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

Tag: winter 2025-2026

Technicolor Tanacetum (1 of 4)

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From Chrysanthemums (Botanical) by Twigs Way:

“[For] a flower so beneficial to mind and body and so universally beloved, the genus Chrysanthemum into which all the garden chrysanthemums belong is now a much reduced one. Recent advances in the phylogenetics of the plant world have reduced the chrysanthemum to a mere thirty familiar species, ousting the likes of feverfew, ox-eye daisies, marguerites and Shasta daisies, which were once proud members of the chrysanthemum fold, and scattering them instead among the Leucanthemum, Argyranthemum, Glebionis, and the Tanacetum….

“The botanical history of the chrysanthemums is indeed a complex one, made more so by the intense hybridization that has been encouraged over the history of cultivation and a tendency to polyploidy (having more than one set of chromosomes), so that despite the rapidly decreasing number of species, there are literally thousands of cultivars, hybrids and varieties. Thus the chrysanthemum presents an immediate contradiction in being both a shrunken genus and a rapidly expanding one, albeit expanding on the basis of an almost incestuous inclination. A recent writer on the chrysanthemum was driven to state that the number of cultivars ‘is very unclear’ and blamed multiple cultivars for a tendency to introduce a ‘wild card’ every so often, seized upon by breeders to try and improve hardiness or encourage a distinctive petal shape….

“Despite this proliferation, almost all varieties of the so-called Chinese and Japanese chrysanthemum beloved of the florist and show breeder are blended hybrids or other forms derived from Chrysanthemum x morifolium and Chrysanthemum indicum, both natives of eastern Asia… [although] it was not until they had crossed continents with the aid of Victorian and Edwardian plant hunters that they were actually introduced to each other….”

Hello!

This is the first of four posts with photos that I took in late November and the first two weeks of December, of Aster family members that had survived an early winter freeze at Oakland Cemetery, and were none the worse for wear.

As one does, I used Plantnet to identify these plants, and it came back with a consistent identification that they are most likely Tanacetum coccineum, or — a slimmer possibility — that they are either Chrysanthemum × morifolium or Chrysanthemum indicum.

This specific mixed result is more interesting than it is confusing, and possibly more interesting than it might first appear: it’s challenging to differentiate between Tanacetum and Chrysanthemum visually; and many plants that we now classify in the Tanacetum genus were historically included in the Chrysanthemum genus (often as Chrysanthemum coccineum), with Tanacetum evolving as a more accurate and separate name through twentieth-century genetic research. This is similar to what I described for the plant well-known as Feverfew, whose names changed during the same timeframe (see Feverfew and Featherfew, or, Tanacetum parthenium (1 of 2)). Regardless of which of the 70 photos I ask PlantNet to help me name, I get similar results: Tanacetum coccineum is the most likely name; Chrysanthemum × morifolium is about half as likely; and Chrysanthemum indicum is the least likely, though not impossible, species name.

Given the ambiguity of plant identifications like this, I try to confirm their plausibility with additional research. Scientific name changes can make that as challenging as the initial identification; but I can often confirm it by searching other sources — like the Internet Archive’s Books to Borrow — to find out if the plant species has adapted to environmental conditions in the U.S. Southeast. While I won’t find something as precise as “this plant can thrive in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta,” I can find out from books like Beautiful at All Seasons: Southern Gardening and Beyond by Elizabeth Lawrence or gardening books by Southern Living that the species has, indeed, adapted to southeastern conditions. And given that Oakland Cemetery (like many historical gardens and memorial spaces) often uses plants that aren’t regionally native and could even be considered exotic or come from other parts of the world, then the probability that Tanacetum coccineum is correct increases significantly.

With some confidence that we’ve got the plant name right, we turn to observing its visual characteristics to see what we can learn. When I come back from my photoshoots, I typically organize the photos by color similarity, in part because it helps me speed up my Lightroom workflow — since photos with similar colors and lighting conditions can often be edited with nearly identical adjustments — but also because it teaches me to observe the color variations that occur among flowers of the same species. If we take a broad view of my four-part series of photos, what emerges visually is a transition among three variations: plants with flowers that have a single dominant color; plants that produce flowers with blended colors among their petals; and plants that produce multiple flowers from a single stem that are each a different color. I had seen the first two color forms many times before, but this was the first year (I think) that I encountered the unique-looking variation producing two or three flowers of entirely separate colors.

Here I’ve assembled the whole series like a contact sheet; click for a larger version and you can see the transition I’m referring to. By the time we get to the end of the series, the plants that bloom in multiple distinct colors should be very apparent, and quite different from those — through about the middle of this series — that have either single-colored flowers or have petals with blends of yellow and pink or purple. This series also illustrates why Tanacetum coccineum sports the common name “Painted Daisy” — something that is more evident as we proceed through the middle and end of the series.

