I know more about cosh* than cohosh. That said, on the way back home from the Midwest we stopped for a couple of nights in Bentonville, Arkansas, to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum for a second time, and on the museum’s landscaped grounds on June 20th I photographed some appealing flowers and buds of black cohosh, Actaea racemosa var. racemosa. The genus name was formerly Cimicifuga, which means ‘makes bedbugs go away,’ and an alternate common name is bugbane, but whether black cohosh really has that property, I don’t know.

If you’re interested in the craft of photography, I’ll add that in taking this picture I made good use of point 4 in About My Techniques. The fact that a shaft of sunlight illuminated the black cohosh inflorescence amplified the contrast between black and white. Points 1, 2, and 18 also came into play.

* In trigonometry, cosh is the hyperbolic cosine.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman