Tangled

There are lots of spider webs around here. I mean LOTS of them. The delivery woman carries a stick to slash through the tangle strung across the porch so she can bring packages to the front door without having to worry about arachnids crawling through her hair. There's one that's been dangling in front of our kitchen window for months (spider not delivery woman). It occasionally catches a fly and consumes it while I'm stuffing a chicken. And Bailey sometimes trails the remnants of a web as he dashes in to escape what stays caught on his ears and tail. They are everywhere.

And they're beautiful in their delicacy, the way the light breaks across the drops of water caught on the strands and splits into colors, the way strings of those drops drape like ropes of pearls: Nature's Flapper necklace.

But without the moisture, when the filaments double back on themselves, they make the flowers look unkempt, fussing up the smooth petals, contorting the leaves by pulling at the surface, and dulling the colors of the plant until, perhaps, we no longer see the plant at all.  

I think this might have been a red-flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum), but now it just looks like the armature for a spider's nervous breakdown, strung with illogical knots and aborted strands headed nowhere.

If I'd never seen this plant before, what would I look at first?  Would it be the damage, the web?  Would I dismiss the plant and move on to something else?  Would I even recognize what it used to be and still was?

Which brings me to a minor health event. While waiting for my sutures to come out this past week, I wondered, "Is this the way I'll see my face:  pulled and lined and dulled like a web-twisted plant? The doctor will see the quality of his work; the scar has a beauty for him. He knows what he accomplished, and my face becomes for him another creation, another success. 

But I will see how it pinches and slices what was once (relatively) smooth. I imagine how others will stare, caught by the web the scar presents, no longer seeing me as I was.

Before I got my stitches out, it was difficult to see beyond the green/blue Frankenstein sutures. I'm not prone to body art, so accentuating the twisted tissue into a kind of face-painting didn't do too much for me--hell, I don't even have pierced ears.  And, believe me,  I know the main thing is that the cancer is gone. I know others who have battled (won and lost) far more formidable opponents than mine. 

All the same, I was afraid of what I'd see and of ceasing to be who I am in the eyes of others. 

 And then the stitches came out.  I have a scar, a canal arcing down from my left eye and then branching out into two short red streams.  It's not at all as bad as I'd feared.  And though I notice eyes darting to it, lingering just a moment longer than a heartbeat, they return to my eyes and nothing has changed.

Campanula punctata 'Cherry Bells'

The spiders are still active in the garden.  But the flowers that have continued through Autumn don't seem much bothered by them.  The Campanula on the right barely tolerates the cobwebs that attempt to anchor themselves to its petals.  The color alone almost burns through the lacing.

And the spider silks pulling at the Anemone bud below aren't going to keep it from flowering. 

 

End of Summer Glare

I love it. I love the first touch of fall because it means my summer suffering is almost over.  I know it sounds odd, ungrateful, or just plain stupid coming from someone living under sheets of wet and grey for several months out of the year, but summer gets old fast. Unblinking, it insists we look it squarely in the face and rejoice.  Yeah, well, not what I moved up North for.  I'm grateful on behalf of my tomatoes.  That's about it. Too flat. The light is too flat. Shadows too sharp. Summer presses down on the brain, squishing thought, expelling romance.  A big, dumb grin of peonies and ox-eye daisies. 

Anemone hupehensis 'Prince Henry'

OK, maybe summer isn't THAT bad.   Tactless, promiscuous.  But throws a good party.  And many flowers that are said to bloom in fall, actually begin in late summer. Anemones come for the party in July, but stay late for the long talks in September.  I swear they look different this time of year, more intelligent, less perky.  Even a little pensive.  Bonjour Tristesse?  

I originally planted a Blue Mist (or Blue Beard) shrub for fall flowers.  But when it first bloomed, I kept saying, "That's it?  That's all there is?  Just little patches of blue bumps along a stem?"  But softer light, nerves steeled against the constant blanket of bees, and a macro lens bring out the turquoise anthers waving above those purple petals and the blue-green leaves.  An animated boutonniere. 

