background check

buckwheat-without-background

My last post has me think­ing more about the back­grounds that plants grow against.

I was get­ting excited that the San Miguel Island buck­wheats(Eri­o­gonum grande var. rubescens) that I’d grown from seed were com­ing in to bloom. But stand­ing back from them, I real­ized that the place where I’d trans­planted them–a raised bed with a red brick retain­ing wall behind it–might not have been the best place for the plants.

The dusky pink flow­ers blend so well with the red­dish col­ors of the brick that they prac­ti­cally van­ish. And the busy grid­ded back­ground of the brick and weep­ing mor­tar draws so much atten­tion that any­thing in front of the wall just gets ignored.

buckwheat-with-background

What would it look like against a more neu­tral back­bround? I won­dered. And so I went to grab a piece of white mat­board and posi­tioned it behind the plants.

Wow. Big dif­fer­ence. It’s sud­denly eas­ier to make out the shapes of the umbels of flow­ers, and you can begin to appre­ci­ate the sub­tle color of the flowers.

buckwheat-with-background-closeup

Up close, the white back­ground almost made the plant look like a botan­i­cal illustration.

buckwheat-with-bug

The low con­trast against the back­ground didn’t pre­vent this bug from find­ing the buck­wheat. Clearly, a bug’s eyes and brain don’t work the same way our human ones do.

Once these plants grow in more and achieve some more height they should stand a bet­ter chance of hold­ing their own against the back­ground of busy brick­work. But the plants will never “pop” against the wall in the same way they’d show against a sim­pler, more neu­tral back­ground. So, in the “note to self” cat­e­gory, I’ll be pay­ing more atten­tion to con­trasts between the plant and the hard­scape around it.

July 10 2009 10:15 am | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: • • • • •

10 Responses to “background check”

  1. tina on 10 Jul 2009 at 11:02 am #

    Back­grounds do make a pretty big dif­fer­ence. But I also think that when pink con­trasts with the pink of the brick it can make a nice pic­ture too. It may not pop as well but the white flow­ers on top of the brick wall help to lead the eye in that direc­tion. Pretty flower. Looks almost like an ame­ria (sp)

  2. ryan on 10 Jul 2009 at 9:22 pm #

    I like how you put the white board behind the plant. It really gives a dif­fer­ent look. As a gar­den installer, I end up being really con­scious of back­grounds. Some clients just changed their mind about the color of a wall, in the mid­dle of a job, chang­ing it from olive gray to brick red, and I had to change to the plant­ing to match. Now, I have three red aza­leas I don’t know what to do with.
    I think the buck­wheat will look really good when it gets larger and you have the gray foliage against the brick and the pink blooms ris­ing above it.

  3. George Janczyn on 11 Jul 2009 at 8:18 pm #

    Maybe you should stucco your bricks white?

  4. Greg on 13 Jul 2009 at 8:12 pm #

    Vive la dif­fer­ence! I like the botan­i­cal draw­ing look of your image with the white back­ground. Pretty pink flow­ers, too.

    I bet they’d look good against the brick back­ground with your macro­fo­cus, the pink against the brick­tones reminds me of my kitchen color scheme.

  5. lostlandscape on 13 Jul 2009 at 8:39 pm #

    Tina, are you think­ing of arme­ria? You’re right, they have a sim­i­lar way of float­ing the flow­ers over the plant.

    Ryan, I’m impa­tient! I’ve seen these buck­wheats get quite a bit big­ger, and the scale of the plant against the back­ground will help the sit­u­a­tion out for sure. No red aza­leas against your brick red wall, huh? I could see how they might get lost…

    George, the house came with what must be 200 feet of var­i­ous brick walls all over the yard. As much as I’m basi­cally okay with brick–neither love nor hate–I actu­ally have been tempted to stucco over some of it in the past.

    Thanks, Greg. A macro does won­ders to iso­late the fore­ground from all the noise of the world, for sure. Pink against orange is one of those com­bi­na­tions the color police some­times says is a no-no, but see peo­ple using really effectively–your kitchen walls for example.

  6. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » july bloom day on 14 Jul 2009 at 8:38 pm #

    […] bloom­ing in the gar­den. I’ve done a cou­ple posts on using back­grounds behind plants (Back­ground check / One way to pho­togr­pah a tree). Inspired, all but one of these shots uses a white sheet of […]

  7. George on 27 Jul 2009 at 1:33 pm #

    Jim…

    A shot by James Grif­fioen made me think of your back­ground check:

    http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/index.php?/photography/ruinslife/

    Here’s another work of his you might like:

    http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2009/07/feral-houses.html

  8. lostlandscape on 27 Jul 2009 at 5:41 pm #

    Cool work, George. The feral houses in the sec­ond really remind of the work of William Chris­ten­berry: http://www.steidlville.com/books/705-Working-from-Memory.html

  9. George on 29 Jul 2009 at 4:08 pm #

    One final note on backgrounds:

    Accord­ing to the IMDB entry for the HBO series Six Feet Under (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0248654/trivia), “the lone tree in the open­ing sequence does not actu­ally stand on the hill shown. It was dug up from someone’s back yard, and placed there for the pur­poses of cap­tur­ing the shot.”

    Here’s someone’s screen­grab of that shot:

    http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q110/Lunatik17/six-feet-under.jpg

    A rather extreme act, I would say!

  10. lostlandscape on 29 Jul 2009 at 8:33 pm #

    George, ah Hol­ly­wood. I’m not sur­prised. Peo­ple do a lot of things to make a strik­ing photo, from wait­ing out the light until it’s per­fect to totally fab­ri­cat­ing what’s in front of the lens–people like James Case­bere and Lori Nix.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply