“The chrysanthemum has a mixed reputation. In a number of European countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Croatia — it’s mostly for funerals. In England it’s ever-so-slightly absurd: altogether too florid a flower. In East Asia it’s a flower that strikes awe. All over the world it’s also a plant of power and significance. It is the source of potent insecticides, telling the story of rising populations over the past century and summing up one of the great dilemmas of the century to come….
“The chrysanthemum is native to East Asia, where it is held in higher regard… but now we come to one of those problems of names that please the precise minds of taxonomists while spreading confusion through the rest of us….
“The genus Chrysanthemum belongs to the family of daisies, or Asteraceae, which contains more than 1,500 genera. The florists’ chrysanthemum used to belong, rationally enough, to the genus Chrysanthemum, then it was kicked out, and assigned another genus. Then it was put back in again, at least by some, but classification is still a contentious issue, serious enough if you are interested in the way life operates. The genus Chrysanthemum includes, it’s usually agreed, species that not only have big showy flowers but also powerful insecticidal properties. This includes the species Chrysanthemum pyrethrum, which is referred to informally, along with related species with a similar property, as pyrethrum. If you’ve ever been in a room with a burning mosquito coil you have felt the benefit of pyrethrum.”
The chill of dawn grows on the tips of yellow chrysanthemum twigs. In this life, don’t let the winecups be dry! Before the wind, play the flute aslant in the rain; When drunk, pin flowers on the hat and wear it upside down!
While my health remains, Let me eat well, And enjoy dancing skirts and singing castanets to the full! Let the yellow flowers and my white hair entangle each other To make a spectacle for the scornful eyes of my fellow men!
I’ve split a batch of thirty-three yellow mum photos between this post and the next one, since they were taken in two different locations with very different lighting conditions. These sixteen were from a spread spilling over an ancient Victorian stone wall — possibly made of stone donated to the city by Queen Victoria (in my imagination) — and were brightly backlit with splashes of sunlight filtering through nearby trees. With the sun in my eyes and the shadow/sun contrasts, I may have missed precise focus on a few of these. If they appear that way to you too then let’s just say it was intentional and the correct way to see them is not that they’re blurry, but that their glowing softly — which is a much more artistic(-sounding) choice, yes?
If you’re interested in learning about a problem I found with galleries on some of my blog posts and a solution, read on. Otherwise, skip down and enjoy the photos!
When working on my most recent Christmas project, I happened to take a look at some Christmas posts from previous years, and discovered that the galleries weren’t working correctly. When I clicked the first image in a gallery, WordPress didn’t show the carousel with the option to move forward to the next image in the gallery — but instead displayed only a single image. To see what I mean, go to Eight Days to Christmas: Red and Green from 2021, select the first image in the first gallery — and notice that you can’t page to the next image in the gallery (and you’ll have to use the browser’s back button to return). I randomly checked a few other older posts and found that they had the same problem: the carousel wasn’t working correctly on many of them. Because I was in the middle of the current Christmas project, I didn’t try to determine what was going wrong — until yesterday when I spent a couple of hours sorting it out.
Once upon a time, the code behind a WordPress site was a lot simpler; and with a smattering of HTML knowledge (which is all I have), I could often figure out why some problem was occurring. As WordPress continued to grow up and especially with the introduction of the Gutenberg or Block Editor, the underlying code got a lot more complicated, with much more scripting and CSS used to format and present a site. All that code is mostly unreadable to me… and yet I try not to be intimidated by tech-stuff I don’t understand, so…
I picked one of the offending posts and brought it up in the Post Editor to see if I could identify what was wrong, previewed it and noticed that the problem had corrected itself. This would seem like a good thing, you might think — but it didn’t help me understand what was wrong, nor how many posts might be affected. So my next step was to compare the code between a newer post that was working correctly and an older one that wasn’t (by using the View Source or Show Page Source function of a browser). Here, for example, is a snippet of code that displays a single image from a gallery:
Nobody knows what this code does (haha!) — and I certainly can’t explain it, but I did recognize that it was part of the gallery/carousel functionality on my site. Vaguely speaking, WordPress generates code like this for each image in a gallery so that you can do things like change the size, background colors, borders, or captions for individual images separately even when they’re part of the same gallery.
In this screenshot I highlighted a bit of code on the third line — < ul class=”blocks-gallery-grid” > — because I noticed that if I looked at the code for a carousel that was working correctly, this bit did not appear. So whatever it did or was originally designed to do, it had apparently been deprecated — and would get removed from a post when I updated it in the WordPress editor, after which the carousel would work as it was supposed to.
