and the first coal fires of the season brought down the heavy pea soupers; and it was not just the garden that the chrysanthemums would enliven but the gardeners themselves…..”

From “The Red Chrysanthemum” by Nguyen Trai in The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry, edited and translated by Huynh Sanh Thong: 

Dawn’s glory is its color, musk its scent.
It’s born to rise above the vulgar throng.
It safeguards its vermilion, shuns all dust.
It owns jade’s toughness, flinches from no frost.
Its fragrance yields to none in royal parks.
Its glow outshines its friends by the east hedge.
Oh, may the Prince bestow his love and care!
It’ll break to fullest flower on Double Ninth.

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Hello!

This is the last of four posts featuring photographs of mums and daisies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, that I took in late November and early December. The first post is Red Mums and Daisies (1 of 4), the second post is Red Mums and Daisies (2 of 4), and the third post is Red Mums and Daisies (3 of 4).

Many of the blooms in this post were photographed against memorial stones or stone-wall backgrounds; others — those toward the center — were shot where they gently trespassed among the two-tone leaves of some variegated irises I photographed a couple of years ago, included in my post Iris pallida ‘variegata’ from June 2023.

All these red flowers were especially fetching. Even though there are seventy-two photos across the four posts where I’ve shared them, I wouldn’t mind having a few more to share. Ah, well, I guess that’s why we have seasons: flowers come, flowers go, then once around they come back again.

Thanks for taking a look!

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