Botany Photo of the Day

One of these days, I'm going to figure out a way to take technically-proficient photographs of the 15m+ (45 feet+) high roses, clematis and other woody climbers in the garden. The challenges are many, including line of sight (the Asian Garden doesn't lend itself well to specimen shots of trees and tree-climbing vines, since it's within a second-growth native forest), perspective and blown out colours from the sky or reflections from the flowers. For the time being, though, I hope you can appreciate the lowest 2.5m of this climbing rose, Rosa filipes 'Kiftsgate'.

I didn't get a chance to visit Kiftsgate Court Gardens in Chipping Campden, UK, when I was in the Cotswolds a few years ago. If I had, I would have seen the original 'Kiftsgate' rose, purported to be the largest rose in England: 27m x 30m x 17m high (80 feet x 90 feet x 50 feet high). You can read more about that rose from the Kiftsgate Court Gardens site: The Kiftsgate Rose (includes a photograph of the flowers).

For the black and white image, I used the technique described in this BPotD entry on the Asian Garden (there's also a link to a how-to article in the comments section for that entry). In this case, the green and blue channels were screened at 100% to create a new alpha channel. I then processed the new channel and the green channel with the soft light calculation at 100%.

Botany / art resource link: A BPotD reader, Dave, sent along this link: The Romance of Orchid Discovery: The John Day Scrapbooks, an online exhibition from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Along with a bevy of orchid information, you'll want to investigate the galleries.