There’s not much happening to photograph out in the garden at the moment. Instead, I’m looking back through some older photos that have been hiding in my PC as unconverted RAW files. Processing them is one of those jobs that I never fully catch up with and sometimes I find an image I like lurking there.
These lewisias were bought a couple of years ago because I couldn’t resist the gorgeous deep pink and the orange with pink veins of their vibrant flowers. They just had to be photographed! (These are Lewisia cotyledon ‘Sunset Strain’.)
I’d be happy to wear these bright colours!
The petals make me think of light, silky fabrics. Like something you might wear on a summer’s day – rich, bright and full of the joy of life.
Photographing the flowers makes me aware of how delicate and translucent they are. As you’ll see in the last photo, the studio lights can shine through the petals, revealing their veining and the texture.
Close-up of a lewisia flower.
Unfortunately, I’ve never managed to keep lewisias growing for very long. They are natives of dry, rocky places in North America and need really good drainage. I have been able to keep some alive for a few years in clay pots, until I have eventually over-watered them. These, however, were planted in a very dry garden border and were happy until winter rains got to them. So it will be back to the pots for the next lot! Then I’ll be able to bring them under cover in winter.
These little beauties may not last long with me but that won’t stop me from buying more and trying again. I hope that I’ll learn how to look after them properly at last!
You can see the light coming through the petals of these flowers.
During the winter I’m glad to be able to photograph plants indoors. It feels good to be able to stay warm and dry! And life is much easier when there’s no need to worry about the flower you’re trying to photograph waving around in the wind.
More importantly, taking photos indoors means that there is plenty of light available to me. I have a very small studio space set up in the house, complete with flash lighting, which allows me to be busy taking photographs at any time of day.
I wanted the light to catch all the little crinkles and curled edges on the petals of the flower.
The photographs here were taken with a very simple setup. The white background is created using a small ‘light table’, which is basically a piece of translucent white plastic which is curved into an ‘L’ shape on a metal support. This gives a base and background that is lit with flash strobes both from behind and from below. These are adjusted to give an evenly lit bright white background to the photo.
The flower itself is lit with a flash fired through a white translucent brolly and a reflector at the side to provide a little bit of light to soften shadows. I like using this particular arrangement because it gives a slightly ‘harder’ light than the softbox that I’ve used for previous photos on this blog. This helps to bring out the shapes within the flower and gives a feeling of depth.
The shadows help to give a sense of the shape of this cyclamen.
Having the flash pretty much to one side of the flower means that shadows can form in the ripples on the petals. If you look at the photograph below, you can see that there is a slight shine to the area at the centre of the flower, on the left side. This shows where the light is coming from. (More or less at a 45 degree angle, slightly higher than the flower and only just in front of it.)
If there wasn’t a reflector (a silver-coloured disc) at the right side, that side would be in shadow. The reflector is just enough to lighten heavy shadows without removing the shadows entirely, so you’re able to see the flowing shapes of the petals.
Digital photography has made using studio lighting far easier than it was with film cameras. (For years I used film, and I tended to stick with safe setups that I new would work.) Experimenting is easy when you can see the results straight away and you can soon find what happens when you move the lights around.
So when the weather’s turned miserable, I’m quite happy to be indoors, so long as I can find something to photograph…
The petals seem to swirl around this little flower, almost as if they’re floating.
When everything outside is looking wintry and dreary, the mahonia bush right at the back of our garden boldly flaunts its gleaming yellow flowers. Give it a bit of sunshine, and those flowers are reminiscent of a yellow highlighter pen – practically fluorescent!
The mahonia provides a touch of brilliance and an attention-grabbing focal point to the garden at a time when it’s really needed. The little flowers are like a patch of concentrated sunshine. (I think it must be mahonia x media ‘Charity’.)
So I shall use these cheerful winter flowers to wish you a very bright and joyful New Year. May 2020 bring you health and happiness!
Because it’s almost Christmas, I thought I’d post some slightly sparkly frost photographs. They go to show that nature can be festive when she likes!