Caryopteris x clandonensis 'Dark Knight'

Even the unfortunately named "Leadwort" takes on a bit of glamour in the long, autumn light.  Like the peach-colored light bulbs used at the Moulin Rouge because they improve the look of women's skin (or so I've heard), flowers opening against a background of browns, reds and oranges have a kind of glow.

Ceratostigma plumbaginoides

The beginning of fall brings the last days of Chinese Astilbes.  Thanks to a friend who gave me two or three, I went from having the equivalent of a decorative throw-rug to wall-to-wall carpeting.  But it's now that I appreciate them most, when only a few resist brown for a moment more.  Improbable details of color I couldn't see in the summer glare.

Astilbe chinensis

 But fall hasn't taken taken off her coat just yet.  It's only the dawn of October; the woods still wait.

Shooting Edge-On

Walk through any public garden in spring, and you'll see strollers admiring the flowers. Stooping slightly, they'll pull their cameras to their faces, position the viewfinder or LCD parallel to the ground, and snap shot after shot of those sunny, open, plant-catalog blossoms. Every detail in focus, the colors bright and depthless, seemingly honest in their accessible flatness.  Everything revealed.  Maybe.  Seeing everything isn't always the same as experiencing everything.  And “tack sharp” isn't always the gold standard in plant photography. At least not for me.

Sitting on the ground, is when I really take the time to look closely at a flower. It's the view of rabbits and cats, who take little notice. And only when I pause in my weeding or planting do I.  Eye-level and edge-on, I see moods (theirs or mine, I don't really know). And it's the ironic gift of a camera's shallow depth of field, revealing more when some edges are left unedged. When far petals softly echo (or contend with) those close by. 

Hellebores present an interesting challenge.  Most of them face downwards.  It's frustrating when you think of "flower" as full-on, open face.  Before putting this newly acquired Helleborus x hybridus 'Mardi Gras Pink' in the ground, I pulled its face upwards to get some shots.

That's a face alright.  And you get to see the pretty design on the petals and the anthers and pistil.  Open and honest . . . and, to my taste, sort of boring.

After awhile, I planted it and moved on.  Then, a week or so later, I was kneeling in the bed, weeding, when I found myself watching the Hellebores.  

Some facing down, some facing away, and all of them beautiful in their restraint; almost coy or maybe simply demure.  Like the edges of a parasol, the petals suggest something precious shielded from the heat of a direct gaze. 

So out came the camera and tripod.  Flat on my stomach, chin in the dirt to look through the viewfinder, I found an angle that gave me a much better sense of what this flower actually is, at least for me..  Same variety, but in a more characteristic position.

Getting every detail of a macro shot in focus is fun, I'll admit it.  You feel like you've mastered something, captured something your eyes don't always have time to observe in even a careful glance.  But shallow depth of field can highlight a single detail or a shape that says far more about the charm as well as the complexity of a flower.

I bought some African Daisies (Osteospermum 'Astra Purple Spoon' and 'Astra Pink Spoon') to photograph because I couldn't resist those spoon-like petals.  After trying all sorts of angles, I sat down next to the table I'd placed outdoors to position them at a more convenient level--it was muddy outside and I wasn't in the mood to change pants.  Glancing over at them, I saw that I could express how bright and playful they seemed to me by shooting from the edges and working with much less in focus.

The 'Purple' to the left beckons to the viewer with its alien-pod petals, while  the 'Pink' below appears to be lit from within, and the trumpeting colors in both seize the focus.

 

Lastly, one edge-on image I especially love is this Anemone 'Honorine Jobert.'  Earlier in my life, I was a dancer.  And this flower at this angle says so much to me about the quiet center, the "still point," at the apex of a leap or the core of a pirouette, or the lift of an arabesque.