I spent much of the afternoon in the Canadian smoke (is it the same as American wildfire smoke?), experimenting photographically with my idea of capturing the community flower.

As I plunge deeply into my infatuation with flowers and my passion for photographing them, I see them as more complicated than those e-cards suggest.

Maria asked me tonight what I mean by referring to “Community Flowers.” I told her it is my sense of flowers as part of diverse communities, not just solitary plants.

They are aware of and connected, perhaps even to me. I set out to document this with my wide-angle lens, it’s the first time I’ve used this lens in my flower photography, and I thought it might better capture the scale of things.

National Geographic says that flowers do communicate with one another, something I have been feeling increasingly as I spend time with them.

They don’t do it the way we do; they tend to do it the way trees do, say botanists. I can feel the life in them when I look through my viewfinder.

To react to their environment,” said the magazine study, ” a single plant must communicate among its roots, stems, leaves, flowers, and fruit. Instead of signals moving through a nervous system like ours, Simon Gilroy, professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says in plants, it’s more like plumbing.”

I’ve been paying attention to flowers more than I ever have; I reason that if I’m going to take good photos of them, I need to understand them and burrow as deeply into their souls as I can

I’m drawn to this idea of community flowers in my photography. Photographing flowers for me is not just about taking a picture of a flower.

I’m trying to capture them in context and respect them as living entities that are aware of each other and of me. I would have dismissed this idea as loopy just a couple of years ago.

But I am trying to express this idea in my photos and, hopefully, in my writing. My relationship with these flowers is suddenly personal, one living thing to another.

My photos are aware of each other and given a chance to get close to each other.

I spent Saturday trying to capture this in photographs; it’s too late to go through them and post them tonight. I’ll do this first thing in the morning. Have a good evening.

Later.