Photographer Robert Llewellyn gets up close with plants

With his wispy red-brown hair, cuddly frame and air of guilelessness, there is something of the teddy bear about Robert Llewellyn, especially when he starts swatting at an imaginary fly.

“Here’s a fly,” he says, waving madly until the hands go still. “The eye of this fly is absolutely beautiful.”

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Adrian Higgins

Adrian Higgins has been writing about the intersection of gardening and life for more than 25 years, and joined the Post in 1994. He is the author of several books, including the Washington Post Garden Book and Chanticleer, a Pleasure Garden.

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(Robert Llewellyn/TIMBER PRESS) - The seeds of a Southern magnolia are suspended by threads in a photo from Robert Llewellyn’s “Seeing Trees.”

When magnified, the insect’s compound eye becomes an all-seeing geodesic dome, a study in architecture and engineering. Most people just look at objects. Llewellyn sees them. He has spent more than 40 years as a professional photographer, most of them based in his house-cum-studio overlooking the Rivanna River a few miles upstream of Charlottesville.

He has photographed a shelf load of travel and landscape books between his bread-and-butter commercial work. Even the commercial gigs feed his visual curiosity. “Ever go down a coal mine?” he asks. “It’s white. You would think it would be black. It’s covered in lime because coal dust is explosive.”

Llewellyn, 65, may have thought he had seen everything until he worked on his latest book, with the garden writer Nancy Ross Hugo. It’s called “Seeing Trees.”

I find it ironic that the largest plants in the garden — spreading oaks, columnar tulip trees, big old hollies — are the least perceived. They are taken for granted, until they die or a limb comes crashing down.

The authors have brought the level of observation to new heights, presenting the daintiest parts of trees — buds, flower parts and seeds in various stages of ripening — in a way that hasn’t been seen, generally.

Llewellyn had always seen trees as important aesthetic forms in landscape photography. But when he worked with Hugo on an earlier book, “Remarkable Trees of Virginia,” he saw them differently. “First, they were living things, they are born, they die. And second, they live in communities.” In his new book, he has discovered that minute detail reveals something else, an unexpected and alien beauty.

What do we see when we look, and look closely? The maturing acorns of the sawtooth oak are wrapped in coarse tufts, like sea anemones; the pink flower of the redbud, in isolation, resembles a hummingbird; and the common Virginia pine tree sports baby, adolescent and mature cones all on the same branch.

The images reflect a depth of detail that until now, only the best botanical illustrators could approach. Llewellyn has used innovative digital camera technology to overcome the limitations of macro-photography. Normally, if you take an extreme close-up with a macro lens, the required aperture allows only a small area of soft focus surrounded by blur. Llewellyn figured out how to get around that.

In his photo studio, he takes a twig of post oak from his garden, removes a plump light - brown bud and cuts it in half. It’s not much bigger than a peppercorn. He places the sections below a camera mounted vertically on a motorized shaft. He taps a control panel and soon the camera is flashing away on its own. Over a couple of minutes, it takes 26 frames as it travels the grand distance of about an eighth of an inch closer to the buds. A computer then assembles the sharpest areas of each image into one composite picture: On a screen, we see sliced post oak buds in full and extreme detail. The bud scales enwrap embryonic leaves waiting for spring. They are green and tipped with translucent hairs. Each hair is visible. It is not the clarity of the image itself that is moving, but what it reveals.