Touched by Light: The Textures of Wild Bergamot

Lens-Artists Challenge #397: Texture

For this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge, Anne has chosen a topic close to my heart: texture. As she puts it, texture “gives us the visual quality of a surface — how rough, smooth, gritty, or soft it appears in a two-dimensional image.” We see it in weathered wood, rusted metal, animal fur, and leaves veined like maps. The key ingredient is always light: its direction, intensity, and the shadows it carves. A narrow aperture (something like f/8 or f/11) keeps fine detail crisp across the frame, and in post-processing, contrast, clarity, and sharpness can amplify what the lens already saw. Textures can also be added later as layers, of course — but I prefer to find them in the field.

One of my favorite ways to chase texture is through macro photography. So this week, I stepped into our courtyard with a single subject in mind: Wild Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa), better known to many as Bee Balm. A long-blooming perennial in the mint family (Lamiaceae), it grows about 2 to 4 feet tall (60–120 cm) and produces showy lavender-pink flower heads from late spring into summer. Its leaves carry the characteristic minty fragrance of the family, with a sweet, citrusy note that recalls bergamot orange — hence the name. Native across much of North America, it is a magnet for bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds, and Indigenous peoples and early settlers brewed its leaves into a fragrant tea, sometimes called Oswego tea.

Here are some macro photos showing textures in Wild Bergamot flowers, arranged from the wider view down to the most intimate close-ups.

This wider macro view tells several texture stories at once. The lavender corollas are velvety and finely hairy — almost peach-skin under raking light. Beneath them, the bracts appear smooth yet veined, with subtly pebbled surfaces that catch tiny highlights. Across the flat green receptacle, the radiating calyx tubes introduce a contrasting, bristly, almost spiny quality, while the protruding forked stigmas at the top add a wisp-like, fibrous accent against the softer petals.

From above, the calyx tubes look like a galaxy of tiny green crowns. Each one is rimmed with sharp, bristly teeth, and many cradle a perfectly round droplet of water. The contrast is striking: spiky and prickly at the rim, glossy and smooth on the droplets, and softly fuzzy on the curving corolla lips above. Notice how your eye keeps shifting registers as it travels across the frame — bristly to velvety to silky.

This frame strips everything away except the very tip of one floret. The two-lobed anther is dusted with grainy, sand-like yellow pollen — a texture you can almost feel through the screen. The thin, hair-like fibers floating behind it are the bifid (forked) stigma and the fine bristles along the corolla rim. Below, the pink corolla blade acts almost like a stage curtain — its surface velvety and softly hairy, a cushioned counterpoint to the gritty pollen above.

Caught at an early stage, the head shows off a different set of textures. The calyx tubes are still translucent and glassy, lit from within and tipped with bristly teeth. The bracts that frame the head are leathery and finely pebbled, threaded with red-tinged veins. The whole composition feels almost crystalline — sparkling droplets, crisp edges, and a soft halo of out-of-focus leaves around it all.

Backlight transforms these bracts into stained-glass panels. The papery, slightly waxy surface is mapped with a network of fine veins — pinkish where the bract begins to blush, then deepening into reddish-purple along the edges. Tiny hairs catch the light along the rim, and the central spine looks almost translucent against the stem. Texture here is quiet but rich: paper-thin yet structured, smooth yet grooved.

This is the deepest layer of the dive: a single calyx tube, opened toward the camera. The five sharp, hairy teeth (two are off the focal plane) reach outward like a tiny crown, prickly and dense with stiff bristles. Beads of water cling along the rim, and inside the tube, soft white-and-purple filaments — the stigma and stamen tips — fan out like fine silk. Every kind of texture lives in one frame: bristle, drop, hair, and the smooth curve of the inner tube wall.

Photography in poetry – that was how beautiful the posts were last week. Your responses to Ann-Christine’s “Illustrate a Quote” were great! I hope you will join this challenge, too. Please don’t forget to use the “lens-artists” hashtag in your posts to help people find your wonderful challenge entries.

Next week, Ritva will feature a new challenge. It will go live at noon EST in the USA. Tune in to find out more about the challenge then. Please see this page for more information about the Lens-Artists Challenge and its history. If you don’t want to miss any future challenges, please consider subscribing to the team members’ websites. Here they are:

• Tina of Travels and Trifles.
• Patti of P.A. Moed.
• Ann-Christine of Leya.
• John of Journeys with Johnbo.
• Anne of Slow Shutter Speed.
• Sofia of Photographias.
• Egídio of Through Brazilian Eyes.
• Ritva of Ritva Sillanmäki Photography.
• Beth of Wandering Dawgs.

That is the story behind the shots. If you liked this post, you may also be interested in others featuring Lens-Artists, Macros, Sunday Stills, Teravista, Texas, Wild Bergamot, and Wildflowers. Until the next time, keep clicking and capturing the beauty your eyes find.

Posted for Terri’s Sunday Stills Monthly Color Challenge: Pink and Pastels.

Sources

• Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, native plant database, Monarda fistulosa species page (wildflower.org).
• USDA NRCS PLANTS Database, Monarda fistulosa profile (plants.usda.gov).
• Missouri Botanical Garden, Plant Finder, Monarda fistulosa (missouribotanicalgarden.org).
• North Carolina State Extension, Plant Toolbox, Monarda fistulosa (plants.ces.ncsu.edu).
• U.S. Forest Service, Plant of the Week: Wild Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa), Larry Stritch (fs.usda.gov).
• Illinois Wildflowers, Wild Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa), John Hilty (illinoiswildflowers.info).