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Lilium Regale, the Regal Lily and Its History (2 of 2)

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From “Picturing the Lily” in Lily (Botanical) by Marcia Reiss:

“More than any other science, botany depends on pictures. The fragility of plants and even dried specimens, which lose their living colour and form, make scientific study difficult. Botanical illustrations made plants visible and reproducible for analysis. They evolved from hand-drawn copies and crude woodcuts of stylized plants in medieval herbals to finely detailed copper etchings and splendid colour lithographs in lavish folios, books and magazines. In the process, which unfolded over centuries along with new botanical discoveries and developments in printmaking techniques, they presented a more complete natural history of nearly every plant and flower, including extraordinary images of many different kinds of lilies….

“By the early seventeenth century flowers were increasingly grown, not only for food or medicine but also purely for their beauty and decorative qualities…. As gardening became increasingly popular, botanical illustrations found new outlets in periodicals that combined botanical discoveries with horticultural information. Published in Britain, France, Belgium, Germany and America, they appealed to a wide readership. Many of the plants discovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had their debut in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, first published in London in 1797 by William Curtis, an apothecary-turned-botanist, and still produced by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Veitch Nurseries, one of the most important plant collectors in the nineteenth century, displayed more than 400 of its plant introductions in the magazine, including the wild lilies discovered in Asia by Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson.

“Despite printing innovations in the first half of the twentieth century, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine used only hand-coloured plates before 1948…. After [Walter Hood] Fitch’s resignation in 1878, Matilda Smith became the chief artist. Lilian Snelling was the magazine’s chief artist from 1922 to 1952, and among her individual accomplishments was the supplement to [Henry John] Elwes’s Monograph on the Genus Lilium in the years 1934–40.”

From “Lilium regale” in Lilies: Beautiful Varieties for Home and Garden by Naomi Slade: 

“While some lilies could be considered awkward or even vexatious in the garden, delightful Lilium regale is a species that is not only magnificent to look at, but also satisfyingly easy to grow. Encountered in 1903 by legendary plant hunter Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson in the Min Valley, Sichuan Province, China, he wrote of this flower:

“‘There, in narrow, semi-arid valleys, down which thunder torrents, and encompassed by mountains composed of mud-shales and granites, whose peaks are clothed with snow eternal, the Regal Lily has its home. In summer the heat is terrific, in winter the cold is intense, and at all seasons these valleys are subject to sudden and violent wind-storms.… There, in June, by the wayside, in rock-crevices by the torrent’s edge, and high up on the mountainside and precipice, this lily in full bloom greets the weary wayfarer. Not in twos and threes but in hundreds, in thousands, aye, in tens of thousands.’

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photographs of Lilium regale — also known as the Regal Lily, Royal Lily, or King’s Lily — that I took at Oakland Cemetery earlier this summer. The first post is Lilium Regale, the Regal Lily and Its History (1 of 2), where I wrote about Ernest Henry Wilson’s expeditions and his singular connection to the Regal Lily.

In this post, we’ll take a look at Wilson’s use of photography and writing together to document his explorations and discoveries, and how that work intersected with the burgeoning interest in botanical illustration in the service of science, art, and horticulture — reflecting botany’s reliance on pictures, as described in the first excerpt above.

The first photo below is from Wilson’s book Plant Hunting: Volume 2 and the second one is from The Lilies of Eastern Asia. They are, of course, of the same scene; but I thought it was interesting that Wilson captioned them differently: the one on the left as “Her Majesty, Lilium Regale” and the other as “L. Regale Wilson” — the difference likely because Wilson’s plant hunting volumes are more informal and autobiographical, while The Lilies of Eastern Asia presents his discoveries in a scientific and naturalist context. The use of “Her Majesty, Lilium Regale” also coincides with what I discussed in the first post about Wilson’s use of monarchy-adjacent terms to describe Lilium regale — something he was more likely to do in his writings that were directed toward general audiences.

