“Common in gardens throughout Western Europe, this perfect iris produces pale violet-blue flowers with white beards that are tipped yellow towards the back. The falls and standards, unlike those of many other bearded species, are very short and form a neatly shaped flower that is not damaged in poor weather conditions. In the wild the flower can vary from deep violet to almost pink. It is scented. The grey green foliage is resistant to disease. Early hybridizers used this species as a parent to create other bearded irises. It is sometimes known as Dalmatian iris.”
Any color that is blue Gives a thing the proper hue. Be it raiment, sky, or water Or the ink beside the blotter Blankets for an unborn child Or blue iris, growing wild Music or the mood I’m in, or The haze that’s mountain climbin’ Violets in a wooded nook Bluebirds singing near the brook Anything worthwhile, it’s true Deserves to be a shade of blue.
For this post, we’re going to explore some of the differences between the irises in my first post and those in this one, considering them visually while glancing at what those visual differences tell us about the iris’s botanical history. These blue-violet irises are likely Iris pallida, a close relative, or perhaps friends with benefits; and they look a lot like the I. pallida species as described in the quotation from Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia above.
Here I’ve placed a pair of images from the first post on top of two from this post, where it’s likely that you immediately recognize the color differences between the dark, saturated purple of the first two and the lighter blue-violet of the second two. This is more than just a color difference, however: the saturated purple occurs in conjunction with a petal structure that’s thicker than that of the blue-violet irises. Although this comparison isn’t precise, the purple irises would feel more like a piece of copy paper, and the blue-violet irises would feel more like tissue paper.
The structural differences also mean that the two kinds of irises react differently to the lighting conditions where they’re photographed. Hold a piece of tissue paper in front of a light bulb and you’ll see that much more light passes through it than copy paper held in the same position. This means that the purple irises will look nearly the same when the lighting is coming from the side or from the back, whereas the camera will pick up significant differences in the appearance of the blue-violet irises with side lighting or backlighting. As I mentioned previously, the lighting conditions did vary a lot during my photoshoot — from cloud-filtered to bright sunlight — even over the fifteen minutes that passed when I took these photos. So as you progress toward the bottom of these galleries, you can see how backlighting in particular affected the appearance of the flowers: parts of the flower that contrast with the blue-violet color of the petals (especially their orange beards and the internal parts of the flower behind the beards) exhibit a natural-looking glow.
How the two kinds of irises appear in photographs also gives us a chance to observe other characteristics. They’re both bearded irises (because they have beards!), with the purple ones — standing about three feet tall — classified as tall bearded irises and the blue-violet ones — standing about two feet tall — classified as intermediate or medium bearded irises. The height of the purple irises means that they have to produce very strong stems to support the weight of a large, complex flower blossom; and, from my observations, the tall irises were much less likely to show damage from recent thunderstorms or wind than the blue-violet ones, which had plenty of stems that ended up growing horizontally (like the example I showed in the first post).
The thicker flower petals on the purple irises also supported a genetic alteration: breeders selected irises that produced petals with ruffled edges that, over many generations, eventually developed the substantial amount of ruffling that you see in the two top photos above. The development of ruffled irises — taking place over a period of about five decades up to the 1980s — was both an aesthetic effort and a practical one aimed at strengthening the petals of larger iris flowers. (If you’d like to learn more about this part of iris history, search for variations of the word “ruffle” in the book I quoted up top, Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia by Claire Austin, or in Austin’s companion book Iris: The Classic Bearded Varieties.)
With their thinner and more translucent petals, the blue-violet irises, on the other hand, often show only a slight curving at the petals’ edges (hinting at the possibility of ruffling) but would never have supported as much of a ruffle as the purple ones. And the edge curve often recedes and flattens on the blue-violet petals as the flower opens and ages; whereas it remains mostly intact on the purple ones throughout the blooms’ lifecycles.
Being able to photograph batches of similar irises like these (and those in future posts) from Oakland’s new plantings gave me a chance to research observations like this, following a kind of compare and contrast methodology where I would have plenty of recently opened flowers to compare with those that had been around for a few days. There are so many irises at so many different stages of development that I can use the plantings in a way that might be comparable to time-lapse photography of a single iris. We’ll explore these relationships in more detail in some upcoming posts, and engage in further examination of how the location and use of older iris plantings and newer ones reflect the cemetery’s history and its design as a memorial garden.
