I’m fortunate to live right next to an arboretum on the grounds of the campus where I work. Recently they replaced a big lawn area with a carefully tended wild meadow, though that sounds a bit of a contradiction.
I quite like the meadow, though its first season has presented some puzzles in terms of what its planters are trying to perfect in how it grows. Early on there were numerous tall grasses that went quickly to seed, but the staff came out before the seed started scattering and ripped all the seedheads off, which must have been a fair amount of work. (If it had only been some of the seedheads, I would have suspected the deer who come through there in the pre-dawn, but it was a bit too methodical and also it was the entire meadow in one night.) I presume that was because they didn’t want the grasses to dominate the meadow.
Then we got a profusion of black-eyed susan flowers, which I found really delightful. I’ve taken a number of pictures of them in bright sun, morning light and on an unexpectedly foggy day, and I’ll probably venture out this week for my annual “flowers are starting to die” macro hike with a lot of attention to the meadow.
The meadow has some clearly defined borders, including a pathway through it, so that invited me to lie down with my head and upper body inside the meadow for some shots. (Perhaps unwise in terms of exposure to ticks, but I was wearing my walking clothes that I’ve doused in permethrin.)
It made me think a lot about the underside of plants, and of flowers specifically, and what they might present like visually. I keep coming back to the thought that the main benefit of photography for me personally has simply been to make me wake up visually, to see the world differently, and this is part of it—it invites me to circle around objects, to look to change where I look from. And yet that’s no good if what it produces is something unseeable (sticking your head in a totally dark space yields very little to the eyes or the camera) or if it is so unfamiliar that your eye and your lens can’t leap from the new view back to the old one—or at least isn’t something you can parse at all because of its strangeness. It makes me think a bit about how a joke you have to explain isn’t funny, or about those terrible editorial cartoons where everything has to be labelled with words for it to make any sense at all. Something familiar seen in a new light only holds the gaze if it has a new and interesting look of its own, or if it reveals something new about something well-seen. If I have to label it—“this is a lilac bush as seen from someone under it” or suchlike—it feels as if that wouldn’t really work.