This photo appears to have been taken in a garden setting, not during any of the China trips Wilson made to gather Lilium regale specimens. Though I never could identify exactly where it was taken, it is not among those photographs I linked to in the previous post — E. H. Wilson China Expedition Photographs from the Arnold Arboretum — so I might speculate that Wilson took it later to illustrate his books rather than as an expedition image. With some exceptions, his expedition photographs were more often documentation of the locale, terrain, shrubs, trees, and assistants he employed on his trips, an approach that also reflected the ephemeral nature of the species he encountered (they may or may not have been blooming when he found them), and the nature of photography at the time, where cameras were more suitable for what we would now think of as wide-angle photography.

While photography was consistently used on botanical explorations around Wilson’s time, as his photography skills grew, Wilson became notable not only for the quantity of photographs he took, but for his profuse use of his own images in his books. His biographer Roy W. Briggs gives us some insight into that, and also helps us see where Wilson’s photography fit in the history of photography more generally, in this passage from the book “Chinese” Wilson: A Life of Ernest H. Wilson, 1876-1930:

“It is the quality as well as quantity of the photographic illustrations in Wilson’s books that sets them apart from the works of other authors of the period writing in the same field. It must have been a source of annoyance to Wilson that the technology for producing colour photographs had not been developed. The disparity between what he had originally seen projected on to the ground-glass plate at the focal plane of his camera lens and the final processed monochrome image must surely have been a disappointment to him.“

That color photography was still in its early development at the time — it was largely experimental — explains why complete documentation of encountered botanical specimens was bridged through a combination of photography and botanical art in Wilson’s era. While Wilson’s use of photography documented his expeditions and the species he encountered, publications like Curtis’s Botanical Magazine sought to appeal to scientists, horticulturalists, and gardeners of varied levels of expertise with detailed, accurately colored illustrations.

Here, for example, we have Lilium myriophyllum (an early though imprecise name assigned to Lilium regale) by Matilda Smith (from Flowers From the Royal Gardens of Kew: Two Centuries of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine), which shows not only the characteristics of a typical Regal Lily and renders its stunning colors and its growth patterns, but also includes smaller sidebar details of the flower’s unopened blossoms and its pistils:

And here’s a similar example by Lilian Snelling (from Digital Commonwealth Massachusetts Collection), where once again we see an elaborate but realistic presentation of the shapes, textures, and colors of the plant and its flowers, as well as the structure of its rooting bulbs.

For botanists, explorers, horticulturalists, and gardeners alike, this accumulated demonstration of developing botanical knowledge — starting with expedition photography like Wilson’s followed by his extensive narratives, augmented by the art in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine — provided a robust picture of the discovery and movement of previously unknown plants throughout the Western world.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Lilium Regale, the Regal Lily and Its History (1 of 2)

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From “Lilium myriophyllum” in Flowers from the Royal Gardens of Kew: Two Centuries of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine by Ruth L. A. Stiff:

“Now known as Lilium regale, this handsome lily was collected in 1903 by Ernest Henry Wilson (1876-1930), who found it growing in the semi-arid valley of the Min River in northwest Sichuan. This Chinese species is considered one of the ten best garden plants in the world. It is easy to grow, is deeply fragrant, with many funnel-shaped flowers of creamy white, and has slender stems, each from two to four feet tall. Thriving in moist but well-drained soil and requiring many hours of direct sunlight, the regal lily has been grown for over one thousand years in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean gardens.

“E. H. Wilson is considered the most famous of all the plant collectors who traveled to China. His first voyage there in 1899 was for the Veitch family, the best-known of the nineteenth-century British nurserymen. He hunted chiefly for the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University from 1907 to 1919 and eventually was appointed Keeper of that institution. It is estimated that as many as six hundred of his one thousand or so introductions are still in cultivation.