“All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the night before and brushed, wet and scented, across her face. It was wistaria. Wistaria and sunshine…. Here indeed were both in profusion. The wistaria was tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet geraniums, bushes of them, and nasturtiums in great heaps, and marigolds so brilliant that they seemed to be burning, and red and pink snapdragons, all outdoing each other in bright, fierce colour….
“The ground behind these flaming things dropped away in terraces to the sea, each terrace a little orchard…. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavender, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea….
“Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour, piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers…. [Flowers] that grow only in borders in England, proud flowers keeping themselves to themselves over there, such as the great blue irises and the lavender, were being jostled by small, shining common things like dandelions and daisies and the white bells of the wild onion, and only seemed the better and the more exuberant for it.”
Beautiful lily, dwelling by still rivers, Or solitary mere, Or where the sluggish meadow-brook delivers Its waters to the weir!
Thou laughest at the mill, the whir and worry Of spindle and of loom, And the great wheel that toils amid the hurry And rushing of the flame.
Born in the purple, born to joy and pleasance, Thou dost not toil nor spin, But makest glad and radiant with thy presence The meadow and the lin.
The wind blows, and uplifts thy drooping banner, And round thee throng and run The rushes, the green yeomen of thy manor, The outlaws of the sun.
The burnished dragon-fly is thine attendant, And tilts against the field, And down the listed sunbeam rides resplendent With steel-blue mail and shield.
Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest, Who, armed with golden rod And winged with the celestial azure, bearest The message of some God.
Thou art the Muse, who far from crowded cities Hauntest the sylvan streams, Playing on pipes of reed the artless ditties That come to us as dreams.
O flower-de-luce, bloom on, and let the river Linger to kiss thy feet! O flower of song, bloom on, and make forever The world more fair and sweet.
Hello!
This is the first of ten posts (yes, that’s right, ten!) featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery in one lengthy visit toward the end of April. As I mentioned in a previous post (see Studying Japanese Quince): we hope you like irises, because we’re going to spend the next five weeks looking at the photographs and exploring them in different contexts, like their colors, their culture and history, their botanical characteristics, and, sometimes, their appearance in literature (like the excerpt from The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim and the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at the top of this post).
There are 323 photos in the whole series, which means that I’ve been spending plenty of time not only post-processing each image, but organizing them in ways that might make sense for further exploration. As I often do, I’ve arranged the photos by their dominant colors, and ended up with these eight groupings to help me streamline processing in Lightroom and give me some anchors for further research. Here are the groupings in the order I’ll be presenting the photos:
Purple and Blue: 50 photos
Brown and Gold: 42 photos
Purple with Variegated Leaves: 19 photos
Purple Plicata: 36 photos
White: 38 photos
White Standards, Purple Falls: 50 photos
Pink Standards, Purple Falls: 26 photos
Yellow and Orange: 62 photos
How’s it possible to end up with a large collection like this — which you might describe as so many irises in so little time? I’m glad you asked! There have always been plenty of irises to photograph throughout the gardens, but a few years ago, the caretakers expanded their iris collections by several acres (near the Greenhouse Valley section toward the northeast corner of this map), where they constructed a number of new rectangular garden plots featuring just irises, segregated by color as I’ve done here. And that of course means that if you visit the cemetery during peak iris blooming time (late April or early May), you are pleasantly confronted with hundreds or perhaps even thousands of individual irises, fully flowering in open spaces, just waiting for you to take their pictures. It’s actually a fascinating addition to a Victorian garden cemetery like Oakland, where plantings are typically associated with various memorial structures and memorial plots, to have this separate set of gardens that have been designed as recently planted independent arrangements of flowers, unaffiliated with the garden’s overall historical design.
