Picture Perfect Belfast photographer Lynn Karlin has spent years capturing Maine gardens

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Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson earned his reputation as one of the 20th century’s best photographers by capturing the perfect moment. He would pick a place he liked, set up his camera and wait: perhaps for a man walking by wearing a certain type of hat or a bicyclist angled just so.

Sometimes the wait lasted hours.

Like Cartier-Bresson, Belfast photographer Lynn Karlin looks for perfect moments. But this chronicler of Maine gardens has been known to wait years for the right shot.

“I go back to gardens two or three times a year. If a garden is too new, I’ll wait a year or two and then go back,” she says. “I’m very patient.”

Even once she sets up her camera, she still waits hours sometimes “for the flowers to stop moving, for the wind and light.”

And her results justify the effort.

Her work includes lush close-ups: Spiky lily stamens dusted with yellow pollen and silhouetted against white, chartreuse-tinged petals, deep red jalapeno peppers curled around each other’s green stems in an intricate pattern. And then there are the larger vistas: a front porch heavy with purple wisteria blooms; a marmalade cat looking out over red daylilies tilting toward a misty shorefront; and a massive moss covered stonewall standing watch over delicate ferns.

In addition to capturing gardens in their summer peak, Karlin shows the same vistas in wintertime to illustrate the importance of structure.

After more than a decade of photographing gardens around the state, returning time and time again to the same places to check on their growth, the 52-year-old Karlin has pulled her photographs together in “Gardens Maine Style” published this year by Down East Books.

Writer Rebecca Sawyer-Fay, whose articles have accompanied Karlin’s photographs over the years in New York-based Country Living Gardener magazine, wrote the text for the coffee-table-size book.

“Gardens Maine Style” includes chapters about gardens by camps and cottages, in-town and by the sea, flower as well as vegetable. One chapter lists horticultural parks and nurseries and restaurants with kitchen gardens while another notes places where gardeners can buy garden crafts and vintage artifacts.

Garden connoisseurs will appreciate the careful attention to detail as plants are always identified and the text includes useful tips for planning and planting.

“A lot of people don’t have time to see other gardens because the season is so short and so busy,” Karlin said. “This was a chance to give them a garden tour that they can hold in their hands.”

Karlin knows her medium better than most. When she first moved to Maine in 1983, she and her then husband, Stanley Joseph, raised and sold vegetables on land that once belonged to back-to-the-land icons Scott and Helen Nearing.

That’s when Karlin first started photographing greenery.

A Queens, N.Y., native, she trained at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn before spending more than a decade working as a photographer in New York City. She specialized in shooting interiors, fashion and celebrities and quickly made a name for herself. Karlin was the first female staff photographer hired by Women’s Wear Daily and later worked for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, House Beautiful and County Living.

But even then, she was thinking about wide, open, spaces.

“Ever since I was little I had dreamed about a cabin in the woods. I read lots of books about the country,” she said, citing several, including the Nearings’ back-to-the-land classic, “Living the Good Life.”

A chance visit to Maine with a friend who wanted her to meet the Nearings changed her life forever. When the two arrived at the Nearing farm in the village of Harborside on Cape Rosier, a sign at the gate said visiting hours did not begin until later in the day. Seeking to fill the time, Karlin went to the farm next door, where she met her future husband.

Eight months later she moved to Maine for good. During the years she lived and worked on the farm raising produce for area inns and restaurants with Joseph, Karlin took photos of her garden. Eventually an editor friend in New York suggested she put that work into a book. The result was “Maine Farm, a Year of Country life,” written by Joseph with photographs by Karlin. Now out of print, the book is sought-after for its lovely photos and informative, entertaining text.

During the years on the farm she never had time to visit other people’s gardens. So when she moved to Belfast in 1992 (she chose the small seaside city because she liked the airport and the Belfast Co-op), she reveled in the opportunity to get out and see what other green thumbs were doing.

Karlin keeps herself busy. Her own garden is small because she has little time to care for it. When she’s not out taking photographs, she might be flying her single-engine Cessna to Stonington for lunch, or teaching dance at the Camden American Legion Hall. She’s had her pilot’s license for close to 14 years and started teaching country, partner and line dancing under the name Kountry Karlin, before expanding to other musical genres.

“I like line dancing,” she says. “I like dancing alone, you can get into your own rhythm and you can express yourself.”

Boxes of slides line the walls of her office. A pile of garden books on a side table awaits winter when she will have time to read.

“I have all these jobs that have to go out,” says Karlin, who sells many of her stock of 30,000 garden images to publications all over the world. “It’s really frustrating because now is when I really should be out shooting gardens.”

Trim, with deep, blue eyes, short, wavy brown hair and a wide mouth, usually stretched wider in an infectious grin, she twinkles with enthusiasm, speaking excitedly about her work with a slight New York accent. Showing a visitor around her small bungalow, she proudly shows off an extensive collection of books about flying and then in the next minute pulls out a volume of spare, elegant black-and-white photographs of Paris, and another book of black-and-white close-ups of vegetables taken by British photographer Charles Jones in the 19th century.

She says she prefers black-and-white, an apparent contradiction for a women whose work sparkles with color. But the clean composition of her garden shots echoes the stark simplicity and clarity of good black-and-white photos.

“I look for gardens with good bones,” she says, “trellises, arbors, walls, things that will look good any time of the year.”

Karlin uses a Nikon N90 camera and Fujichrome Velvia film. The extremely slow slide film (50 ASA) requires the use of a tripod. She prefers the Velvia film because it minimizes the graininess of her photos and provides good color saturation.

Many of her garden shots include cats. This is no coincidence. While still living in New York, Karlin shot the photos for a New York Magazine story on celebrities and their cats and for a Ladies Home Journal article on celebrities and their dogs. For the past three years, she has contributed to Cats in the Garden, a calendar printed by Fulcrum Publishing.

The garden book is out, but that does not mean Karlin is finished with her tour of Maine’s green thumbs. She’s always on the lookout for new gardens. Does the reporter know of any good gardens outside mobile homes? she asks.

“When I was a kid I loved scavenger hunts. That’s what I do now,” she says. “And I get so exited when I find a new garden. It makes me happy to be able to spotlight some of these places that might otherwise never be seen.”

Photographer Lynn Karlin and writer Rebecca Sawyer-Fay will be on hand 9 a.m.-noon Saturday, Aug. 25, to sign copies of “Gardens Maine Style” at the Camden Farmers Market. 273-2809.