Researching either the garden or cultural history of the plants now classified separately from Chrysanthemum as Tanacetum can be fascinating. Even if you don’t get as botanically obsessed as I sometimes do, you’re likely well aware of the long association between chrysanthemums and Asian culture, with both Chinese and Japanese history having many embedded connections to chrysanthemums and closely related species. If we try to follow those traditions from ancient Asian culture to modern (and historical) gardens like those at Oakland, it can be helpful to work with a general framework for thinking that through, which could go something like this:

  • There is a long, deep, and rich history of chrysanthemums in Chinese and Japanese culture. Tanacetum species plants, in that history, would have been known more for their medicinal uses than ornamental ones.
  • There is a separate historical and botanical trajectory for Tanacetum that stems from its native regions (Iran, Turkey, parts of Russia, and the Caucasus region generally). This evolves into Tanacetum’s transition to European gardens in conjunction with plant exploration of that time, with Tanacetum coccineum making its way there in the early 1800s — where it was not initially distinguished from its visually similar chrysanthemum relatives.
  • Since the nineteenth century, Europeans as well as Americans blended Chrysanthemum and Tanacetum plantings in their gardens and in memorial spaces like Oakland, where the historical differences between the two were less important than the plants’ botanical and visual characteristics — notably their ability to produce late fall/early winter color, withstand cold temperatures, and re-emerge perennially.
  • We overlay this with the understanding that historical literature will often refer to what we now call Tanacetum as Chrysanthemum, or for a few decades, Pyrethrum, reflecting the plant’s three name changes over two centuries. The breeding work that produced the diverse color forms we see today began in the nineteenth century when the plant was still classified under those older names, with color diversity expanding continuously over much of the twentieth century.

With this framework in mind, we’ll explore more of the historical and botanical characteristics of Tanacetum coccineum and its linkages to chrysanthemums in the next three posts — or maybe we’ll just look at the photos!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

New Year’s Day 2026 (White Mums, Manipulated)

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From “A Way to a Happy New Year” by Robert Brewster Beattie in Poems for Special Days and Occasions, compiled by Thomas Curtis Clark:

To leave the old with a burst of song,
To recall the right and forgive the wrong;
To forget the thing that binds you fast
To the vain regrets of the year that’s past;
To have the strength to let go your hold
Of the not worth while of the days grown old,
To dare go forth with a purpose true,
To the unknown task of the year that’s new;
To help your brother along the road
To do his work and lift his load;
To add your gift to the world’s good cheer,
Is to have and to give a Happy New Year.

From “The Snowman’s Resolution” by Aileen Fisher in More Poetry for the Holidays, selected by Nancy Larrick:

The snowman’s hat was crooked
and his nose was out of place
and several of his whiskers
had fallen from his face,

But the snowman didn’t notice
for he was trying to think
of a New Year’s resolution
that wouldn’t melt or shrink.

He thought and planned and pondered
with his little snowball head
till his eyes began to glisten
and his toes began to spread;

At last he said, “I’ve got it!
I’ll make a firm resolve
that no matter WHAT the weather
my smile will not dissolve.”

Now the snowman acted wisely
and his resolution won,
for his splinter smile was WOODEN
and it didn’t mind the sun.

Hello!

While I’ve been taking photographs regularly at Oakland Cemetery for about six years now, it wasn’t until 2022 that I discovered the large volume of late-blooming asters and mums that are featured throughout the property. Most of them initially flower from late October through late November, include a wide variety of species and colors, and persist into early December if we don’t have too much cold weather. They tend to fill the gap between the emergence of fall color among trees and shrubs in autumn, and those plants — mostly flowering shrubs and trees like quince and plums — that are capable of producing blooms as early as January or February. As these asters and mums put on their best shows just before the holidays — and just before I start my annual Christmas project posts, I tend to accumulate several hundred photos that I don’t work on until after the holiday project, and the holidays themselves, are in the rearview mirror.

So this is the first post (of a presently unknown number) of some of those asters and mums, and I picked the white ones to share today since I’ve gotten in the habit of associating white flowers with New Year’s Day. Subsequent posts will bring in rainbows of hues, including some rather amazing mums where the single stems of individual plants produce three to five flowers, each one a different color.

While members of these plant families are highly resistant to cold weather — which is of course what makes them so suitable for late autumn and early winter growth spurts — we’d had several days below freezing right around the time many of the plants were starting to bloom. You’ll see the effects of those freezing temperatures in three ways: some of the flowers formed non-traditional shapes that reminded me of what coastline trees look like when blown by wind off the water for decades or centuries; some of the blossoms (especially at the tips of their petals) had their colors shift from white to light pink or light red; and many of the stems and leaves froze to the point where they produced swatches of yellow or turned completely brown. The leaf color change is similar to what happens to many plants as autumn approaches, where a plant’s ability to produce chlorophyll (and stay green) is reduced by the cold and its leaves eventually desiccate, detach, and fall to the ground. The shape-shifting is a chemical reaction to reduction in water fluidity that contracts cells and collapses the flower structure; and the color-shift is a reminder that few flowers are actually pure white but instead are suppressing the appearance of alternate colors when they’re at optimal blooming stages.