The day I took all these photographs started out overcast with some bright but filtered sunlight — my favorite conditions for photographing flowers — but as the morning progressed, the clouds came and went repeatedly so I got to experiment with a variety of lighting conditions including filtered sunlight, stark yellow/white light, and both backlighting and side-lighting. While I’ll sometimes abandon a photoshoot when the lighting conditions change like this, I decided to adapt to it and keep on shooting — in part because we had recurring severe thunderstorms of such frequency in April (continuing through almost all of May) that I thought I might not get another chance to photograph the irises without substantial storm damage. So as you progress through these photos, you’ll see some like this one…
… that adapted to getting storm-battered by adjusting the trajectory of the stem horizontally while still retaining enough upright support to top the stem with a nearly perfectly formed flower. Let’s keep that resilience and ability to adapt to the environment in mind as we move forward with explorations of the iris’s historical persistence, its botanical properties, and its cultural and memorial connections.
I chose Longfellow’s poem to accompany this first post because of the way it seamlessly blends these different connections. “Born in purple, born to joy and pleasance” — for example — doesn’t just describe the color of irises like those in my photographs, but also takes us back to the historical association of irises with royalty or aristocracy. Variations in purple or blue colors and the shape of an iris flower gradually emerged to symbolize royal courts or coats of arms through an association with heraldry, often described as fleur-de-lis(or in Longfellow’s rendering “flower-de-luce”). While there’s some overlap where fleur-de-lis may refer to the shapes of irises or to similarly shaped lilies (abstracting the shape of either flower to a drawing yields similar results), the two remain largely interchangeable in the cultural history of both plants (see Fleur-de-lis Origins for more on that) — and Longfellow clearly intended his poem to describe irises, as he did explicitly in the sixth stanza. That he started out by calling the plant a lily, then reverted to calling it an iris further on, reflects these historical connections.
While Longfellow used evocative colors to induce our understanding of iris history, he also used color to help us see irises in their natural environment, weaving his chosen palette throughout verses in the poem. He was sometimes explicit about that (like the “born in purple” phrase we just discussed), but more often he used an approach that we might call “reflective” by describing the iris’s surroundings. Words and phrases like flame, radiance, green yeomen, burnished, sunbeam, steel-blue, golden rod, celestial azure, and sylvan streams all imply colors that Longfellow found surrounding the irises — yet any of them could be equally attributed to the colors of an iris plant itself, especially when considering how many different colored irises there are, and the enormous variety of colors any individual iris can display. Pick any of my photographs below (or in the rest of this series) and you can find most of these colors; cruise the internet for photos of irises and their descriptions, and you’ll encounter similar phrases in those descriptions; wander for a while among iris gardens at a place like Oakland Cemetery — and whether you’re looking at newly planted acres, or older plantings associated with memorials, it will be quite obvious why the name of the iris itself was derived from the Greek word for rainbow.
From “West of the Pacific: Fortune in China and Japan” in Pioneers in Gardening by Miles Hadfield:
“China, for botanists, was in almost every respect the opposite to North America. It was a densely populated land with an ancient civilisation. The arts, and the cultivation of plants in particular, had been practised for centuries. In the early part of the nineteenth century China was in a particularly bad state of internal confusion, and trading through those few ports used by the Western traders became almost impossible. An English army was sent to change the situation. As a result, in 1842 the Treaty of Nanking was concluded, which gave Britain increased powers of access to the mainland of China, defined British rights in the ports, and gained the island of Hong Kong.
“John Reeves now became the leading member of a committee formed… to engage a collector and despatch him to China…. Robert Fortune, the new superintendent of the hothouse department of the [Royal Horticultural] Society’s garden at Chiswick, was the man chosen….
“On 26th February, 1843, he sailed in the Emu on this pioneering journey to China, the fabulous land of Cathay.
“This is how he described his arrival:
“‘On the sixth of July, 1843, after a passage of four months from England, I had the first view of the shores of China; and although I had often heard of the bare and unproductive hills of this celebrated country, I certainly was not prepared to find them so barren as they really are. Viewed from the sea, they had everywhere a scorched appearance, with rocks of granite and red clay showing all over their surface: the trees are few, and stunted in their growth, being perfectly useless for anything but firewood. A kind of fir-tree (Pinus sinensis) seems to struggle hard for existence… but is merely a stunted bush… Was this, then, the ‘flowery land’, the land of camellias, azaleas and roses, of which I had heard so much in England?'”
From Avernel the hills flow down And leave it near the sky, And it has birds and bells and trees And fauns that never die.
