Friday, May 27, 2016

Tall bearded irises: a painterly view



Tall bearded irises May 2016

The sensory overload in my gardens now is almost overwhelming! The sense of exuberance provided by the abundance of new growth, the colors, the fragrances - it's almost too much. Thousands of rose buds are beginning to open, tall bearded irises are in full bloom. At home, the noisette roses on the south side of the house are providing an avalanche of soft yellow, sweetly fragrant blooms.
I'm taking lots of pictures, sometimes a couple of dozen in a few  minutes. Working that fast is an invitation for mistakes, and a fascinating one occurred the other day.
When I got home and downloaded that day's images, I had a couple of apparent duds. I almost deleted them, but one in particular caught my eye: it's definitely a keeper! That's the one you see above: I've already got an 18" x 24" print out hanging on the living room wall. From a few feet away, it looks like a painting, not a photo. It reminds me of the color plates sometimes seen in early twentieth-century gardening books. To my eyes this image has wonderful qualities of color and composition. And that's not self-praise: I had nothing to do with it. It was pure serendipity!

3 comments:

DC Tropics said...

Very nice! Some of my more interesting photos are the ones I didn't intend, the ones that didn't turn out quite "right".

Melissa said...

Gorgeous! I want so many of the irises when I look through the catalogues, but I'm afraid they will all clash and it will not look like this!

McWort said...

There are three dozen different irises in my two iris rows; the rows are separated by a three-foot path. At first, I agonized over how to group them color-wise. But I was pressed for time, and when planting time came I just put them into the rows as they came from the shipping box. And now that I've seen the results, I'm so glad I did. To my eyes, the gorgeous colors do not clash, and when dozens of plants are in bloom at once they provide a color feast unlike anything else in the garden.