All this means that this year I accumulated hundreds of aster and mum photos that are not entirely photogenic. Naturally, I was aware of that when I took the photos (how could I not be?), but took lots of them anyway, in part because I wanted to see what I could create from them once I had time to spend editing in Lightroom. While I’ve long been accustomed to using Lightroom’s healing tools to remove spots, pollen, bits of debris, or unfocused photobombing bugs from my images, the kind of repair and reconstruction needed for heavily damaged plants is beyond the capabilities of those tools.

Such reconstruction is not, however, beyond the capabilities of Lightroom’s Generative AI Remove tool, which was added to the software in mid-2024 and I’ve been experimenting with it since. Simply put, this tool lets you select parts of an image that you want to replace, and it fetches three potential replacements you can pick from to let you properly match colors and textures. It lets me think of an image’s creative reconstruction like this: what might have been in the photo if the damaged flower, broken leaf, or dead stem wasn’t there?

Here are some examples to help illustrate that thinking, three photos showing how the image looked before I selected elements to remove and replace (sometimes dozens of individual selections), and after. Select the first image and page through all six if you’d like to see how the changes worked out. Note, especially, how the tool generated new leaves for the plants that are botanically accurate: they not only match the colors and textures present in other parts of the photo I didn’t change, but are correctly rendered not as some generic leaf shape, but with the distinct appearance of chrysanthemum leaves.

Of course, the end result departs significantly from what I photographed, which generates all sorts of interesting questions at the intersections of photography, creativity, image manipulation, and even artificial intelligence. A photography theorist bound to originalist or documentary conceptions might think this distance between what I photographed and what I chose as an end result violates some picture-taking laws, but I’m not one of those theorists. I do, however, try to approach these changes intentionally, with the idea in mind that we — as humans who observe plants and flowers in real life — tend to focus on parts of a scene we consider the subject and worth contemplating, while disregarding those parts of that scene that we consider irrelevant. To the camera, everything it captures is equally significant or insignificant, though it may help us with subject isolation when we vary focal lengths, apertures, and other settings — so it’s up to us and our discretion, not the technology, to decide what matters.

If you’ve been following me here for a while, you’ll likely recall that I have in the past often produced galleries of images where I’ve removed the backgrounds behind the subject I wanted you to see by converting them to black. This was a different kind of image manipulation serving the same goal: presenting a photo based on what mattered to me when I viewed the subject, while discarding distracting or irrelevant items. Given the Generative Remove tool’s capabilities, I look back on that now as a transitional period in my own development, one that I’d probably still be using had this new tool not been invented, and one that permits me to take wider shots than I did in the past while knowing I can remove aberrations while still preserving the botanical accuracy and garden context of the original scene.

Because its operation is quite opaque — like a black box in technological terms — using it is heavily experimental, but with a lot of ambiguity since you can never get the same results twice even if you try to make an identical second selection. And while you can’t tell it what to do with words that represent your thoughts or your vision, eventually it sinks in through that experimentation that you can influence how it acts. I’ll explore that more fully in a later post, but here are two things I discovered that have turned out to be consistently true: if I want to repair damage to a particular leaf, I should first remove any small spots or blemishes on adjacent leaves, or the tool will incorporate nearly identical spots into its replacement; and, if I want the tool to construct something like a new leaf in an otherwise nearly blank location, it will do that accurately if I include a sliver of a leaf nearby in my selection. These two techniques tell me that the tool is contextual: in determining potential replacements, it’s looking at what else is in the photo in conjunction with what I’ve selected before providing replacement options.

Here’s another way to understand that. For this image, I selected everything in the sixth photo above for replacement — therefore asking Generative Remove to recreate the entire photo. What does this result tell us about how it works?

I’m glad you asked! We can see that — even though I’ve told the tool to replace all the image’s content — it still recognizes that the primary subject was a white flower of a particular shape, the background leaves were unimportant, and that the most prevalent colors in the image were white and shades of green. It probably knows nothing specific about objects we would identify as chrysanthemums, but takes the pattern it found in my photo’s subject and repeats it while varying the pattern to simulate randomness. It applies this same approach to the grass in the background: note how each swatch of grass is very similar though not precisely identical.

This arrangement of recurrent but slightly varying patterns is one of the reasons we would recognize this implausible field of flowers as likely created by an image generator: the patterns are too uniform, and any given section of the image looks nearly identical to any other. That has two implications: first, that when editing photos and using this Generative Remove tool, I have to keep an eye out for unnatural patterns or patterns that aren’t a logical fit; and second, when you see an image with patterns like this, your conclusion that it’s AI-generated is most likely correct.

Thanks for reading and taking a look…

And Happy New Year!