Dahlia

I like the way the Fuji exposes and pushes the darker parts of the image way into the dark, like with this image of a Dahlia. Again, it is from the Fellows’ Garden at Christ’s College in Cambridge.

I looked up dahlia and was surprised at where it comes from. It’s a New World flower – from Mexico and Guatemala and into the northern tip of South America (not sure what happened to the intermediate countries between Guatemala and Colombia…)

The plant is named after Anders Dahl, author of Observationes Botanicae, and a student of Linneaus.

The story of the introduction of the plant into Europe is interesting – In 1787, the French botanist Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville was sent to Mexico to steal some cochineal insects. He got the insects and reported that he had seen strangely beautiful flowers growing in a garden in Oaxaca.

A couple of years later the plants made their way to Europe, and the rest, as they say, is botany.

E&OE

If this is not in fact a dahlia, and I have got it wrong (not unknown), then blame my poor faculties.

White Dahlia

Of course, it is not white – the original flower is not white. I ‘whited’ it in Photoshop. I rarely if ever convert a part of a photo into a black-and-white image. Perhaps you have seen those postcards of scenes like red London Buses crossing a B&W London Bridge? Not to my taste, but a chacun son goût, and now I have gone and done it. Seriously, do you like the white version?