I often feel a bit overwhelmed when I visit a public garden—there are so many flowers all around vying for my attention. I am rarely attracted to large clusters of flowers, but instead tend to gravitate toward individual flowers that I can photograph up close with my macro lens.
Here are three of the flowers that I photographed during a recent photographic foray to nearby Green Spring Gardens with my friend Cindy Dyer. The first is a spiderwort (g. Tradescantia), a flower that I love for its simple geometric shape. I am not sure if the plant in the second photo, some species of allium, counts as a flower, but I love the way that the partially open “bud” reveals the complex structure inside. The final flower is a simple viola that I spotted amidst a bed of green ground cover—like pansies, violas always make me smile.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
As always, great photos but I think the second one is particularly striking. I will look more closely at my alliums for sure. I’ve been doing puzzles during the lockdown and can picture this photo as a torturous jigsaw puzzle!
Thank you again
Thanks, Ann. The allium is actually my favorite too. I tend to lead with my best or favorite shot, but WordPress does not do a very good job displaying images in portrait mode, so sometimes I will begin with an image in landscape mode so that it will display properly.
The allium is wonderful. I was too late for our natives this year; by the time I found some, they were well past their ‘use by’ date!
Very nice series of flower images Mike!
Lovely. We have had a cold spring in Winnipeg and flowers are just now beginning. So it nice to see photos of them.
You can consider them to be preview of coming attractions. It is really cool that viewers come from so many different places. I grew up in New England, so I was used to a later start to the growing season. Occasionally, though I have trouble adjusting to the flip-flop seasons places like Australia and New Zealand, where it is now autumn for them.
Very lovely photos, Mike. Did you put paper behind second photo?
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Thanks, Mitzy. I did not use an artificial background for the allium image. What I did was choose a camera setting that had a really shallow depth of field, which meant that only the center of the image is in focus and the edges of the subject are blurry as is the stem. It’s nice to be able to get a smooth background like that through control of the camera and careful framing rather than through use of additional items.
Nice, very nice!
You got some excellent shots of them!
I eagerly await my spiderworts each year. Just leaves right now. When we have them they can be either rich blue such as yours or a pale blue that is almost white. Here’s one. Love your allium shot and the Viola is gorgeous.
I’ve never seen a spiderwort quite so pale as the one you showed in the linked posting, Steve. It is stunning with the contrast between the white petals and the bluish-purple strand in the center.
They are lovely and, I think, even more attractive than the rich blues.
There is such a range of blues and purples in the ones that I have seen. The white ones really let you focus on the cool shape of the spiderworts.
Great shots, Mike.
Thanks, Dan. In many ways this spring has been a throwback to seven year ago, when I was just starting to get serious about photography and was shooting a lot of flowers. Eventually I realized that I liked photographing insects on flowers and eventually gravitated towards insects without the flowers.
So you’ve come full circle 🙂
Beautiful captures, Mike. I esp. love all the detail in the allium bud.
Exquisite portraits!!
I’ve seen spiderwort growing wild near my brother’s lake house in far western North Carolina, just a few miles from the Smoky Mountains park, and I was fascinated. I think yours is the only other photo I’ve seen of them, other than in flower guides. And that allium is terrific.
Thanks, Gary. I was in an artsy kind of mood when I shot the flowers. I didn’t really like the background behind the allium, so I opened up to f/4 and you can probably see how shallow my depth of field was for that shot. It is nice when that kind of softness around the edges of the subject is intentional.