May in the Garden

An explosion of beauty invites closer looks…

Worries fall away. Self-referential thoughts and chattering preoccupation fade as the graceful curve of a petal, the intoxicating scent of fruity roses and the crunch of footsteps on gravel light up forgotten territories of the mind.

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These photos were taken at Bellevue Botanical Garden (near Seattle), all on May 21st. I used a 45mm f1.8 prime lens for all except the black and white paired peonies, the peony from behind and the tree from underneath – those three were made with a 60mm f2.8 macro lens. The camera is a micro 4/3rds (Olympus OM-D EM-1) so the lens focal length equivalents on a “normal” camera are about 90mm and 120mm, respectively. I used apertures from f1.8 to f20, for a soft background on some images and a sharp scene across the frame for others, and I often used spot metering.

The processing was done in Lightroom, but I also used Color Efex Pro on about four of these for additional enhancing, to get the image looking more the way I sensed it. The three black and whites were done in Silver Efex Pro, with a few additional tweaks in Lightroom. I’m one of those photographers who really enjoys the processing, so I don’t mind spending time modifying images after I’ve downloaded them. That might be because I was involved in drawing long before I took up photography seriously; I take the same pleasure in manipulating light, form, texture, and color on the computer that I did working with them on paper.

BEACHED

I do a fair amount of research before I travel to a new place, but never so much that the sense of discovery is quashed. In that spirit, our road trip to southwestern Oregon and neighboring northwestern California unfolded with a nice balance of the known and the unpredictable: we always knew where we were staying at night, but every day offered up new discoveries.

Take beaches, for example: I’ve seen photos of Oregon beaches and I’ve been to a few of them, so I thought I knew what to expect: crashing surf, vast expanses of sand set with sun-bleached log giants, craggy sea stacks. I expected I’d find sea stars and hoped to spot sea lions. But fossils and rows of geometrically patterned rocks on the beach? No, I didn’t expect that!

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That’s Beverley Beach, on Oregon’s central coast in the first photo. We pulled off Route 101 there one day with little more than a sign to entice us. The parking lot is on the opposite side of the road from the beach, so we took the short path following a log-packed creek under the highway and out to a broad, sweeping beach. Savoring the instant “Ahhh” of relaxation you get when you meet the ocean, we slowly meandered south, enjoying the mind-freeing spaciousness and the satisfying give of sand underfoot. It was a brisk day, the sky packed with cumulus clouds, the tide half-way in, the views up and down the beach nearly empty. No ships, few birds, just ocean, earth and sky, and a pin-like gash on the horizon where a distant lighthouse stood.

Soon the landscape changed, and we arrived at a steep, hard-packed mud cliff, oozing moisture from runoff overhead.

Curious about the muddy cliff, I leaned in, and peering closely, I saw one, two, hundreds – no, thousands – of fossils, arrayed at eye level: a paleontologist’s home run. There were shells displayed at every possible angle, and odd, perfectly spherical protrusions, too. Wonderment is a gift, and we had it in spades that day as we walked the beach, but part of me wishes I’d known a little about the geology here before. I was entranced by the fossils and oddly-shaped rocks but I had no idea I was witnessing evidence of two different formations from tens of millions of years ago: a neat pairing of sediment layers and volcanic ash layers, the now-compacted ash hailing all the way from the distant Cascade Mountains.

Here’s a quick video about Beverley Beach fossils. The photos below may picture the volcanic layer but so far, I’ve been unable to find out what makes these intriguing, sculptural shapes.

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The beach offered up treasures, too:

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And apparently there are things to eat:

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What a piece of luck it was to choose that beach to explore.

Another day we wandered north on Route 101 from Newport, searching for a spot we remembered from a previous trip on the Oregon coast, a scenic overlook that was as far south as we got that time. Eventually we found it (I’m not called Balboa for nothing!) on a narrow, two-lane road called Otter Crest Loop that parallels the highway. The Ben Jones Bridge, built in 1927, spans a dramatic gorge overlooking a wild strip of coastline. Inspecting the rocks, once again we found Pelagic cormorants nesting here, on precarious crevices high up on a salt-sprayed cliff. Photographing them proved beyond my capability, but it felt good just to watch the birds swoop in to their narrow perches, and listen to wave after wave of foamy turquoise seawater crashing into the rocky shore.