“During Wilson’s celebrated return trip to the valley of the Min in the fall of 1910, when he and twenty accompanying porters and collectors harvested over six thousand regal lily bulbs for distribution throughout North America and the British Isles, his caravan was struck by a disastrous rock slide on a narrow mountain pass. Wilson, whose leg was broken in two places, was forced to lie still while pack mules walked over him in an attempt to vacate the path.

“Recalling this episode in his book Plant Hunting (1927), Wilson later wrote: ‘How many people know the size of a mule’s hoof? Quite a number have felt the strength of a mule’s leg and the sharpness of his teeth; his obstinacy is a proverb. But the size of his hoof is another matter. Frankly, I do not know with mathematical exactness but, as I lay on the ground and more than forty of these animals stepped over my prostrate form, the hoof seemed enormous, blotting out my view of the heavens.’ Miraculously, Wilson sustained no further injury, but the limp that was to plague him for the rest of his life became affectionately known as his ‘lily limp.'”


From “Enumeration of Species: Lilium regale” in The Lilies of Eastern Asia by Ernest Henry Wilson:

“This Lily has a surprisingly limited distribution being confined to about fifty miles of the narrow semi-arid valley of the Min River in extreme western Szech’uan between 2,500 and 6,000 feet altitude — a region where the summers are hot and the winters severely cold and where strong winds prevail at all seasons of the year. I never saw it wild outside of this valley, which is walled in by steep mountain slopes culminating in perpetual snows. There it grows in great plenty among grasses and low shrubs and in niches on the bare cliffs. From the last week in May to the first in July, according to altitude, the blossoms of this Lily transform a desolate lonely region into a veritable garden of beauty. Its fragrance fills the air and ’tis good to travel there when the Regal Lily is in bloom, though the path is hard and dangerous as personal experience and notices in Chinese characters carved in the rocks, urging all not to loiter save beneath the shelter of hard cliffs, testify.

“It was my privilege to discover this Lily in August, 1903, and in the autumn of the year following sent about three hundred bulbs to Messrs. Veitch. These arrived safely in the spring of 1905, flowered that summer and were afterwards distributed under the erroneous name of “Lilium myriophyllum.” In 1908 I shipped with indifferent success bulbs of this Lily to the Arnold Arboretum and to some friends, but in 1910 I succeeded in introducing it in quantity to America and the stock passed from the Arnold Arboretum to Messrs. R. and J. Farquhar and Co., Boston, Mass….

“Under cultivation in Europe and America the Regal Lily has behaved royally, being equally indifferent to winter colds, summer droughts and deluges and has flowered and fruited annually. It is the only Lily of its class that ripens seeds in the climate of New England. The seeds germinate freely and many millions of bulbs have been raised. It forces well even after cold storage and there seems no reason why it should not become the ‘Easter Lily’ of the future….

“The pollen is very cohesive, which makes shipping the plants in flower a comparatively easy matter, and the fragrance of the blossoms is pleasant, being not so strong as that of related species. The canary-yellow of the inside of the funnel contrasts well with the lustrous and translucent, marble-white upper part of the segments, and often the rose-purple is pleasingly tinted through, more especially if the flowers are allowed to open indoors or in light shade as under cheese-cloth. Some critics object to the coloured flowers, some to the narrow leaves, but in adding it to western gardens the discoverer would proudly rest his reputation with the Regal Lily….”

Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photographs of Lilium regale, a historically and botanically significant plant and flower whose common names include Regal Lily, Royal Lily, and King’s Lily — names that emerged during imperial British explorations of Asian countries such as China and Japan, and reflect the sense that this lily was both opulent in appearance and impressive in its ability to conquer its environment.

The flowers of the Regal Lily are among the largest of those produced by any lily, in a recurved trumpet or funnel shape extending five to six inches across. Strong, densely-leaved plant stems may stretch six feet, with multiple flowers emerging on any given stem. Here you can see what I often find when photographing these lilies at Oakland Cemetery, where the volume and weight of the flowers — especially after a windy thunderstorm — pushes the mass of plants into a horizontal position, yet with nearly all of the flowers intact and the stems bent but not a single one broken.

