Tag Archives: flowers

According to European-Western tradition, there are four cardinal directions: north, south, east and west; and we mark them on a map by making the sign of a cross: north, south, east and west. Dominus Vobiscum. But Western culture tends to value a map rather more than the ground under your feet. If we take a larger view of it all, we should acknowledge two more cardinal directions: up and down. We live in three dimensions, not two. A map is only a diagram. Et cum spiritu tuo.

And when we make images — photographs, drawings, paintings — we tend to look along the flat plane of our cardinal directions, which means also, the plane of our standing vision. And if we photograph flowers, we tend to make our images like the identification photos in a nature guidebook. We look at them as if they were as tall as us, or we as ground-hugging as them.

The bias is to ignore the sky above, the mud below. I spent some hours yesterday attempting to break my own tendencies and see if a shift in perspective might give me a fresher look at the garden. And so, I made a series of photographs pointing the camera straight down at the flowers from the top.

The first image I made, when I put it up on my screen, reminded me of something. It took a moment, but then I had it: the Pleiades — the Seven Sisters in the night sky in the constellation Taurus. Here are the flowers:

Here are the Pleiades:

Looking down in the day was a mirror of looking up at night. Bunches of flowers, especially roadside wildflowers, often remind us of stars in the night sky. It’s why we name them cosmos, stellas and asters.

Certainly the flower that has meant the most to me, emotionally, through my life is the aster, named for the stars. I remember a day, some 40 years ago, driving with my then-soulmate (is there a sadder hyphenated word in the language?) near Port Jervis, N.Y., and coming across an abandoned field, maybe a couple of football fields in extent, that was crammed with asters, thistles and ironweed, so thick on the ground there was barely any green showing through. It was hysterical with blue, and I thought it was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. Since then, I have sought any semblance of that abundance. I’m not sure a single life affords more than one of those moments.

And so, I am walking through my sister-in-law’s garden in North Carolina and holding my camera flat parallel to the ground to see what these flower-stars look like from an angle we don’t normally see — or at least, think of them.

Over and over the star analogy shown through. Constellations of yellow or white against a sky of green.

Even the leaves themselves can be stars:

Patterns made: line-ups, triangles, squares, quincunx, spatters and grids.

There is a Medieval trope that everything in Heaven finds its analog in the sublunary world (much like the Renaissance idea that everything in the world is mirrored internally in the mind). And I certainly felt that correspondence strongly while finding my floral models to photograph.

It was the looking down that made the connection, the opposite of the looking upwards at the night sky. But looking down — straight down, if I could avoid my own clumsy feet — gave me more than that. I found that I was photographing more than calyx and petal, but discovering just how many distinct greens nature blares forth.

Historically, painters had a limited number of pigments to use when painting leaves and trees. They could modulate those hues with the admixture of others, but there was a limit. The trees of Claude or Titian are mostly monophonic rather than stereo. The artist who freed green from those confines was Paul Cezanne, whose paintings contain more greens and more blues than any artist before or since. His eye for tint and shade was phenomenal. I remember when I first came to appreciate the work of Cezanne. I had seen his paintings only in reproduction and always thought of them as rather dull, even muddy. But visiting the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., I found a wall of the still lifes and was knocked out by the glowing depth of color: color I had never experienced except under the influence of herbs. But those chemical-induced colors were vaporous compared with the earthiness of Cezanne’s greens, blues and yellows.

And so, there I was, camera in hand, looking earthward and seeing the exuberance of May in Piedmont, North Carolina, and the blistering variety of green that sprouts from the ground.

I walked around the property, head held downward, and finding such a joyous variety under my feet, that I wound up, in the space of under an hour, taking at least 100 usable photographs — images I would be proud or eager to share with the enthusiasm of a convert. The greens made patterns; the blossoms made patterns; the leaves were shapes to pleasure in; the colors were delicious.

The esthetic sense, however, awakens an awareness of yet a seventh cardinal direction, which we might call “center.” It is the inward direction that is privy to the other six and gives them meaning and purpose. North, south, east, west, up, down, and in. Each in some way a reflection of all the others.

I have traveled much in each of the cardinal directions, north to the Canadian arctic, south to the Cape of Good Hope, eastward to Europe and finally, the Pacific coast. I have gone up in aeroplanes and cathedral bell towers, and down in chthonic mine shafts and vast caverns, but most of all, I have gone inside of myself. The experience of nature — but also the making and partaking of art — expand the inner world, adding continents to the mental globe, possibilities of understanding, and depths of compassion.

Looking down at the humble soil and its profuse variety keeps one from becoming tired of life. Paying attention is, in some ways, coequal with life itself.

Next — perhaps in tomorrow’s rain — I will extend my interior travels by looking straight up to see what is there.