It can be difficult to sort out problems with images and galleries on WordPress, mainly (in my opinion) because people use words like gallery, slideshow, and carousel interchangeably and imprecisely, so searching for solutions just sends you down endless rabbit holes. But now armed with something I could work with that I knew was part of the problem — the code < ul class=”blocks-gallery-grid” > — I found this article that describes how WordPress 5.9 introduced a new structure for galleries, and that existing galleries would only be migrated to the new structure when a post was updated with the editor.
I also gathered from this article (much of which made little sense to me) that theme designers could have mitigated the problem for earlier galleries (see the “Backwards Compatibility Considerations” section) — which means you may not have the same dysfunction with these galleries on your site, if the theme developer updated your theme to account for the change. Mine didn’t, and apparently others didn’t either: I picked a few themes at random from the WordPress theme directory, and they all failed to display the older galleries correctly, in some cases not even responding when I clicked on a gallery image.
All this explains why galleries on my older posts don’t work right but new ones are fine — but I don’t know how any non-technical WordPress blogger would have known about this when the change was made and that they might need to do something because of it. Does anyone go back and check older posts when WordPress updates come out? I know I don’t — though I may from now on — and it was two years before I stumbled on the problem on my own site.
Ah, well, “to fix or not to fix” is now the question. If I go to “All Posts” on my WordPress dashboard and search for “blocks-gallery-grid” (include the quotations marks, if you try this on your own site), I learn that there are 101 posts from 2022 and earlier that will all fail to display the galleries correctly. That’s a lot! And each one will need to be opened in the post editor, re-published, then checked to make sure nothing else went wonky. So on the one hand, the broken galleries will nag me and haunt my dreams until I do something about them; on the other hand: waaaaahh! I don’t want to!
But I probably will fix them… maybe I can teach The Dog to do it… wish me luck!
Chrysanthemum fresh in the frost what use your beauty so late? Butterfly cheerful in the fragrance, your life neither comes too early, at cycle’s end you both meet your youth and grace intact till death
Western wind, snakes and dragons hibernate, all the trees with days’ advance fade and dry Such are the parts destined by fate….
“Chrysanthemum fashions have come and gone for thousands of years. The flower has been cultivated in China for more than 3,000 years, referred to in early records usually as yellow, the colour of certain wild species. They stood out because they bloomed in autumn, after the heat of the summer, and this is one reason for their popularity ever since….
“By the time of the Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) in China there were almost certainly several varieties, since there was a grand market for chrysanthemum sales in the capital, while poets in succeeding dynasties wrote often in its praise. Doubles, a range of colours and multi-hued flowers appeared during the Song dynasty (AD 960–1279), with 400 varieties by 1458, when the first book on the flower was published.
“In Japan, the chrysanthemum took off as a national symbol in the early thirteenth century when Emperor Go-Toba started using one as his personal symbol; other emperors followed, and late in the century it became the royal family’s official symbol. During the Edo period many new varieties were produced and new growing techniques developed, often involving detailed pruning and tying to elaborate frames to shape the plants into pyramids, miniature trees or cascades, or encourage one huge, perfect flower. The latter technique was taken up widely after the plant was introduced to the West in the 1830s.”
Dusky red chrysanthemums out of Japan, With silver-backed petals like armor, Tell me what you think sometimes? You have fiery pink in you too… You all mean loveliness: You say a word Of joy. You come from gardens unknown Where the sun rises… You bow your heads to merry little breezes That run by like fairies of happiness; You love the wind and woody vines That outline the forest… You love brooks and clouds… Your thoughts are better than my thoughts When the moon is getting high!
Here we have red, red, red ones — blooms from several garden locations that exhibited mostly pure red rather than the red/pink/magenta I described in the previous post. It may be noteworthy that when magenta is absent, the flower petals take on a barely perceptible orange hue when lit by the sun.
“One of the world’s most successful commercial flowers, there seems justice in the plant’s name being derived from the Greek for ‘golden flower.’ Once larger, Chrysanthemum is now a much-reduced genus, with around 30 familiar herbaceous or subshrubby species recognised from eastern Europe across to the Far East. Polyploidy and hybridisation are common, so the origin and classification of this and related genera is still in flux….
“Chrysanthemum species are generally long-lived and often clump-forming. Some have persistent semi-woody growth, but others tend to die out in patches. Generally they are from woodland edge habitats, although several are common along seashores in Japan. Species are found in a number of climate zones, with many of those which have contributed to the cultivated gene pool from the Far Eastern humid subtropical zone….
