Spring ephemerals are among the most fleeting of flowers, emerging for just a brief period every spring. These tiny plants grow early during the season on the forest floor, after the ground has thawed and before the trees have started to sprout their leaves, and their duration above ground is short and sweet: Certain varieties, such as bloodroot and twinleaf, only bloom for about 24 to 48 hours. It’s, therefore, no easy photographic feat to capture these native plants — yet photographer Jackie Bailey Labovitz managed to photograph 16 exquisite images, which are now part of her “UNDERSTORY” exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History, Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, and Norfolk Botanical Garden.

“It was amazing that I was able to get 16 great images in 34 days,” says Labovitz. “In the case of the twinleaf, for example, the petals are very tenuously attached — the first rain or wind that comes after it first opens just takes them right off. It’s working against the clock.”

There were 15 flowers in total (there’s a double of the white trillium, which turns pink as it gets taller, almost transforming it into a completely different flower). “Of the 15 plants, only five of them aren’t on the endangered or threatened species list, according to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service,” says Labovitz. “Plus, the plants in this series are all native plants — meaning they were here before this country was settled. It’s very interesting. In the case of the Dutchmen’s breeches, for example, the only bee that can get into that flower is the bumblebee, because its tongue is 8mm long; the honeybee, on the other hand, which is not a native insect (it was brought from overseas), only has a 6mm tongue and can’t get in there.”

The backstory behind each plant featured in “Understory”also lends a personality to each and every specimen. “Twinleaf in particular is very interesting to me — it’s named after Thomas Jefferson, because the botanists who came to America thought he was America’s first serious botanist,” says Labovitz. “It blooms around the 13th of April, which is his birthday. Or it’s interesting that the root of the dwarf iris was used by the Greeks to make macaroni: They ground it and put it in the flour to keep it together. With the exception of two, all of these plants have historically been used for medicinal purposes by Native Americans and even modern man. Recent research has shown, for example, that there may be something in mayapple that might help stop cancer cells from dividing.”

Foraging for Photos on the Forest Floor

Labovitz captured these photos over a nearly five-week span last April 2 through May 4, not more than an hour from her home in the Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge Mountains. “I went to a managed wildlife area, as well as a state park 10 minutes across the road from me,” she says. She concedes it’s tricky figuring out, year to year, the ideal time to search for these specimens. “Last year, for instance, we had a huge blizzard, then a hot spell. Everything must have been tricked and bloomed at the same time. This year, everything is much more staggered out in terms of when they’re blooming.”

Part of the challenge (in addition to finding that optimum seasonal window in which to shoot) is to locate a perfect specimen (“I have to find one that hasn't been banged up and that’s in a complete state, without leaves blown off”) and perfect lighting. “In a lot of the field guides, the images are really good, but they all look like they were taken in the light of Miami,” says Labovitz. “I wanted to take them in their natural light, however, so people can get a sense of how it would feel in the forest at that time. So, if you look at a lot of them, you’ll see they have a brown background — that’s because that’s when the leaf mulch is out. There’s nothing green around when the earliest ones bloom. You get this fabulous sense of the smell and the location that they’re in, and the light in which they actually perform photosynthesis.”

Labovitz would try to be on the road 40 minutes before sunrise and would often shoot until the sun went down. “I mostly shoot in the afternoon, because a lot of these plants close up at night, and they’re not open in the morning,” she explains. “If it happens to be cloudy or overcast, they also don’t open. So many people say don’t shoot in the middle of the day, but these plants might not be open until the middle of the day. For one shot of the dwarf iris, I waited for just the right light for 45 minutes. I was in a ditch, waiting for it to be backlit just the right way. Plus it had spotlights on it from the few leaves that were already on the trees.”

Exclusively using the 28-300mm lens, Labovitz’s workhorse lens since 2003, allowed Labovitz to capture these flowers just the way she envisioned. “I almost always shoot at 300,” she says. “This lens lets me get exactly what I’m looking for. Shooting at 300 and having shot with that lens for so long, I can estimate how far the background is, how far the foreground is. Plus it’s so light — and when you hike 13 hours a day, the weight makes an enormous difference.”

Thanks to her training in the fine arts, Labovitz was able to capture these often “sculptural” flowers using more traditional compositional ideas. “I’m very influenced by minimalism: Less is more,” she says. “Most people who see these images think they’re paintings. Each plant has its focal point, and they’re formally arranged in terms of thirds, repetition, the Golden Mean, the Golden Triangle, and so forth. I spend a lot of time figuring out how much negative space to give these images: How close do you go up or down? How much do you crop it in?”

Labovitz literally is down on her stomach, elbowing her way through the mud and leaves to get just the right perspective. “If I’m just shooting slightly up, I’m flat on my belly lying on the ground — I’m basically just looking for a lone, perfect specimen that happens to be a long way from a huge mass of color,” she says. “For example, I found a specimen of pink lady’s slipper a little bit up on a knoll, so I shot up into the trees: If you look carefully, you can see the trunks of the trees.”

Shooting the flowers at their level is also a sign of respect. “These are very small plants: The smallest one is 4 inches tall, and the tallest is 18 inches,” she says. “I didn’t want to be in this sort of condescending position. Almost everyone just photographs them with a tripod, standing up, which kind of belittles them.”

No tripod for Labovitz, who sets her camera down right on the ground. “I’ll dig out a little hole and, if there are rocks around, put rocks underneath it so the camera is flush with the ground,” she says. “I put my eye up to the viewfinder to make sure it’s stabilized and as steady as can be, but most of the time it’s just using whatever happens to be there — sometimes you’ll find a tree trunk that’s in just the right place!” Labovitz also occasionally uses a Slik tabletop tripod (“it has a little suction cup that goes right down in the dirt”) and a Wimberley Plamp (one end clamps to your tripod, the other end to the object — “it’s hard to use the Plamp often, because these flowers are so delicate”).

One last way Labovitz tries to emphasize the significance of these plants is by printing them on canvas in three sizes: 8x10, 16x20, and 24x30. “Even at 8x10, these plants appear larger than they are in real life,” she says. “When you take a show at the Norfolk Botanical Garden, they’re all 24x30, which really makes people notice them. Maybe people will start to realize how important these things are: In addition to their medicinal qualities, they have other purposes. For example, in the case of the trout lily, it forms a whole mat under trees that helps prevent erosion; because it’s one of the earliest blooming plants, it also provides food for the queen bee so she can feed her workers to get started for the season. I want people to see these plants in a new light.”

For more of Jackie Bailey Labovitz’s images, go to www.easternunderstory.com. UNDERSTORY will be on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Naturalist Center through the end of the summer; the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley through July; and Norfolk Botanical Garden through May.