When coral-pink azaleas fill Its roomy woods with sweet, And lilac spills of violets wait For violet-veined swift feet;
When moths are budded by the oaks’ Uncrinkling rose and red And high, high up, green butterflies Reveal the poplars’ head;
When shaggy clouds in single bliss Blaze up the sea-blue air, Spilling their shadow-amethyst Along the hills’ wide stair;
Then there is singing in the sun And whispering in the shade And dancing till the stars slope down Their murmurous arcade…..
Hello!
The first six photos below show the section of Oakland Cemetery’s gardens where the rest of the photos were taken. It’s one of my favorite areas in the gardens for several reasons, not the least of which is the variety of plants and flowers that grow together there, to be discovered by simply aiming the camera in any direction. But it’s also one of the quietest and most peaceful sections. You descend into it via a curved roadway surrounded by large trees and shrubs, and your isolation from the sounds of the busy city outside — partially created by brick walls around the property — is as complete as you’d get from noise-cancelling headphones, the kind that still let you hear birds singing, bees buzzing, and the soft whoosh of the wind.
I had taken quite a few photos of azaleas from a different part of the property last year (see Azalea Blooms Aplenty), so for this series, I focused more on the roses than the azaleas. Rose varieties can be a challenge to identify, but these feature a very dark, saturated red petal color with yellow (or sometimes burgundy) stamens and anthers in the center, plenty of unopened late spring buds, and (you’ll have to imagine this part) an intense, heady scent that lets you know they’re roses even before you see that they’re roses.
“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.”
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!
“In 1685, Chinese ports were officially opened to ships of all nationalities. Even then, customs regulations were so strict that foreign trade was effectively limited to Macao and Canton. Nonetheless, some Chinese plants began to arrive in Europe. Chinese chrysanthemums appeared briefly in the Netherlands in the 1680s, but soon disappeared from cultivation, while an Oriental hibiscus flowered at the Chelsea Physic Garden in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The hibiscus was introduced by the East India Company doctor James Cunningham, yet most early eighteenth-century introductions came from unidentified sources. Although Chinese plants had limited impact in Europe at the time, the accounts of Chinese gardens by Jesuit missionaries led to a fashion for Chinese-style effects in European landscapes.
“The early nineteenth century saw sporadic but enthusiastic attempts to introduce Chinese garden plants, importing to Europe the results of China’s centuries-old traditions of plant breeding. Chrysanthemums, China asters, camellias, peonies (especially tree peonies or moutans), and roses, all excited attention in Britain and Europe. Most were introduced by horticulturally minded sea captains. Sir Joseph Banks, the Director of the Royal Gardens at Kew, planted the first tree peony there in 1790. Sir Abraham Hume of Wormleybury in Hertfordshire was active in distributing peonies and chrysanthemums. Two founders of the Horticultural Society, the amateur gardener and collector Charles Francis Greville and William Townsend Aiton, the superintendent of Kew, helped distribute plants, the latter from specimens received at Kew. Among the results, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, were hydrangeas and tiger lilies. In 1818, John Reeves, a tea inspector at Canton, began to send plants to the Horticultural Society, among them some of the first wisterias….
“In the 1820s the Society sent two collectors to China: the first, John Potts, returned with seed of Primula sinensis; the second, John Damper Parks, was sent with specific instructions to look for the yellow form of Rosa banksiae.”
As I’ve mentioned more than once here, I sometimes experiment with several AI tools to help me learn more about the plants and flowers I photograph. For me, it’s a shortcut to merge what I’ve learned about photography with what I continue learning about botany. And at this point, I’ve used them enough to recognize — despite appropriate misgivings about their future impact (as seen in aggressive marketing mixed with technological utopianism) — how they’ve improved over the past couple of years in areas that are relevant to me: photography and botany. I interact with ClaudeAI the most because in my experience it excels at explaining things in a botanical or historical context, and clarifying any questions I have or resolving what appear to be contradictions in its explanations.
Two years ago, I couldn’t get any of the AI tools to accurately identify flowers that are perhaps universally known to human beings. In other words, they couldn’t tell the difference (for example) between a daffodil and a tulip, despite each of those having easily recognized and distinct shapes. Fast forward a bit, and now Claude can tell me what’s in a photograph in detail — from the colors in the image, to the subject, to the shapes and structures in the background — and can usually identify a plant from one or two photographs, especially if the photographs contain other elements besides its flowers, like the stems, leaves, and surroundings where it’s growing.