“The Japanese emperor Gotoba (1183–1198) particularly liked the flower and started using a chrysanthemum graphic as his own personal symbol. Other emperors followed suit, and in the late 13th century it became the official royal family symbol. Today, in English-speaking countries, the Japanese ruling institution is sometimes referred to as the Chrysanthemum Throne. In the East, chrysanthemums have tended to be symbolic of long life, which is perhaps another reason for the popularity of chrysanthemum tea; in the West, however, they became a funeral flower during the course of the 19th century and so were frequently, superstitiously excluded from the home, even being seen as a curse in Italy.”
how shall we tell the bright petals from the sun in the sky concentrically
crowding the branch save that it yields in its modesty to that splendor?
Hello!
Toward the end of November through mid-December of 2023, I encountered some fabulous batches of many-colored mums at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens — but then got wrapped up in my Christmas project and am just getting to those photos now. I suppose technically these are “autumn mums” — but you know I like my alliterations, so I went with “Midwinter Mums” as the post title for this series.
For the first photos in this series, I selected those that had an unusual combination of colors. These mums at first glance appear red — as red is the most dominant color — yet among the red blooms there are quite a few, even from the same multi-bloom stem, that exhibited a distinct color variation that included magenta or pink. On some individual blooms, half the petals were red and half were red and magenta, or magenta appeared toward the center then gradually radiated to red. At first I just thought is was a trick of the light (you know how tricky light can be) and started shifting the magenta toward red in Lightroom — but then set them all back to keep the color variations intact. The first two photos below show how large this group of mums was; and you can see in those photos how magenta appears randomly throughout the cluster.
“Creativity is most rewarding not as something to practice ad hoc when making a photograph but as a general attitude toward life. A creative attitude may lead to the experience of flow, to occasional grand discoveries and meaningful breakthroughs, which is not the case when you follow familiar (convergent) recipes and templates aiming to produce predictable, preconceived outcomes. Put another way, the rewards of prioritizing creativity over success are ongoing and sustained. They grow cumulatively over time and may on occasion yield immense and unexpected rewards, even the possibility of enriching your life with new meaning.”
The world outside is dark; my fire burns low; All’s quiet, save the ticking of the clock And rustling of the ruddy coals, that flock Together, hot and red, to gleam and glow. The sad old year is near his overthrow, And all the world is waiting for the shock That frees the new year from his dungeon lock. — So the tense earth lies waiting in her snow.
Old year, I grieve that we should part so soon, — The coals burn dully in the wavering light; All sounds of joy to me seem out of tune, — The tying embers creep from red to white, They die. Clocks strike. Up leaps the great, glad moon! Out peal the bells! Old year, — dear year, — good night!
Though I drop back into oblivion, though I retreat Into the soft, hoarse chant of the past, the unsoaring, dull And songless harmony behind the screen of stone, I do not age. But I come, in whatever season, like a new year, In such a vision as the open gates reveal As you saunter into a courtyard, or enter a city, And inside the city you carry another city, Inside delight, delight. And it seems you have borne me always, the love within you, Under the ice of winter, hidden in darkness. Winter on winter, frozen and unrevealing….
To flower in a sudden moment, the bloom held high towards heaven, Steady in the glowing air the white and gleaming calyx. Lightness of heart.
Hello!
Well another year has bit the dust! If you’re reading this, you’re alive — and perhaps, like Iseult la Belle, you do not age!
For this post I had planned on writing a retrospective of 2023’s Christmas Project to describe some of my techniques and a few things I learned along the way — but, instead, I ended out un-decorating and de-glittering over the weekend to start the new year fresh and with a (reasonably) clean house. So I’ll still likely do the retro — but later this week or later than that. Stay tuned!
The first quotation up-top is from a book I just bought: The Interior Landscape: The Landscape on Both Sides of the Camera by Guy Tal. Like all of his books, this one explores the relationships between photography and creativity in incomparable ways, and would be an excellent addition to any photographer’s or artist’s library. I’m just starting the it, so — more on that later!
I chose the two poems above because they seemed to well-represent the transition between years: the first one a bit darkly, perhaps; the second one with flashes of delight. I often choose white flowers for a New Year’s post — and those I’ve included below were some I had taken in mid-December, after a couple of days of subfreezing temperatures. The first five are my favorites because of the desiccated leaves in the background or at the frame edges, leaves that gave off a rich orange/brown glow on a cloudy day and are actually leaves of lilies I had photographed previously. Old and new together: old lily leaves and new, white asters.