Last Christmas, I woke up to a frosty morning and was able to get outside and spend a bit of time taking photographs of a softly shimmering world.
This year we had a cold period much earlier in the month and I took these photographs then. I don’t think I’ll be outside taking photos this year because the forecast is not promising any frost or snow. (I’ll have a lazy morning inside!)
Fennel seed head
Seed heads are among the most promising of garden subjects to photograph when they are decorated with ice crystals. For this reason, I don’t cut plants back at the end of autumn. (And, more importantly, really, it gives a better habitat for wildlife and a supply of seeds as food for birds.)
There are several seed heads that I particularly want to stay intact until the frost arrives – agapanthus, fennel, allium and daucus (wild carrot) – because they have the most interesting structures and look at their best when frosted.
Allium seed head
The arrival of frost is one of the times I most enjoy garden photography. With luck, there will be a moment when the sun comes out. Then the frost will glitter and shine, making the garden come alive with exciting new images to photograph. Plants that may have looked quite ordinary before (like the hydrangea below) suddenly acquire a radiance that makes them irresistible to me and my camera.
I wish you a joyful Christmas, full of fun and sparkle!
Sometimes things don’t go to plan with my flower photography. This year I wanted to photograph the range of different colours (including white, pink and lilac) of the Dianthus ‘Rainbow Loveliness’ given to me by a friend.
However, rain and the fact that the plants were grown from seed this year, so not yet large enough to have a lot of flowers, made it difficult.
By the time the young plants were ready to flower, the drought of summer had passed and it had become rather wet and windy. This meant that the delicately fringed flowers were easily damaged. I would walk past them and think, ‘Must take some photos’, but by the time I came back to them, the rain would have got to the flowers and would have left the petals trailing limply.
In the end, I managed to take photographs of just the one bicoloured flower. For close-up photography like this, the flowers really need to be in excellent condition. Sadly, my timing wasn’t good enough to catch the others when they were fresh and undamaged.
Not to worry! Next year the plants will be bigger and able to flower more profusely. They should also be able to flower earlier in the summer, when the weather is likely to be drier and kinder to fragile flowers. Then I should have a chance of of photographing more of these strange but pretty dianthus (‘pinks’), whose petals look like swirling strands of seaweed floating in an invisible sea.
It doesn’t get very cold in this part of Suffolk in Autumn, so the leaves tend to get blown away before they have a chance to develop much colour. (Yet a few miles away, where it gets chillier, there have been great clouds of yellow leaves.)
However, in the last couple of weeks, the night-time temperature has got cold enough to encourage a bit of colour here and there. You have to look quite hard for it, but it can be found.
Blackberry leaves become a mix of heat and frost.
Our recent frost helped to make the last of the leaves more interesting to photograph, providing a crisp, icy contrast to the warm tones of the leaves. It was a good time to be out early to take some pictures.
While I was wandering around with my camera, I noticed soft noises that at first sounded as if there were birds hopping around nearby.
But when I looked up, I realised that I was hearing the leaves falling in the neighbours’ garden. It gets the sun before ours does, and as the frost melted, the leaf-stalks were losing their last grip on the trees and shrubs and dropping softly to the ground. Somehow, the tiny sounds made the morning feel even more hushed and peaceful.
The frost has melted, but being wet makes these geranium and cotoneaster leaves all the more red.
The leaves will soon be gone and everything will seem bare and wintry. But, just for this last little while, these few are rich and glowing with beautiful warm tones – a sight to seek out and enjoy.
By the time you read this, we will have had another frosty morning here. More of the leaves will have fallen and I will have been out taking more photographs.
Autumn has slightly lightened and warmed the tones of these weigela leaves.
On Monday we had the first frost of the year. Up until then, the weather had been mild and wet, so it felt as if it had come suddenly. There were still a few flowers in the garden, lasting much later than you might expect. And, of course, they were caught by the frost.
As you may imagine, this meant that I had a busy morning padding about the frozen garden with camera in hand.