This sort of presentation might not seem ideal, aesthetically and photographically speaking — but that doesn’t matter to the lily, whose growth, flower production, and pollination strategies are only minimally impacted despite tipping over. And as you can see from the photos below — and those in the next post — for the photographer it’s just a matter of slinking among the leaves to get a satisfactory point of view on the plant’s stunning blooms.

The introduction of Lilium regale to British (and United States) horticulture began with the Chinese expeditions of Ernest Henry Wilson in the early twentieth century. Wilson — a botanical explorer and avid photographer — made several trips to China during which he encountered the Regal Lily and collected hundreds of bulbs to expatriate. Any research you encounter on Wilson — like the first excerpt I included at the top of this post — will undoubtedly mention the injury he suffered on the fourth China expedition, where he broke his leg after slipping between some rocks and used parts of his camera tripod as a splint so he could be carried from the accident scene. Wilson subsequently coined the phrase “lily limp” to describe the permanent injury he suffered, and that phrase remains linked to Wilson, Regal Lilies, and his China expeditions to this day. The chapter Advent of the Lily Royal in his book Plant Hunting (Volume 2) contains his elaborate and occasionally self-deprecating description of the events, and you can learn more about Wilson’s China trips and see some of his photographs at these links:

1907 – 1909: First Expedition to China

1910 – 1911: Expedition to China

E. H. Wilson China Expedition Photographs

I hit briefly on the significance of the introduction of Lilium regale to European and American botany in one of my posts about Lilium speciosum — Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (2 of 3) — where I quoted from Naomi Slade’s book Lilies: Beautiful Varieties for the Home and Garden:

“While fabulous, lilies had gained a reputation for being challenging and capricious to cultivate. They were exciting; they were expensive; and they were quite likely to die on you after a couple of years. Inevitably, they attracted a certain type of well-heeled horticultural brinksmanship, right up until amenable Lilium regale emerged, bringing down both prices and the level of skill required to cultivate this most desirable of flowers.”

The other lilies I’ve photographed this year — such as Tiger Lilies, Japanese Show Lilies, and Formosa Lilies — were well known to early twentieth-century botanists, as they had all been encountered and transitioned to Western horticulture in the nineteenth century. Each species was being actively and broadly studied, hybridized, and sometimes naturalized in new environments for decades before Wilson’s Asian expeditions. But each transplanted lily species also presented often futile growing challenges for gardeners — as Slade describes above — until Wilson fetched the previously unknown Regal Lily from China, first in 1903.

As Wilson describes it — in the second excerpt above, from his book The Lilies of Eastern Asia — this hardy Regal Lily, found in remote and difficult-to-explore locations in China’s mountains, adapted well to European and North American gardens, as it “behaved royally, being equally indifferent to winter colds, summer droughts and deluges and has flowered and fruited annually.” This single statement helps us see how gardening with lilies moved from a specialized activity of horticultural experts, to something gardeners of any level of expertise could do — and how it can happen that, over 120 years later, we find a large batch of Regal Lilies at Oakland Cemetery producing robust, colorful, and fully intact flowers despite having been nearly knocked to the ground by the wind.

As a primary source for research, Wilson’s firsthand and comprehensive account — from which I excerpted just three paragraphs — also tells us a lot about this pivotal moment in the botanical history of lily distribution from Asian regions to the West. We can derive from his account how Liliium regale’s geographic presence was originally quite limited, contributing to its absence from Western lily culture until Wilson’s expeditions. The narrative gives us insight into the physical difficulties plant explorers faced and how they overcame them — often only over multiple expeditions — to redistribute their specimens to their home countries and foster subsequent propagation and commercial development. The excerpt even demonstrates how botanical naming conventions evolve: Lilium regale was initially marketed and sold under the name “Lilium myriophyllum” — a name that you will still find in historical resources — and Wilson’s suggestion that the Regal Lily might become the “Easter lily of the future” was applied to a different lily entirely, Lilium longiflorum rather than Lilium regale. Yet Wilson’s preference for describing this lily as “behaving royally” — or elsewhere describing it with numerous monarchy-adjacent terms — did stick throughout subsequent decades, which is why this lily’s most common nicknames Regal Lily, Royal Lily, and King’s Lily sound like they were anointed by The Crown rather than this intrepid, determined explorer.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Discovering the Formosa Lily (3 of 3)