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The central coast of Oregon is so packed with scenic pull-outs, it’s hard to know where to stop. Gunta, an Oregon coast expert who blogs at Movin’ On, recommended Cape Perpetua, a headland which is the highest viewpoint on the Oregon coast reachable by car. Advertised to provide fantastic views on clear days, Cape Perpetua afforded us a dramatic view of a darkening squall drawing nearer and nearer as the air grew colder and colder. A short loop trail through the woods features mighty evergreens and an old stone and wood shelter looking out across the Pacific. The intense contrast between snug forest and windy sea was a perfect mix.

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One minute, dark clouds and icy-cold winds bit our faces, the next, sunbreaks lit up the shore:

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And then it was on to southern Oregon and a rewarding day of botanizing with Gunta (close encounters with carnivorous plants!). The day after that we romped on another spectacular Oregon beach, on our way to northern California, where house-sized redwoods kept us humble, and a hundred miles from the ocean, in a charming mining town, the oldest continuously used Chinese temple in California kept us humble, too…but that’s another story, or maybe several stories.

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ALL THE SOUNDS

On a cool October morning in 1972, I woke up with a plan: I would write down every single sound I heard on that day. As soon as I was aware of a sound, I began to record what I heard in a small notebook. At the end of the day, exhausted, I fell back into bed and noted the last sounds I heard; the final sound was “breathing.” In the following days I went through the notebook, deciphering my scribbles and working out the grammatical kinks, resulting in a 60 page typed manuscript.

Since that day I’ve contemplated repeating the exercise, but the world is infinitely noisier now than it was back then. In any case, the piece stands on its own: a lopsided record of an ordinary day, made extraordinary by a single-minded focus on sound.

Here are a few excerpts from the Sounds piece, interspersed with images to complement, rather than explicitly adhere to, the narrative. I noted the time sporadically throughout the day, whenever I thought to look at a clock. In this excerpted version a line: ___________ means I’m skipping ahead to a later time in the day. I begin here at 9:30 am, a few hours after I woke up.

9:30am

light switch turning on

light switch turning off

stomach grumbling

sparrows chirping

blue jay calling

door opening

clothes sliding against each other

door closing

clothes falling on chair

paper falling on the floor

door opening

paper bag rustling

jars hitting each other

door closing

door opening

glass hitting the counter

door closing liquid pouring door opening

door closing

blue jay calling

___________________________

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1:13pm

page turning

lid screwing on

swallowing

glass hitting other glass

paper rustling

biting

chewing

bell chiming

my voice

voice

match striking matchbook

paper sliding across table

paper rustling

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my voice

voice

footsteps

siren whining

horn honking

bell chiming

liquid pouring

voice

my voice

footsteps

humming

chairs scraping the floor

voices

footsteps

banging

match striking matchbook

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footsteps

crash

sirens whining

papers rustling

crash

piece of wood hitting table

voice

my voice

whistling

paper tearing

sandpaper sanding wood

swallowing

fingers scratching head

voice

my voice

burp

laughing

___________________________

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6:40

truck passing on the street

feet stamping

hands clapping

fingers snapping

elevator door closing

laughing

cooing

voice

elevator door opening

elevator door closing

elevator door opening

elevator door closing

elevator door opening

footsteps

door opening

door closing

my voice

___________________

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voice

slide projector motor running

laughing

voices

chairs creaking

whispering

paper rustling

cigarette pack dropping into bag

voices

coughing

pad rubbing leg

blowing

laughing

slide projector clicking

voices

laughing

voices

laughing

slide projector clicking

____________________________

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8:40

my footsteps

ladder hitting the floor

my voice

voice

whistling

traffic passing on street

chewing

bus passing on street

hand rubbing my hair and face

elevator door opening

elevator door closing

elevator running

fingers tapping

elevator door opening

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voice

radio

voices

laughing

whistling

plastic rustling

horn honking

voice

my voice

kiss

voices

kiss

laughing

my footsteps

my voice

kiss

my voice

nibbling

subway passing by

burp

motor in clock running

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A few words of explanation: Early that morning I made a decision to record sounds by naming what made the sound, rather than spelling out what the noise sounded like. I quickly realized that trying to write down the actual sound I heard was impossible, in most cases. Using a tape recorder to make an actual recording was not a consideration, because my primary interest was in exploring the relationship – or the space, in a way – between the sensory traces an object makes (our perception) and a record of those traces, a concern that interests me to this day. *

What is different about a sound you hear and the mute, written words that describe that sound? What is lost and what is gained when you step back from direct experience, and put something – in this case, the written word – between you and the experience? What does a day look like when the traces that are left of it are only a written description of the sounds that were heard and some bits of memory? How is the shape of the day itself altered when one sensory component of it moves into the foreground?

