Callaway Gardens: The Unending Season

Description: As a photographer, I knew the importance of manipulation. Sometimes I had to manipulate my F/stops. Sometimes I had to manipulate shutter speeds. Sometimes I had to manipulate the film. Always, I had to manipulate the light. On occasions, I had to manipulate the image itself. I had not been a photographer for long when I was taken from the Progressive Farmer staff and named chief photographer for Southern Living when the magazine was launched during the late 1960s. I was pleasantly surprised in early 1973 when I was called in and told that I was being assigned to capture the photographs for a new book that would become known as “Callaway Gardens: The Unending Season.” The excitement quickly faded. Southern Living Books wanted the new picture book out before summer. Winter was just now giving way to spring. Not all of the gardens at Callaway were in bloom, and it was my job to showcase one of the most beautiful spots in the South. As the book would say: “Callaway Gardens nestles quietly along the gentle foothills of Pine Mountain, sheltered and shadowed by the picturesque peaks of a timbered highland it calls home. It hides in springtime behind a flirting, flaming veil of azaleas and rhododendrons. Tiny, fragile wildflowers fight their way through the thick, winter carpet of leaf mold to lazily pass the days of summer, nodding and blowing as if in agreement with the whispers of the wind, waiting to fade away with the promised frost that comes to lacquer autumn fire on the leaves of the forest.” Fortunately, the azaleas were blooming. So were the rhododendrons. And the forest was thick with dogwoods. However, it was not the time of year to gaze out and see the full spectrum of Callaway’s brilliant color. As a result, I felt as though I had to get to know the flowers and plants on their own terms. The only way to really understand a garden, I decided, was down on my hands and knees, crawling through the leaf mold and searching for those tiny spring shoots as they were fighting their way into the sunshine. The blooms, the moss, the lichen, the buds, the thorns, and I were all eye level. I felt as though, with my 55mm macro lens, I was seeing what only a few had ever taken the time to see before. I was watching the flowers of Callaway being born again. And I hiked back into those far-reaching natural gardens where so many never bothered to go. Early one morning, I sat against a big pine tree trunk, put a 200mm lens on the Nikon and began sweeping it across the forest, searching for any odd or unusual compositions I could find. My lens fell on a dogwood branch, covered with bright emerald green moss. The sun had filtered through the limbs and touched the branch with a magical glow. It was twisted into a “Z” pattern as it reached back into the dark woodlands. The composition was perfect. There was only one problem. The branch no dogwood blooms. I glanced around. No one was watching. But then I doubt if anyone else was even out on the grounds at that hour. It was cold. A late frost was touching the ground. And I was alone. I picked a single dogwood bloom off a tree. Nobody would miss a single dogwood bloom, I thought. I eased over and placed the bloom at exactly the right place on the branch, just as if God had put it there Himself, prayed that no wind would come and blow it away, and began photographing the image as though sun bouncing off the white petals of dogwood was a high-fashion portrait. The days dragged on. The weeks passed by. I forgot about the little dogwood bloom until I saw the design of the book. The dogwood bloom had been chosen for the cover. I smiled and, until now, never told a soul about the image that wasn’t there.

Price: 10 USD

Location: Alexandria, Alabama

End Time: 2025-01-15T19:59:23.000Z

Shipping Cost: 3.49 USD