The next photo in our monthly series of plant photos by Karl Blossfeldt is a quiet, subtle print in three parts.  The side images are of convolvulus sepium (bindweed) and the middle picture is campanula medium (bellflower).  As you will already know from our earlier posts this year, Blossfeldt plant photographs really are amazing.

Of course, they’re particularly interesting for those who love gardening and plants in general.  People who love plants might still never have looked that closely at individual leaves, flowers or stems.  Karl Blossfeldt’s photos show the subjects very close, at levels of magnification that nobody had seen before, so they make us look at ordinary plants in a new way.  We can see how extraordinary these common plants really are.  Blossfeldt’s contemporaries had the same reaction.  When his book was published, in the late 1920s, it became an international bestseller in a couple of weeks, and people thought his work was incredible.

Blossfeldt plant photographs are always interesting, showing the structure of flowers, stalks and leaves in marvellous detail.  Here the twisting folds of the convolvulus flowers before they open remind us of a folded parasol.  Lots of manmade inventions seem to follow nature’s original designs!