I was in my final year at School of Visual Arts in New York when I made the Sounds piece. I had moved back to my parents’ house temporarily, after losing a shared Brooklyn loft and all my belongings in an unfortunate incident. Each morning that semester I awakened to the quiet of suburbia, then I commuted by bus to the city and took the subway to school or to my part time job as an artist’s assistant at a studio on Irving Place. On this October day I went to work first, then walked to an evening art history class, probably with Carter Ratcliff. Thankfully, those classes were usually a lecture with slides, and were relatively quiet. But as soon as my friends figured out what I was doing, they made their best efforts to interrupt any quiet that would give me a rest from mad scribbling in my notebook by producing an assortment of difficult-to-describe sounds. A few are seen above, along with my foot-stamping frustration. Unsurprisingly, it was for me, a day of few words.

I used a small notebook to write down what I heard that day. When I was in a quiet place I would hear the page turning. Later, when I typed up the piece, I chose to follow the same page spacing as in the original notebook, so that “page turning” appears at the top of some pages. The piece was submitted as part of my final work for a fine arts degree, and was well received. Now the paper edges have softened, the cover is tattered, and rust is slowly eating into the binder’s metal insert. I hope to transcribe and digitize it one of these days.

An earlier post on this subject with photos of the original manuscript is here.

The photos:

A light fixture for sale at ABC Carpet and Home on Broadway, in New York City. I took the photo in New York on October 17, 2017, exactly 45 years after I made the Sounds piece. What goes around comes around; the artfully distressed wall behind the light is reminiscent of the way walls actually looked in downtown lofts in the early 70’s. It wasn’t chic then, it was just what existed.
A rope-tied rock serves as a polite barrier in a path at Seattle’s Japanese Garden.
A view of trees outside a window. A small piece of blue glass in a wood frame rests against the window.
A collection of insects at an eccentric museum inside a Roman Catholic seminary in Mount Angel, Oregon.
At the Seattle Japanese Garden, workers erected a tarp to protect plants while they worked on a new addition to a structure in the garden.
Hoses on the old wood floor of an auto repair shop in Ferndale, California.
The view across the street from the ABC store window where the lighting fixture photo above was taken. This view hasn’t changed since I was in school.
A single rubber glove dropped on a sidewalk in Seattle.

* A concern with investigating the difference between objects as they are and as we perceive them was prevalent in the 1960’s and 70’s art world. It was a time when conceptual art questioned art itself, and minimalism was beginning to battle it out with post-minimalism, a term coined by art critic Robert Pincus-Witten, who taught at SVA. Dorothea Rockburne, one of a number of working artists who taught at SVA then, would often bring up Kant in connection with ideas like this one, from Wikipedia:

Kant argued the sum of all objects, the empirical world, is a complex of appearances whose existence and connection occur only in our representations.^[2] Kant introduces the thing-in-itself as follows:

And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something.

— Prolegomena, § 32

April to May

For pure, unbridled joy nothing beats the transition from April to May, for me. Deciduous trees are covered with tiny pinpricks of intense yellow-green, washing the landscape with pointillist light and color. Birds are vocal, the skies are changeable, and everything is new.

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This article arrived in my inbox while I was putting this post together. It’s great news about chocolate! The next time I feel a need to boost my eyesight while processing photos, I’ll grab a few squares.

The photos (with some notes on processing and on the plants):

