Plants in Context

Zoey makes a good point in one of her posts, about macro photographs versus plants in context. She wants to see what a plant looks like in the garden landscape, because she has been misled before by pretty catalog photos showing only closeups of the flowers.

I guess some of us are more information-seekers than beauty-seekers, especially when it comes to unfamiliar plants. Me, give me a beautiful close-up photo anytime. It's the beauty I'm after. Sometimes a plant is not nearly so beautiful in context, because of flaws in the landscape surrounding it. My photographer's eye wants to eliminate the flaws, and one way of doing that is to get in really close to your subject.


So Zoey, I am guilty of your pet peeve! But I am listening, and I am attempting to post more pictures of the actual landscape a given plant resides in, no matter how delicious its foliage or colourful its flowers. The photo above is my 'Lullaby of Spring' iris, in context. It shows that I have many more blooms to look forward to this year as spring fades into summer.

Next, here is a shot of the weigela bush in all its blooming glory.


And here is the bush in its garden setting. (These photos were taken by two different cameras at different times of day, so the colouring comes out looking slightly different.)


Here is a photo of my Centaurea in bloom. (The flowers are wispier than I thought they would be, but overall I still like the effect. The colour combination is always what draws me in.)


And here is my flawed photo of that plant in its garden setting. I really don't like my semi-grassless slope and I haven't yet decided what to do about it, being as anti-lawn as I am. We could resod, but it would just look like this again in another two years. So I feel I am stuck. (Though I'm sure I'll think of something eventually.)


All photos belong to kbgardenblog.blogspot.com and may not be used without attribution.