Now that the plants are beginning to die back for winter, there’s not much left to photograph, so the intricate effects of frost give an opportunity that’s too good to miss. I took as many photographs as I could before the sun melted it all away. (And there will be more in later posts…)
A passionflower bud, caught by the frost.
The echinacea flower (PowWow White) was frozen through, and this has enhanced the green tinge to the ends of the petals. The emerging flowers start off pale green, with a vivid green cone, gradually maturing to a white flower with a golden-yellow cone.
This colour-change makes for more photographic potential. The plant is a new addition to the garden and I’m looking forward to following its progress with my camera during the next year.
Frosted penstemon ‘Raven’ – hope it can cope with the cold!
The passionflower is ‘Constance Elliot’, which I wrote about here. It was planted just last year and has flowered well during the late summer. The bud seems to have escaped any serious damage from the frost and the plant’s leaves are still firm and healthy-looking, so I reckon it hasn’t come to any harm. Even so, as it gets colder, I’ll protect the base of the plant with either mulch or frost-fleece.
If the winter gets really cold, I may also put fleece around the penstemons. I’ve lost a few of these in cold winters, but some varieties have gone on for years – especially ‘Garnet’, which seems to be hardier than most. (Pictured is ‘Raven’, which came through last year’s fairly mild winter easily. I hope it turns out to be thoroughly hardy too.)
The rose below is a tough old girl who doesn’t let anything bother her…’Zephirine Drouhin’, a rose that is both delightfully scented and thornless. This is probably my favourite plant in the whole garden. I’m glad that she doesn’t mind the frost!
Rose ‘Zepherine Drouhin’, covered in frost now, but her flowers will perfume the air again next summer.
November has brought chilly winds and the threat of frost. It’s not quite winter yet but the garden flowers are disappearing fast. Soon the main colour will be the yellow of the autumn leaves.
But for a few days yet, there is a little bit of colour here and there. Just enough to enjoy while I finish planting the spring bulbs.
Some plants have flowered for a surprisingly long period. The gaura (above) has been in flower for months, as has the pink-flowered salvia below.
Salvia and fuchsia flowers brighten the garden until the end of autumn.
The deep purple penstemon ‘Raven’ is another plant that has fully earned its place in the garden by flowering for a long time. A weeping crab apple called ‘Royal Beauty’ grows nearby, and the rich red of its tiny fruits picks up on the slight touch of red at the mouth of the penstemon flowers.
The fuchsia is one of several plants that are in pots at the front of our house. I think this one is ‘Army Nurse’, but I can’t be sure because we have several that are very similar to each other. It’s one of the hardy fuchsias and I’m planning to plant it (and some others) out in a border in the back garden. They’ll be visible from the house and give a splash of glowing colour right through the autumn.
My last flower is the autumn crocus. The bulbs are growing in small clay pots sitting in a wrought-iron holder on the wall. (This keeps them well out of the way of my cats – autumn crocuses are very toxic plants so I didn’t want to take any risks with them.) These flowers should have been over by now but I planted them late, so here they are at last!
Now I must remember that I still have to finish planting some spring bulbs…then I’ll be hoping to find something more to photograph. Maybe some of the late colour will hang around for long enough to get frosted. Not very kind to the plant but makes a great picture!
Crocus speciosus (autumn crocus) opening in the sun.
Hardy geraniums were one of the first flowers I grew. They really encouraged me in my early years of gardening because they are so easy to grow and have both pretty flowers and good-looking leaves.
Finding that they were easy to divide and propagate gave me a confidence boost as I learned about the basics of gardening, and I’ve loved having them in the garden ever since. They’re tough little survivors, and great to fill in spots that other plants would struggle in.
‘Mrs Kendall Clark’ is a lovely blue geranium.
There are several blue or purple-blue geraniums in the garden. Some were here already when we bought the house. One is magnificum, which has striking dark veins on the petals (below, right). There are a couple of others that I don’t know the names of – one of the mysteries of inheriting plants!
