Accuracy & then Beauty
Sunday, May 17, 2020
Perhaps on day of early summer 2001 in our old Kerrisdale garden, a Vancouver neighbourhood, I was bored. I was admiring a beautiful, hard to grow Bourbon Rose called R. ‘Reine Victoria’. A couple of year it died as most Bourbon roses do not like our rainy springs. They also need full sun or the tight and complex bud will not open.
I cut a couple and went into my living room where I had and Epson Perfection1640SU flatbed scanner. I placed the rose and scanned it at 1600 dpi at 100% size. I did not put the date on the saved file. That important part of my now thousands of plants scans became my personal rule.
The beauty of the scan wowed me but I saw other possibilities. It had to do with the fact that since I have always had a well calibrated monitor I could make sure that my plant scans showed accurate colour. When one takes pictures of roses and other flowers in a garden with either a film or digital camera, the pictures will be affected by the fact that cameras are sensitive to ultraviolet light. Many plants reflect that and there is more UV light in the shade and in cloudy days. Photographs of flowers will not always be accurate because of UV.
I thought that by scanning my roses for the record (and through the years many of our roses died because our large garden had lots of shade and few sunny spots for the roses) I would have a record that I could share with other gardeners. But this was not to be. When I explained to folks that my photographs were not photographs but scans and that I was a scanographer they would quickly lose interest.
I have now persisted with this task of scanning the plants of our gardens. I have rhododendrons, hosta leaves, host flowers, bulbs, weeds, ferns, iris, camellias, many of Rosemary’s rare perennials, and whatever else I thought would make an interesting scan.
I have no idea of what will happen when I depart to join Rosa ‘Reine Victoria’ wherever she might be. Will this be some kind of valuable legacy? I think not. I will just keep on.
But now in these days of being able to fiddle and muddle I decided to try some other ways of scanning our roses. I have used an opaque white plastic sheet either one (underneath on the flatbed glass, or also with a second one on the top. They are tough to fix as after the scan I have to spend lots of time removing the blemishes that are ingrained in the plastic sheets.
These scans may not be accurate but they are beautiful nonetheless.
