Promise of Spring
by Terry Rowe
Title
Promise of Spring
Artist
Terry Rowe
Medium
Photograph - Digital Photography
Description
Crocuses are the first to come up in my garden in the spring, sometimes there is even still snow on the ground when they bloom. I see their delicate blossoms as a promise that warmer weather will indeed sometime come again. I converted the white and purple veined crocuses into a black and white image to focus on their shape, and the way they seem to glow.
From Wikipedia: Crocus (plural: crocuses, croci) is a genus of flowering plants in the iris family comprising 90 species of perennials growing from corms. Many are cultivated for their flowers appearing in autumn, winter, or spring. Crocuses are native to woodland, scrub and meadows from sea level to alpine tundra in central and southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, on the islands of the Aegean, and across Central Asia to western China.
Cultivation and harvesting of crocus was first documented in the Mediterranean, notably on the island of Crete. Frescos showing them are extant at the Knossos site on Crete as well as from a comparably aged site on Santorini.
The first crocus seen in the Netherlands, where crocus species are not native, were from corms brought back in the 1560s from Constantinople by the Holy Roman Emperor's ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq. A few corms were forwarded to Carolus Clusius at the botanical garden in Leiden. By 1620, the approximate date of Ambrosius Bosschaert's painting (illustration, below), new garden varieties had been developed, such as the cream-colored crocus feathered with bronze at the base of the bouquet, similar to varieties still on the market. Bosschaert, working from a preparatory drawing to paint his composed piece spanning the whole of Spring, exaggerated the crocus so that it passes for a tulip, but its narrow, grasslike leaves give it away.
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Uploaded
February 28th, 2013
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