Several decades in the past, Vacation Bible School was a highlight of my summers: my sister and I spent the week at our church feasting on frosted animal crackers and red Kool-Aid, crafting crosses out of yarn and tongue depressors, and learning Bible songs that I still remember today. One of my absolute favorites was (still is!) “All God’s Creatures Have a Place in the Choir,” a joyful little number about how every animal’s voice fits together to complete a huge chorus of praise.
But I was pretty sure that chorus didn’t include every animal. Because, seriously, there’s no way God would want spiders in his choir.
I’ve never liked spiders. Not even a little bit. I can appreciate the vital role they play in our ecosystem. I am grateful for each biting insect they dispatch. I can, from a very generous distance, be fascinated by the engineering and artistry of their webs. But spiders themselves make me twitch, shudder and move in the opposite direction at high speed.
So when I ventured into the ditches for this photo project, I was pretty careful about checking around each flower, wielding a stick like a fencing sword to clear away webs. The spires of hoary vervain I found seemed pretty clean, so I carried them into the house, plunked them into vases and started shooting.
Then I saw the legs.
Some interesting information about hoary vervain: blossoms will bloom all along the spires, but not all at the same time. When the blossoms are done blooming, they fall from the spire, leaving behind little pockets in the spire that are exactly the right size for spiders to live in. Pale, creepy little spiders that lean out of those pockets and wave their pale, creepy little legs at a photographer, as if to make her run screaming from the room.
It almost worked. If you heard an unexplained rattling sound in Mills County on July 9, that was my vertebrae rattling from the shuddering as more and more pale, creepy little spider legs poked out of the hoary vervain in my studio. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
But vervain is a cool flower and I really wanted it to be represented in this project, so I pulled myself together and kept shooting – although I have to confess that I didn’t linger over it for very long! The spiders did make me bend my post-processing rules, too – I used Photoshop to remove all the spider legs from the final shot. Ugh.
Hoary Vervain, Verbena stricta
Shoot date: July 9, 2019
Possible use as a cut flower: Yep! The purple blossoms will drop if jiggled. And watch out for hitchhikers. Shudder.
