Happy Sunday! Normally by the 22nd of May, you only find a few late blooming Trillium, but our spring wildflowers are running almost 3 weeks late in Southern Maine this year, and a visit to Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge head-quarters yesterday, during our first break after 6 days of steady rain, turned them up in full bloom. We have the Painted variety here, though I grew up with the Red Trillium in up-state New York. My mother called it blood-root…I thought because of the color of the flower…but it turns out that in herbal medicine the rhizome is sometimes used to treat female blood aliments. There is another plant actually called bloodroot, but my mother often used the names for plants and birds that were common in rural up-state New York, the names she grew up with, rather than those found in any reference book. It was years before I realized that her wild canary was actually a Common Goldfinch.

And in researching Trillium this morning, I found that what look like leaves above ground are actually bracts, with the true leaves occurring underground, wrapping the rhizome. The bracts of Trillium do, unlike some brachs, actually act like leaves, since they have chlorophyll and are the only source of food for the plant…stranger and stranger.

These two shots, by the way, are at opposite extremes. The first was taken with macro at the “best” setting of 32mm equivalent field of view (best as selected by the Macro Scene Mode: the setting that gives closest focus and the largest image scale), and the second was taken with macro at the long end of the zoom…810mm equivalent…since the flowers were beyond easy reach behind a rail. Macro as set by the camera allows you to get within 2 cm, or about 3/4 inch, for views like the one below.

All the shots were handheld.

Nikon Coolpix P500, 1) and 3) Macro at 32mm equivalent, 3) Macro at 810mm equivalent. 1) f3.7 @ 1/400th @ ISO 160, 2) f5.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 160, and 3) f3.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 160. Macro mode evidently does some digital trickery to extend the foreground depth of field, while throwing the background further out of focus than it would normally be, as all three shots have more of the look of macros taken with larger sensors and conventional macro lenses…not with a small senor, short focal length, Point and Shoot.

And for Sunday: I picked the Trilliums this morning, from among recent images, for their beauty and for some vague association in my mind with the trinity…and with incarnation. The three pure white petals stained purple red, blood red, at the center. Maybe it is kind of abstract…but to me that is the wonder of the incarnation…purity that bleeds, producing beauty. But the real blessing came in learning a bit more about the plant…for instance it is illegal to pick it in many states and some provinces of Canada…and in remembering my mother, when I was maybe 6 or 7 at the oldest, taking me out to the woods in the spring to look for what she called blood-root. She would never let me pick it either. It was just something she enjoyed finding, and took the time to show me. And that too, is the wonder of incarnation. Love in the blood.