Testing various techniques for photographing flowers

I am hoping to start making blog entries more often. Of course, I've made this decision at least twice before and didn't follow through. I would appreciate folks subscribing and adding comments. I think that would cause me to be more consistent. I believe you need to create a user id for this and since this is a Google product, using a Google ID should work. I am experimenting with different techniques taking pictures of flowers. This started from watching a YouTube video that suggested a longer lens, wide aperture, and shooting down low. I used my Canon RF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM Z lens and some sample shots are thus:

The problem I see is that the close and far edge of the flowers are not in focus. These were shot at 200mm, f/5.0, 1/640, ISO 100. The calculated depth of field is 1/32 of an inch with the subject distance at 20 inches (roughly the closest this lens can focus). To address this issue, I tried focus bracketing and stacking. A few samples using this technique are here:

If you look very closely, you can see stacking artifacts. The wind was blowing slightly when I captured the images. So, the challenge would be to either wait until the wind behaves or spend more time in the software that stacks the images and remove the artifacts. From experience I know that even with stacking the depth of field has issues when two surfaces overlap in the image that have a large difference in depth. The close surface will create a fuzzy band when the far surface comes into focus creating a halo edge around the close surface. Kodak calls this "subject failure". Only hand editing using area cloning can resolve this tyep of issue and with the details of the flowers, that's not going to work. So... how about ignoring the YouTube video, go with a wide angle lens, stop down, and get a depth of field that is the depth of the flower? The DOF calculator in PhotoPills says a 35mm at first/8.0 has a depth of field of three inches if the subject distance is 20 inches. Great!! Well... No. For a 35mm lens, the subject distance is closer to eight inches. At that subject distance, the depth of field drops back down to 17/32 of an inch. But... here are a few samples anyway:

The problems here are multiple. The far back edge of the flower still isn't in focus and the soft defuse background is gone. The background could be faked by post processing but that defeats the purpose of all this experimentation. So... I think strategic use of focus bracketing will be what I will do if the conditions are right. Otherwise, I'm going with the single shot at 200mm perhaps stopping down as much as possible but the DOF is still not going to cover the entire depth of most flowers. The other challenge is most flowers point up so to get a good shot of the open flower, the camera is more verticle than recommended.