At the same time, the tool understands characteristics of photography in surprising ways. It’s able to analyze a photograph, describe its compositional strengths and weaknesses using photographic concepts, and suggest improvements. I’ve used that capability to get recommendations about how to create better separation between subject and background in a photograph, how to most efficiently mask parts of a complex image before making adjustments, and how to use features in Lightroom in ways I hadn’t thought about before with step-by-step instructions. I’ve even uploaded two versions of the same image — one before I’d made any changes to it, and my final version — and asked Claude to explain the differences, which it did in terms of specific Lightroom steps I likely used to create the final version. And in one of the most useful conversations I had with it, Claude described how Lightroom’s Generative Remove Tool (which is also a form of AI) works, and how to influence its recognition of what’s in a photo so it provides better results when, say, I remove some dead flowers from a photograph of an iris and want them replaced with elements that look like nearby stems or leaves.
So to me this means I can do something like this: I can upload a few of my Lady Banks’ Rose photographs and ask for some observations both on the photographic characteristics of the image, and the botanical significance of what I photographed.
Using photos from this series, then, I inquired about three things: Rosa banksiae’s overall growth patterns; the arrangement of both opened and unopened flowers next to each other; and the red edging that appears on many of the leaves (most visible in the fourth, fifth, and sixth images below).
Here’s what Claude told me (that is, here’s what I learned):
Your photographic observations reveal some fascinating botanical principles at work, and I think exploring these visual elements will deepen your understanding of how this ancient rose species has evolved to thrive in its environment.
Let’s start with those dramatic architectural forms you’re capturing. When you photograph branches that seem to hang in midair or run in seemingly impossible directions, you’re documenting what botanists call “thigmomorphogenesis” — the way plants respond to physical touch and mechanical stress. Think of Rosa banksiae as nature’s sculptor, constantly feeling its way through three-dimensional space. Each branch that encounters a tree trunk, stone monument, or even another branch of itself will change its growth direction, creating unexpected angles and curves that make your photographs so dynamic.
The arched sweep pattern connects to something even more fundamental about how this rose conquers space. Picture the plant as following what we might call a “fountain strategy.” The main stems grow upward with vigor, but as they extend and become heavier with foliage and flowers, gravity naturally pulls them into those graceful arcs. This isn’t random — it’s an evolutionary solution that allows the plant to cover maximum territory while maintaining structural integrity.
Now, let’s examine those clusters of flowers mixed with unopened buds pointing skyward. This arrangement demonstrates what botanists call “determinate flowering” combined with “sequential bloom timing.” Think of each flower cluster as a carefully orchestrated performance where not all the actors appear on stage simultaneously. The buds pointing upward are positioned to catch maximum sunlight as they develop, while the opened flowers below them have already completed their primary function of attracting pollinators. This staggered timing extends the overall flowering period and ensures that some flowers are always at peak attractiveness to insects, even within a single cluster.
The red-edged leaves you’ve noticed represent one of the most overlooked aspects of Rosa banksiae’s botanical sophistication. That thin red margin isn’t merely decorative — it’s a sophisticated adaptation that tells us several important things about the plant’s physiology. The red pigmentation comes from anthocyanins, the same compounds that create red autumn leaves. In Rosa banksiae, these pigments serve as a natural sunscreen, protecting the delicate leaf edges from damage while also potentially deterring certain leaf-eating insects.
Think about what this means photographically and botanically. Those red edges create visual definition that helps each individual leaflet stand out against complex backgrounds. But from the plant’s perspective, this edge pigmentation represents millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning. The red compounds can also act as antioxidants, helping the plant manage the chemical stress of photosynthesis in bright sunlight.
Here’s a mental exercise that might enhance your photography: next time you’re capturing the plant, try to think like the rose itself. Where would you position a branch to capture maximum sunlight while avoiding competition with neighboring growth? How would you arrange your flower clusters to attract pollinators most efficiently? When you start seeing the plant as an active participant in shaping its own form rather than a passive subject, you might discover new angles and compositions that reveal the intelligence built into its growth patterns.
