Tiny, magenta girl-flowers

One can scarcely miss the boy parts, those hundreds of pollen-bearing catkins that catch the light and sway musically within even the slightest breezes, giving contorted filberts much of their late-winter visual interest.
But the girl-parts on a Corylus avellana ‘Cortorta’, . . . those diminutive little, magenta flowers that emerge from otherwise normal looking buds along corkscrew branches are so small and understated that they almost require brilliant sunlight behind them to light up their styles enough for you to readily notice them. Yesterday afternoon provided just such sunny backlighting and I just happened to be wandering about my garden with an attentive, color-attuned eye and close-focusing cameras.
I spent some time observing, and then trying to show, with just a few pictures, a sense of scale, of color, of scarcity and of relative location within the context of the larger plant. (It nearly always helps me to understand these sorts of things when I’m looking at extreme close-ups. They help me develop a sense of a thing’s importance as well as its place. I assume it must work the same for you.)

DAVID PERRY PHOTOGRAPHER
Journal Entry February 7, 2010

Sunday, February 7, 2010

The female flowers really are fairly scarce in number, relative to the much larger and more numerous male flowers. And though they glow like tiny LED’s under just the right lighting conditions, from a distance of more than a few feet, they still nearly disappear into the visual cacophony of all those swaying catkins and curvaceous woody scribbles. Yesterday was a clear reminder to me that one must look really carefully to even notice the female flowers on a contorted filbert.

Below: (3) Today, instead of the delicious, low-angled winter sun of yesterday, it is overcast outside. And given the softer, and much flatter light above, those female flowers are even more difficult to locate within that busy maze of color and line. Bright, sunny backlighting can make all the difference in picturing some subjects in ways that they are easy to see, so use it when it will help you, and save yourself the indignity of dropping green arrows into the aesthetic midst of your garden pictures to point others’ eyes in the direction you would have them see.

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