There are many willow species where I live. I think these are Pacific willows (Salix lucida) with big, bright yellow catkins, thriving in the wetlands at Juanita Bay Park east of Seattle. You can see a few of last year’s cattails in the foreground. The willow trees are way ahead of the cattails, which were just beginning to push their leaves up out of the ground when the photo was made, April 30th.
This gorgeous old Weeping willow is a subject I return to again and again – you’ve seen it here before. The tree was probably planted here decades ago, when the area was a golf course. Now the venerable tree blends into wetlands allowed to go wild and is covered with native Licorice ferns, lichens and moss. I processed the photo to emphasize the mystical, romantic quality of the tree in its present setting.
The ravine behind my apartment rejoices in Spring. Bigleaf maples are hung with chunky, dangling yellow flower clusters, and evergreens provide a cool blue-green backdrop for the maples’ intense celebration of color. The middle tree is an older Douglas fir with branches high up on its straight, solid trunk.
A small and attractive native tree, this Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa) grows near the Weeping willow in photo #2, which almost forms a curtain around it. The Red elderberry sports graceful cream-colored flower clusters that become brilliant red berries in Fall, making the tree pop out along roadsides. In this photo the willow branches are all around the elderberry, but I focused the lens only on the elderberry, using a wide, f2.5 aperture.
This time I focused on the nearest willow branches and let the elderberry go out of focus, using the same aperture. Using Lightroom’s radial filter, I reduced the contrast and clarity of the elderberry branch a bit more.
I’m not sure what species this is – possibly a Dryopteris fern, growing at Bellevue Botanical Garden. The interweaving of the two fronds as they grow intrigued me. Ferns are excellent photography subjects and lend themselves perfectly to black and white; remove distracting color and the repeating patterns and uniform structure of the plant become more obvious.
How much longer before these two turtles slip back into the water? The sun is gone! They are Red-eared sliders, native to the US south, not the Pacific northwest. They’ve been popular pets for decades – I remember having them as a child – and sometimes, people release their pets into the wild and they reproduce. There is a similar native turtle, the Western painted turtle. The other Washington state turtle, the Western pond turtle, is almost extirpated here, thanks to habitat loss and the ingestion of eggs and hatchlings by bullfrogs, which (surprise!) humans also introduced.
Another human introduction, but not an invasive one, is the beautiful Magnolia tree. This one may have been planted at Juanita Bay Park when it was a golf course.
Pacific bleeding-heart (Dicentra formosa) is already forming seed pods by the end of April; the blooms are gone by mid May in lowland locations. Pacific bleeding heart is a native understory flower of woodlands, and a beauty it is, with abundant, fern-like foliage and pale pink flowers set on gracefully arcing stems. When the pea-like pods release the seeds, ants carry them home to eat a nutritious little appendage on the seed, leaving the rest…and Bleeding hearts are spread around. This photo was taken at a local park where the delicate plants thrive along a trail frequented by people and dogs. Somehow it all works out.
The stunningly beautiful little Jeffrey’s shooting star (Dodecatheon jeffreyi) is another native flower. This individual however, was planted – at Bellevue Botanical Garden. I remember finding a group of Shooting stars along a wet, rocky trail in the mountains – what a thrill! I saw them again last year on Mt. Rainer on June 30th – a full two months later then they bloom down here. Altitude changes everything.
Talk about tiny! The Piggyback plant’s flowers (Tolmiea menziesii) require patience to see well. The plant is named for the odd way its leaves sprout stems and new leaves. The flowers are tiny, finely detailed, subtly colored gems perched along the stem inches from the ground. I used a macro lens and luck for this photo, and I cropped it. The flowers grow at O.O. Denny Park in a busy, suburban town. Photographed on April 29th.
Peer under a Vine maple tree’s leaves in spring, and you’ll find clusters of small, deep red and cream-colored flowers.
At Juanita Bay Park, a nice marriage of native and non-native flowers: a decidedly hybrid Rhododendron grows amidst the delicate foliage of the native Pacific bleeding heart, whose flower is pictured above (#9).
Looking up at O.O. Denny Park, I saw a maze of Bigleaf maple and Red alder branches with fresh leaves spread out to gather the sun.
The leaves of Maidenhair fern make a frothy ground cover and are an attractive foil for larger, sturdier flowers that grow up through the foliage, at Bellevue Botanical Garden. I used a solarization effect in Color efex, sepia toner in Silver efex, and careful vignetting in Lightroom for this photo.
The Star-flowered Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum stellatum, formerly Smilacina stellata) is another good subject for black and white photography, with its formally arranged, elegantly shaped leaves and clean white star-shaped flowers. This wildflower is native to much of North America; it’s leaves often interweave like those seen here, creating a dense, elegant carpet of deep green under the trees.
A plum tree, perhaps. I don’t know – I didn’t check when I photographed this pretty blossoming tree at Bellevue Botanical Garden, on April 30th.
Japanese maples (Acer palmatum) are beautiful all year long, not least when their foliage is brand new. This was taken looking up and through the foliage, from under the tree. After shooting with a wide aperture, I made a tiny tweak to the tone curve, a few subtle color adjustments, and a little cropping and sharpening.
A close-up of the same tree’s delicate, pendulous flower.
I love the tightly coiled, intense energy of fern fiddleheads. This is the well-known Pacific northwest native, Sword fern (Polystichum munitum). It is evergreen, hardy and tough, growing in all sorts of difficult conditions – almost the antithesis of what one thinks of when one envisions a fern. But nature is full of surprises. And spring has many faces. I touched on just a few here and chose to use a variety of processing styles for the photos. After the dreary uniformity of our Pacific northwest winter, Spring’s multiplicity of form and color is a tonic I’m happy to drink.

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Wanderings & observations

Monthly Archives: May 2018

May in the Garden

BEACHED

ALL THE SOUNDS

April to May