Around the Garden
The Editor's Garden
The Garden at Close Range
Ten photographs from the beds, and four ways to look at them. Slide down a flower stalk, turn up the light, drag a magnifying glass, step in close.
Drops of water hang from the ruffled edge of a kale leaf, gathered in its folds. Observed
A new Anthurium leaf comes up rolled tight around itself. Its veins are already drawn in, a net of lines across a surface that has not yet opened. Observed
Down the spike
Drag the orange handle up and down, or tap anywhere on the photo.
A red hot poker opens from the bottom of its spike upward. The tip, seen here from above, is still a cluster of closed buds. Lower down the flowers have opened and are already fading, and a bee was holding on among them. In most varieties the buds start red or orange and the open flowers turn yellow or cream, so a single stalk carries several stages at once, the oldest at the base. Sourced · bee Observed
Light and lens
Turn LIGHT to brighten the frame. Turn LENS to move in. Drag around a knob, or focus it and use the arrow keys.
Most of this hibiscus leaf is gone. What is left is the network of veins that once carried water across it, with ragged edges where the rest of the leaf used to be. Observed
The glass
Drag the glass over the photo. With a mouse, it follows the pointer.
Two mushrooms grow out of a rotting log, under a white fungus covered in pores. Look along the stalks for the small flies, and along each cap's rim for the fine hairs. Observed
Step closer
Slide to move in, or tap a stop.
One small mushroom at three distances: standing in the leaf litter, the surface of its cap with grains of soil still on it, and the underside, where the stalk meets the cap. Observed
Everything here came from the editor's garden: the kale and hibiscus in the beds, the red hot poker, an Anthurium from the collection, and whatever comes up out of the old wood.
The red hot poker is the one worth carrying out the door. Botanists call a flower spike that opens from its base toward its tip acropetal, and once the word is in hand the pattern turns up on stalk after stalk, the snapdragons in the next bed among them, half in bud at the top and half spent at the bottom.
Sourced — opening order and bud colour of red hot poker: Irish Farmers Journal · Proven Winners · Observed — all photographs, the editor's garden.