Basque Garden Beauty (©2025 Archean Enterprises, LLC)
Behind the Image
I happened upon a garden last May in the Basque region of France. It reminded me without question that, as humans, we sense a deep symbiotic relationship between nature and art. As often happens with photographs, I pondered what this small scene might look like should my retinas be more sensitive to hue and tone. The delight of digital art is its ability to reimagine what we see before us, to transform the mundane into what I saw, not what the camera imaged.
Harsh words have been spoken to me before concerning the digital reworking of photographs—tirades with words like cheating, deceiving, degrading, and bastardizing. All such encounters make me smile. We all know that our grasp of reality is constrained by individual perception, and our memories are not of what we see but what we think we saw.
I think I thought I saw this picture that day in the Basque garden.
I like working with Adobe software. It is cathartic to pull up the Camera Raw Filter, probe an image to see what lies below the surface, and apply a little freehand brushwork here and there.
I love touring gardens, but I’m not much of a gardener. The plant ID program on my phone says the delicate flowers on the left are Calla lilies, and the funky plant on the right is a Tree cholla. If I have stumbled and clearly can’t be trusted to identify plants correctly, please let me know what I am actually seeing in my fusion artwork above.
Further snooping online says Calla lilies do best in zones 8 to 10 hardiness conditions and prefer partial shade to full sun. They were thriving in partial shade when I photographed them, but positioned just below the north flank of the Pyrenees, I have to question the hardiness zone call of 8 to 10. We had to cancel an excursion the day before due to heavy snow just south of our hotel.
The Tree cholla (Cylindropuntia imbricata) seems to be a bold call since the plant is native to the southwestern USA and northern Mexico—notice that southern France is not mentioned.
Fortunately we don’t have to know the plants to enjoy the garden scene.
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