In the garden they hang downward. On this stamp they stand up and glow.
Angel's trumpets — large, trumpet-shaped blossoms with a distinctive sweet scent — are a summer favourite, and this four-cent definitive celebrates them. Photographer Harold Davis backlit the flowers on a light box and combined multiple exposures, so colour comes through the petals rather than reflecting off them, then laid the image over a scan of aged paper. “The point of this technique is to create a partially transparent effect,” he says. He also arranged the stems so the four trumpets point upward, unlike their natural habit, after finding that photographing them facing down simply did not work — the plant's common name suggesting the solution. The flowers came from his own Berkeley neighbourhood. The stamp follows the low-denomination flower issues of 2024 and was designed by art director Ethel Kessler with an existing image by Davis.
Four cents, and unusually beautiful for the price.
PERFECT FOR: making up postage on parcels, journal pages, flower and botanical collections, small gifts for gardeners, and the envelope that is two cents short.
