Lingering fog will ruin Jacqueline Koch’s day.

So will a breeze.

“I have a constant struggle with  movement,” Koch said. “It’s incredible how much plants really move.”

Koch, an internationally-recognized photographer, lives in Coupeville.

Part of the year she spends as a news photographer in Asia. But summer finds her back on Whidbey Island for gardening’s high season.

Koch doesn’t do much digging, planting or watering. Instead, she captures garden essences on high-quality film. Her color-saturated images highlight foliage along with flowers.

Her photographs are the heart of Sasquatch Book’s just-released “The Big Book of Northwest Perennials,” a book which Marty Wingate, garden writer and garden columnist for the Seattle P-I, wrote.

Koch said this book features plant portraits instead of landscape gardens, beds or container shots. She took many photos in Whidbey Island gardens, primarily Bayview Farm and Garden, Rosehip in Coupeville and Leslie Johnson and Walter Beebe’s garden in Oak Harbor.

Koch’s photos drip with color — a testament to her patience in waiting for ideal early morning or late afternoon light.

“Sometimes I missed her visits,” Leslie Johnson said. “She shoots at dawn. She’s gone before I got up.”

One of Koch’s most useful photography tools — in addition to slide film and a tripod — is the telephone.

Calling gardeners to check Whidbey Island’s varied climates helps her nail down conditions up and down the island.

Right light and weather are key to Koch’s composed, interesting shots, she said.

Although her photos are exquisite, they aren’t artificial. Koch doesn’t hold plants in place with tape or use tiny brushes to brush away every speck of pollen.

“It’s important a photo looks good but I want to stay true to movement in the garden,” she said.

“Nature does such a good job, I just look at what nature does,” Koch added to her philosophy. “I don’t have to manufacture anything.”

She sees what she considers overdone shots in magazines and books regularly.

“I’m not a big garden stylist. I don’t use a mister,” she said.

So rain drops gleaming on Alchemilla alpina or lady’s mantle on page 61 didn’t come from a watering can or hose. Koch shot the plant just as she found it one morning.

Koch limits her manipulation of the garden to picking off a dead bloom or shriveled leaf and waiting for insects to buzz off.

Taking interesting shots requires interesting plants. Wingate and Koch agreed they didn’t want to produce a high-school annual effect. Koch photographed different varieties of common plants: double delphinium and yellow foxglove. A Pacific Coast iris and a coral-red daylily.

The most spectacular photograph might be of a Himalayan blue poppy on page 215. Gardeners know Meconopsis betonicifolia as a tricky plant to raise much less get to flower.

“I bought at Rosehip and was so excited it bloomed,” Koch said. The plant died not long after it bloomed but the photo’s immortal.

Other common perennials received uncommon treatments. Koch shot many perennials from a different perspective. Instead of focusing on the Serbian bellflower’s noted fluted bloom, she focused on the back of the flower showing contrast of Campanula poscharskyana’s pale, but bright, maroon foliage against the delicate pale blue flowers.

A shot of a viola is angled, not centered, on the page. Some might consider violas or pansies, pedestrian, old-lady nosegays. Not this viola. Its midnight purple, gold and lavender with tiny almost-green center is exotic.

She wants her photographs to inspire people but she wants gardeners to realize they can grow what she shoots.

Her devotion to shooting plants with little styling might inhibit her career.

“I don’t get as much work as I should because I’m not a stylist,” she laughed.

Her photographs may lack styling but they aren’t without style.

Gary Luke, Sasquatch Books’ vice president of editorial, calls Koch one of the company’s finest garden photographers.

In an e-mail Luke wrote, “She has a sense of floral beauty, garden composition and horticultural obsession.”

Luke compares Koch’s work to that of Richard Avedon who was famous for his portraits of celebrities and whose fashion shots helped create the era of the supermodel.

“These are images that create desire,” Luke wrote.

Koch said her favorite photo in the book is that of Euphorbia griffithii on page 152.

Late fog eventually lifted and sun came out. Koch caught illumination through “Firethorn’s” bracts and stems before condensation burned off.

The page glows.

“The Big Book of Northwest Perennials” retails for $24.95.