Click on any image to enlarge

Pan awakes

April 15, 2020

Uncategorized

Leave a comment

Like most everyone else, I have been bunker hunkering, like some 1920’s gangster, holed up in a house, fearful of each approaching human. And like most everyone else, a bit of cabin fever intrudes. I peek out the window and see a yard across the street with a Bradford pear tree like a snowstorm of white, and the lawn is beginning to get unkempt. The temperature has moderated and the sky is filled with crisp, dry air. And so, I have to get out.

For me, the best solution is to drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway. Its entrance is only a few hundred yards from my house. I can stay sealed up in the car but find a place where the horizon is still marked by the distance where the curvature of the earth bends the rest down and away from my sight. When you are stuck at home, it is easy to think of the planet as consisting of four walls; things are cubicular and static. But get out into the mountains, up high where you see for such a length, and you are again standing on the apex of a globe. Everything falls away from you, both geographically and emotionally. Anxiety thins.

This century has redefined nature. In the 19th century of Thoreau and Emerson, nature was green and pleasant. To Emerson, nature was the outer manifestation of deity. Earlier, to Wordsworth, “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,/ The earth, and every common sight,/ To me did seem/ Appareled in celestial light.”

To Byron nature was so vast not even humankind could mar it. Our century has proven him wrong. For us, nature can no longer be the birds and beasties, the green leaves and burbling streams, the sky above and the soil below. We have filled the oceans — where Byron said man’s control “stopped with the shore” — with tangles of plastic waste the size of islands. In our cities, we have turned the transparent air into murk. We have left our rivers thick with the runoff of pigpens.

The television nature programs I grew up with, that showed us the wildebeest swarming on the veldt and the flying squirrel gliding from tree to tree, have turned into chronicles of rapine and threatened extinction. Those documentaries are now alarums to wake the public to what it is losing.

The Antarctic ice is thinning, the oceans are swelling, the bees are coughing and the once myriad cod have turned into shriveling shoals. It is hard to think of nature the way I did when I was young.

“There hath past away a glory from the earth.”

When I was in my 20s (which was 50 years ago), I was a bird watcher, a hiker, a camper, an amateur astronomer and a gardener. I knew the name of every tree and wildflower or weed. I had an almost mythic connection to the earth: It glowed every day, like a van Gogh painting, buzzing and whirling. Every bush was the burning bush. A surge of brain chemicals blasted my emotions. I was giddy. Now, half a century later, it is not now as it hath been of yore. “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?” “At length the Man perceives it die away,/ And fade into the light of common day.”

Career and responsibilities, the vicissitudes of living, the betrayals of love and the deaths of those we loved, have all risen to take too much space in our journals. And so, in my senescence I have drawn away from what we used to call nature, and that selfsame nature has itself decayed and left me.

But not completely. I drive up the road into the hills, through the tunnels, into the high country where the sun shines and the wind blows the shadows of clouds across the flanks of the peaks. It is April and the dogwoods become galaxies of stars against the darker, still-leafless trees behind them. When I look down at the valleys, I see in the lower elevations the bright young leaves swelling from the buds. It is certainly beautiful, but it isn’t just beauty that makes this important.

We are facing a new virus and most of us, and especially those of us on the shorter end of life’s measuring stick, feel an immediate threat. We may die. We always knew that, but now we can almost touch it and taste it on our fingertips. It is not theoretical.

And so, I get out of my car in a roadside pullout and look down from the mountain into the woods beside the road and see the fresh buds and the tree branches that sway and the shoots springing tip first through the forest litter and I know that it is another spring, my seventy-second, and one more of millions that make a wake behind the present going back before there was any consciousness to know it. On the uphill side of the road there are stony outcroppings and those folded strata tell me of eons of continuity.

I have heard, as you have, poets and essayists talk about the importance of nature, and I have at times winced at what seemed to me the perfervid sentimentality of such bromides. After all, everyone knows, or else, should know, that if nothing drastic is done, we’re all going to hell and taking the world with us. The news is 24 hours a day bad, or at least the talking heads tell us so. Over and over.

But when I go to the woods, it is quiet except for the “small fowls that make melody and sleep all night with open eye.” And the hurly-burly slows and I am forced to know that there is a rhythm that is not that of CNN, that whether it is plague or influenza or corona virus, we have inhaled and exhaled this pestilence before, that the world endures, with me or without me. My frame of reference, like my horizon, expands.

So, it isn’t the simple beauty of the natural world that does me needed good. Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony has six movements and they include such titles as “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me,” “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me,” and ends with “What Love Tells Me.” And what they all join to say is a harmony and a flow. And so, as I drive along the Parkway, I listen to that music on the CD player and the outside and inside, the world and my thoughts and feelings, all twine together into a singularity, mind as mirror to the world, and world as mirror to mind. Pan awakes, Summer marches in.

Click any image to enlarge

Giverny in the fall

January 16, 2015

Uncategorized

2 Comments

The Seine river loops northwest out of Paris into the rich, green French countryside of Normandy. The river is contained by low parallel ridges of hills on either side that form a kind of geologic sluice guiding the flow of the river toward Le Havre and the ocean.