The combination of these elements — the space-conquering architecture, the strategic flower timing, and the protective leaf margins — creates what we might call the “visual vocabulary” of Rosa banksiae. Each photograph you take is essentially documenting a conversation between the plant’s genetic programming and its immediate environment, written in the language of form, color, and spatial relationships.
If you read all that (you did, didn’t you?), you can likely see what I’m talking about. I didn’t just get a description of the characteristics of a Lady Banks’ Rose; I got them in a wider context of my own observations from photographs I’d taken, which the AI’s response blends into a discussion of the plant’s botany by examining my photographs, then creating a bridge between photography and botany. And the idea of “thinking like the plant itself, seeing the plant as an active participant in shaping its own form rather than a passive subject” is something I’ve probably done without realizing it; but intentionally composing a photograph to reflect both its visual interest and its botanical characteristics is something I can expand on. Instead of just considering how it looks, I would consider how its appearance demonstrates its behaviors, its evolutionary strategies, and how it has adapted to its environment — and how to capture that when taking a shot.
Coincidentally (or possibly not!), I’ve been watching a fascinating documentary about plants called The Green Planet (2022). Yet another excellent David Attenborough production, this five-part documentary takes a similar approach to that suggested by Claude: it “flips the script” to show plants as active directors of their own behaviors as they engage with their environments. Attenborough describes it as filming plants, over time, in ways similar to filming animals for other nature documentaries. If you’re interested in plants at all, this documentary is worth watching (I’m on my second viewing), and here are a few sections I found compelling to whet your appetite:
The first episode — “Tropical Worlds” — shows how vines use their tendrils to latch onto other plants, push them out of the way, and pull themselves upward toward the sun. If you have any vines in your garden, I think you’ll find the video representation of their movement quite compelling.
Episode 2 — “Water Worlds” — has a segment about giant water lilies (Victoria boliviana or Victoria amazonica) that send a jagged spike from beneath the water to the surface. The spike (which reminded me of a morning star or flail weapon) then rotates in the movement of water and wind in increasingly larger circles, to clear away other plants and make room for the water lily to come — which will need a lot of open space because it’s a giant!
The same episode describes how a carnivorous Bladderwort (Utricularia) creates small bladders beneath the water’s surface, that are triggered upon being touched by tiny prey, after which they snap open and vacuum the prey into the bladder to consume it.
Episode 3 — “Seasonal Worlds” — includes a vignette that shows how nettles and brambles (which have thorns or hooks), and climbing vines like hops, appear in sequence as the first plants to fill out wild landscapes in spring, using their various “climbing appendages” to make their way through other plants and capture light, before large shrubs and trees produce leaves that cover them in shade. It also includes a segment on the parasitic dodder (Cuscuta), a tiny-leafed vine that attaches itself to other plants, punctures their stems and leaves, and sucks nutrients from the plants it attaches to. “Vampire vine” is sometimes used to describe this plant; to learn about how it works, see Scientists Find a Gene That Enables a Plant to Become a Vampire.
Also in this episode are examples of unusual relationships between plants and insects. The Hammer Orchid (Drakaea) produces no nectar so is incapable of summoning insects the traditional way for pollination. Instead, it produces a flower that resembles a female thynnid wasp, thereby attracting the male wasp of this single, specific species to have its way with the orchid and scatter pollen. This section of the Wikipedia article about Drakaea describes how that happens. Not to be outdone by Drakaea’s enticing escapades, the Silver Arrowreed (Ceratocaryum argenteum) produces and flings seeds that match the size, shape, color, and odor of antelope dung — which are gathered and buried by dung beetles (who have a preference for antelope droppings) to ensure the plants’ offspring germinate.
These are just a few highlights, but you can probably see — given my so-far six-year project of botanical photography — why I like this series. And each episode ends with about ten minutes explaining the techniques behind the videography, how it was filmed in part on-location and in part by recreating those locations in studios in the United Kingdom. Imagine, if you will, the complex effort required to replicate giant water lilies growing in a pond, in a studio. That’s a lot more complicated than my photography shoots at Oakland Cemetery — but I’ll bet it’s just as much fun!
