Red, White, and Blue all over

On this Fourth of July, in the year of Our Lord 2023, ProfessorRoush is going to let the pictures (mostly) speak  for themselves.   I went out to take just one photo of each color, hoping that I'd have anything blue blooming at all, and I was yet overwhelmed by the abundance of red, white, and blue in a garden now brimming over with oranges and yellows from the daylilies.  Okay, I cheated a little on the blue since most of the species that are currently blooming with blue flowers are native plants; all weeds in my garden.   My apologies to my British readers for the insufferable reminder of the loss of your colonies.  Warning,  picture heavy!  

First the Red:

Pelargonium potted in front of the house

'Spiderman' Daylily

Hybrid Rugosa 'Linda Campbell'

Canadian Rose 'Hope for Humanity'

Then the White:

Phlox 'David'

Shasta Daisy 'Alaska'

The impossibly delicate Argemone polyanthemos,
 or Prickly Poppy

Rose 'Marie Bugnet', not at her best

Hibiscus syriacus 'Notwooodtwo' 

Hydranga paniculata

And last, but not least, the Blue:

Clematis 'Romona'

Salvia azurea; Blue Sage
Nothing is bluer!

Hisbiscus syriacus 'Blue Bird'

My nemesis; Commelina communis

Fringe-Leaf Ruellia; Ruellia humilis

Not bad, eh?   Not bad at all for a garden that currently is dominated  by daylilies and looks like this everywhere:

  HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY TO ALL!

Turnabout Transgression

Turnabout IS fair play, isn't it folks? "Any eye for an eye?" Or is it "all is fair in love and war?"   Whichever the case may be, my post today is a sweet and long-awaited revenge on Mrs. ProfessorRoush, who regularly steals my photos from this blog for her Facebook page and whom, I might add, seldom gives credit for the artful photography she pilfers.  I'm, as you might say, "returning the favor" with my photo-heavy blog today.  Today's words are mine, but the pictures are all from HER Facebook.  Ha!

In my own defense, I couldn't help but download these beauties from Mrs. ProfessorRoush's Facebook because she's really upped her photo game.  Many of these photos are not merely the pictures of pretty flowers that she usually captures, they were COMPOSED, artfully arranged according to classic principles such as placing the subject by the "rule of thirds" and using depth of field.  

Look at the beautifully photographed white Columbine above.  Mrs. PR got it perfectly right, with the most focused bloom precisely placed in the upper left third.   But then, as in the second photo, she incorporated depth of field with the same subject, placing the columbine in perspective against the house and cloudy sky behind it.

A few steps back, a shift of a few degrees, and yet another view echoing the first, but a different subject, this time the 'Batik' irises filling the foreground, framed between the evergreen to the right and the distant River Birch to the left.   She resisted posting the 'Batik' head-on, but instead showed off its abundance, its proliferative nature at bloom time.  I was impressed as well by the framing between the evergreen to the right and the distant River Birch to the left

Here, another example of photographic value of thirds, this nice double-flowered purple columbine, it's unblemished foliage in the lower left third balanced by the out-of-focused green foliage in the upper right and contrasted against the bright flowers on the left of center.   The grounding weight of the columbine foliage at the base of the photo is almost palpable.
  

Mrs. PR has even evoked emotion with her photos!   Can't you just feel here the loneliness of the single native Baptisia australis (Blue Wild Indigo)  among the new prairie grasses, my garden shade house far in the background?   Hear it calling "here I am, here I stand, fragile yet defiant."   What a nice composition and what a vivid message.

 

And what of the contrast of the rustic look of the old trellis that stands attached to my gazebo, here with the newly blooming 'Ramona' clematis?   That trellis is a decade old, weathered, splintered, and, in truth, probably held up only by the young, beautiful and vigorous clematis.  Somehow here, in the back of Mrs. PR's mind, there may be some semblance to the old weathered ProfessorRoush and his eternally young and beautiful bride.  Or is the similarity sitting in the back of my mind?

Gaze for a moment on the perfect pinkness of this 'Scarlett O'Hara' peony in silhouette, all life and color among the healthy green foliage.  Since 'Scarlett O'Hara blooms early and brazenly, I refer to her as Scarlett the Harlot and so I might title this "Silhouette of the Harlot".    Titles are fleeting, but beauty eternal.

We might have had to admonish Mrs. ProfessorRoush this lapse into  the "Oh, Wow" centered composition of my massive and spreading 'Harison's Yellow.'   In her defense it is difficult to ignore the sheer floriferousness and vivid yellow of this Hybrid Spinosissima when she's in full bloom.   But even here, as you can see in the photo below, Mrs. ProfessorRoush suddenly redeemed her artwork, stepping back to use the 'Harison's Yellow' as a mere color spot in the line of the bed connecting with the Cottonwood of the background, framed within the confines of the nearer Purple Smoke Tree to the left and the American Elm to the right.  Bravo! Belisima! Magnifica! Mrs. ProfessorRoush!  

My garden, through another's eyes, through a lover's eyes, is new again.