Some 50 miles from Paris, near the provincial town of Vernon, the River Epte joins the Seine, although to call the Epte a river is to exaggerate.

It is hardly more than a creek.

Nothing would make one notice this tiny riverine junction, if it were not that Claude Monet chose this area to live, to paint, and to create one of the most celebrated gardens in the world.

The great Impressionist painter moved to the hamlet of Giverny (Zhee-vair-nee) in 1883, and from then until his death in 1926, he cultivated the kind of garden that made his home a modern Eden. Even now it is as much pilgrimage destination as tourist attraction.

“Once settled, I hope to produce masterpieces,” Monet wrote his dealer when he first came to Giverny, “because I like the countryside very much.”

Monet settled on a two-acre parcel of land that sloped from the center of the village down toward the small branch of the Epte that runs parallel to the road. There he set up house with his second wife, Alice Hoschedé, and their combined brood. It was a bustling bourgeois home, full of bustles and lace, children and cakes.

The house still exists: an odd old farmhouse, it is only one room wide and long as a barn, made of pink stucco, with forest green shutters and doors.

Each room is painted in its special color – the kitchen is blue and the dining room is brilliant yellow. Monet had little use for beige.

Outside is the “clos Normand,” or the Norman enclosure, where Monet immediately began planting his garden, “so that there would be flowers to paint on rainy days,” he wrote.

But the garden took over. By the time he set to work on the great waterlily paintings that he gave to the nation as a gift, he had six gardeners on his staff.

Thousands each year make the pilgrimage to Giverny. They want to see where Monet worked; they want to see the waterlilies that he made into icons of art. But the gardens still retain their independence: There are those who visit not because of the painter, but because of the flowers themselves.

Monet’s property has become one of the greatest gardens in the world.

In the summer, the place is crowded, but in the spring and fall, the tourists fade away and you can have the grounds to yourself, or nearly so.

One would think that in the middle of October, when the rains are already cold on your skin, the flowers would have died away, but it is not true.

Even then, the clos Normand is riot with the yellows of sunflowers, the reds of dahlias, the blues of asters and the pinks of cosmos. The garden paths are choked with flowers.

It was an effect that Monet sought: that weedy nature should take over the place, luxuriant in growth.

The formal French garden, as you find it in Versailles or the Tuileries, is orderly and tamed. Square and round plots, with a grid of garden path between. Every flower marches in rank and file, as if their gardeners were drill sergeants.

In distinction, the English garden gives us a different vision of nature.

There, the meandering forest paths take us past informally planted shrubbery and flower beds, to provide the illusion that we are not in a garden at all, but rather walking through some especially lush bit of wildness.

Monet’s garden is a hybrid of these: The paths are rectilinear and formal, but the plants have taken over, spreading out over the footways, up into the air and intertwined with each other. There is a formal layout, but a rich chaos of growth defeating the formality. It creates the illusion of a patch of garden left untended so the flowers grow rampant.

The effect is still overpowering. Instead of looking down at patches of roses or dahlia, they instead grow up to nose-height, so they force their aroma into your nostrils. They rise to eye level as you walk the paths.

They hang overhead and dangle down at you.

One cannot help but recall the stanza by Andrew Marvell:

“What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons as I pass,

Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.”

The present gardens are a miracle. After Monet’s death, his family dispersed and eventually left the old homestead to ruin. The gardens fell untended, the house sprung leaks.

As the great art critic John Rewald wrote, “Rodents – as undernourished as the local inhabitants (at the end of World War II) – had gnawed away the roots of the plants in and around the pond. The waters had stopped flowing – it was a dried-out, devastated, heartbreaking site. Nothing was left but the memory of past glories and the paintings of Monet, of which quite a few were still in the house and others in the studios, where some of the skylights were broken.”

The artist’s son, Michel, hadn’t lived there for decades and showed little interest in keeping the place up. When he died, in 1966, he bequeathed both estate and paintings to the French Academy of Fine Arts. The grounds were slowly restored and the gardens replanted, taking as their guides the many paintings and photographs that had documented the place.

And in 1980, the gardens were opened to the public, nearly 100 years after Monet first started planting bulbs.

Modern visitors find a large parking lot south of the gardens, within easy walking distance. The entrance to the garden takes them first through the large studio Monet had built to paint his large waterlilies in. It is now also the gift shop. Through that and into the clos Normand, you get your first view of the long shotgun house, covered in vines and flowers.

The clos is gridded with pathways, skied-in with trellises and arches and splattered with the petal-dots of color.

As Monet himself wrote of them, “The overall effect is endlessly varied.

Not just from one season to the next, but from one minute to the next, for rather than making up the whole spectacle, the flowers are only the accompaniment to it.”

In the water garden across the road, he noted, “the heart of everything is the reflecting mirror of the water, whose appearance fluctuates endlessly according as it catches the teeming life and movement of the every-changing sky. A passing cloud, a freshening breeze, a squall that looms then strikes, the gale that comes without warning, the light that fades then intensifies anew – all these things transform the color and texture.”