Capturing Beauty from the Garden

When I started Garden Shoots, I wondered if anyone would read it. Lo and behold, I got lucky. And one of my first readers, Liz Reed, has become an unmet-as-of-yet friend. She is a fellow landscape designer who lives in Pittsburgh. More importantly, however, she is a photographer, painter, and an artist with a scanner. Consider the beauty of “July Tapestry,” created with blooms from her garden, an artist’s eye, and her first scanner, an Epson CX4800.

"July Tapestry" by Liz Reed.

She sent me this image in her first e-mail and I nearly swooned. It’s mysterious, moody, and begs to be examined closely. Composed of Platycodon, Asclepsias, blueberries, and Nicotiana blooms, carefully arranged for balance and texture, “July Tapestry” is a wonderful piece of art.

Liz began experimenting with scanning as an art form after she sold her gallery (Gallery in the Square, which is no longer in existence) and turned to landscape design as a second career. (She designs gardens in Pittsburgh and Long Island at the present.) But she still draws, paints – and has branched out into scanning beauty from the garden. Recently she opened Garden Capture,  a virtual store on Etsy, where you can purchase her images.

"Sunflower Mandella" is the most-often viewed of Liz Reed's images on her Etsy site, Garden Capture.

What she loves about this art form, she told me recently, is the limited depth of field that the scanner creates; the parts of an object next to the scanner glass are sharp, but the rest  fades off quickly into the distance. The lighting is a constant (unlike in regular photography), so repetition and patterns are important. Over time, she has learned the “vocabulary” of how the scanner will read items, so she has become more adept at arranging her materials.

In late summer, I encouraged Liz to enter Gardening Gone Wild’s October photo contest – but it was open only to bloggers, whose company she has yet to join. If you’re interested in how to try this art form yourself, check out this link to GGW’s contest announcement for that month. For some other superb examples of scanned  images (botanical and otherwise), look at Scannography Artists’ website.

Some of her personal favorites  include “Glory Mirror,” “Green Texture Corsage,” and “Glory,” shown below.

"Glory Mirror" by Liz Reed

"Green Texture Corsage" by Liz Reed

"Glory" by Liz Reed

Liz now creates her scans with a new Epson scanner and some updated software. She had a show of many of the images in her Etsy store at Gallery in the Square before it closed. I’m contemplating redecorating my guest bedroom soon, and I can just picture some of her images, framed on the walls, as wonderful additions to the room. So check out her art at Garden Capture – I know you’ll enjoy it.

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Tags: equipment, photography, plant combinations

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