This is one of my very first focus stacks — and I'm a little proud of it, so you'll have to forgive me for leading with that.
For anyone who hasn't gone down this particular rabbit hole: focus stacking is when you take a whole series of photos, each one focused at a slightly different depth, and then you blend them together so every needle, every cone, every drop of water is tack-sharp from front to back. It's how you make a small thing feel real - the way you'd see it if you actually held it in your hand.
This is our Japanese white pine. She lives at the front of the house and shades the flagstone patio with a canopy she's been working on for fifteen years. She is - and I do not use this word lightly - a stunner. The silvery-blue cast on her needles is one of my favorite colors in the whole garden, and when the rain comes, that silver deepens into something almost metallic.
The day I took this was rainy and dark and gloomy. The kind of day a lot of photographers stay inside for. But the gloom is exactly what gave the image its mood - that rich, jewel-box darkness behind her, the wet needles catching what little light there was, the two small green cones glowing like they'd been polished. You can almost smell the sticky pine sap coming off the screen.
She doesn't pop like the mimosa. She doesn't dance like the columbine. She just steadily, quietly is. A little taller every year, a little more shade every summer, a little more home to every bird and squirrel that decides to drop in. Some plants throw parties. Some plants are the house.
Fifteen years of quiet growth, and here she is on a rainy spring day, as beautiful as I can remember.