I’ve added two of my favourite blue geraniums – Rozanne (top photo) and Mrs Kendall Clark (above). Rozanne’s flowers can be quite strongly blue, especially when the flower is newly opened but then can age to a more lilac shade. Mrs Kendall Clark is a paler blue and stands tall and elegant in the border. (And has attractive, finely-divided leaves – a definite bonus.)
Left – This white geranium appeared unexpectedly in the garden this year. Right – Geranium magnificum spreads easily.
There was a nice surprise this summer when the white geranium above simply arrived from nowhere. I can’t remember planting it – not in recent years anyway! (Though it may have been labelled as something else. It’s welcome anyway!)
I enjoy photographing the geraniums, especially those that have strongly marked veins on the petals. That’s a detail that adds a lot of interest to a flower portrait.
The geranium below appealed to me for a different reason – the wonderfully hairy stems! (Apparently they are sticky, but I didn’t touch them to find out for sure!) It was growing in a garden I visited and I hadn’t seen one before, so I was rather intrigued by it. However, I’m not likely to try growing it because it can’t withstand frost. Maybe I’ll get to see it in its native Madeira some day!
Geranium madarense has unusually hairy, sticky stems.
Last year I bought two plants of the Japanese Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’ while I was visiting Fullers Mill Garden, (which you can read about here). There had been one already in the garden when we first arrived, but somehow it died out, even though the pink Japanese Anemones nearby thrived.
The elegant white flowers on graceful tall stems captivated me. The stamens are a rich yellow and the petals have the slightest blush of pink on the reverse – just enough colour to add interest when I’m photographing them.
In the garden they are simply beautiful. One plant is in front of a weeping crab-apple that has dark red fruits. Beside is a gaura, whose butterfly-like white flowers are still on the go, creating a lovely early-autumn combination.
The other plant is apparently very happy in a little raised bed that is a temporary nursery area for plants that will go into a pond-side border.
The backs of the petals of ‘September Charm’ are surprisingly hairy.
There were already some pink Japanese anemones in the garden. One is ‘September Charm’, which I planted as a division from a plant in my previous garden in Scotland. (This doesn’t really live up to its name here, because by September it has pretty much finished flowering. But I can forgive it for that because it starts to flower in late July, so it has been busily flowering for a good long time.)
The other pink anemone was already in the garden when we arrived and I believe it is ‘Hadspen Abundance’. This is an unusual flower, because the petals are very variable. Two of the five petals are smaller and slightly darker than the rest. In the particular flower below, the variance isn’t much, but I have seen the plant with much bigger differences between the two sets of petals. That can make the flowers look quite strange!
‘Hadspen Abundance’ has irregularly-sized petals.
So by now you may be wondering what my dilemma is. (Or, if you are familiar with Japanese anemones, you may know exactly what I’m going to say…) The problem is, these enchanting plants are real thugs in garden borders.
My pink September Charm has run riot. It now has a huge spread in an area that nothing much wants to grow in because the conifers in the neighbouring garden had left the soil so impoverished. (The conifers are gone now, thank goodness.)
And as for Hadspen Abundance – well, let’s just say that now I understand why there wasn’t much more than it and some geraniums in the garden. It takes over and is difficult to remove. So now I want to add to the chaos… (Actually, I have added to the chaos – both white anemones are already in the ground.)
This all leaves me wondering what to do next. Re-plant them in large containers? Chance it and hope that they don’t smother everything else? Maybe I can leave the one in the temporary nursery-bed where it is – but it’s only a very small raised bed. I think it will be able to creep out of there! (Anemone roots are very efficient at spreading themselves around.) Big bottomless pots might be the answer, so I’ll have to see what I can find.
Meanwhile, I shall enjoy the flowers and take photographs of them whenever I get the opportunity. Let’s hope that I’m not writing about how they’ve taken over the entire garden at some point in the future!
The white flower of ‘Honorine Jobert’ brightens a slightly shady spot.
Ann Mackay: Inspired by Nature 