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From “Lilium formosanum” in Lilies by Henry John Elwes:

“This remarkable lily was found by Charles Wilford, a Kew collector, on the coast of Keeling in western Taiwan (Formosa) in June 1858, but does not seem to have been known in Britain till 1881, when it bloomed in Messrs Veitch’s nursery at Chelsea.

“The bulbs were sent to Messrs Veitch by… one of their collectors who found them in Taiwan, and they were offered in the firm’s catalogue of plants for 1881, at ten shillings-and-sixpence and one-guinea apiece…. [John Gilbert] Baker had previously described the lily as a variety of L. longiflorum, and it was illustrated in Veitch’s catalogue as L. longiflorum var. formosanum…. It is readily distinguished from L. longiflorum by the narrower leaves and longer, narrower trumpet as well as by the purplish colouring outside….

“In 1912 [William Robert] Price…. gathered seeds of this lily at 2050 m on Mount Morrison. A stock of bulbs was soon raised from these seeds and distributed to the botanic gardens at Kew, Edinburgh and Glasnevin and to friends and, until a few years ago, that stock was the source of all specimens of Price’s lily in this country…. It has been found useful as a rock-garden plant since it flowers very quickly from seed…..

“The behaviour of the type plant under cultivation suggests that the taller forms are not generally suitable for outdoor cultivation in British gardens. Possibly autumnal frost and damp may destroy the leaves before they have had a chance of replenishing the bulb. However, they have succeeded in some places. As a cool greenhouse plant it is excellent, but its susceptibility to virus diseases makes it desirable to raise fresh stocks from seed at frequent intervals. In fact it has been used frequently as a test plant to establish by inoculation whether a virus is present or not…..

“Much the same may be written of the taller-growing variant of L. formosanum, to which E. H. Wilson refers as growing among Miscanthus grass in the Nanto prefecture of Taiwan…. He wrote:

“‘I have noticed that at altitudes above 1800 m this lily takes on a different form. In the plains the flower is pure white, but as one ascends the perianth becomes faintly marked with red on the reverse. Above 1800 m it is wonderfully different, being quite a small slender plant about 31 cm high with a perianth of conforming size. At the higher elevations the red markings become deeper and take the form of rich, red bands on the keels of the perianth segments. The change is so gradual and continuous that it is obviously the same species all the time.’

“Few lilies vary more than this in their behaviour in different parts of the country, and for reasons probably partly due to the later start in spring growth, and perhaps partly climatic, it seems to be more successfully grown on the other side of the border than in the south of England. In southern gardens it is happiest in full sun, but with the shelter of dwarf shrubs to screen the stem-roots and protect the vernal growth of the stem from the rigours of the climate….

“The plant is unusually quick to reach the flowering stage from the sowing of the seeds, and in October single flowers have appeared on stems of bulbs of which the seeds were sown in February of the same year. In eastern North America specimens of L. formosanum grew to 2.25 m high and carried more than 30 blooms. The remarkable length of the flower is a characteristic of both the alpine and tall forms; it may be as much as 10 cm long.”

Hello!

This is the third of three posts with photographs of a lily with the scientific name Lilium formosanum — also known by the common names Formosa Lily, Taiwan Lily, or Taiwanese Lily — at Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Discovering the Formosa Lily (1 of 3); and the second post is Discovering the Formosa Lily (2 of 3).

Together these three posts show how well the Formosa Lily adapts to different environments, from its sandy full-sun location in the first post; to the more shaded location in the second post; to this location among a densely packed growth of ferns. The presence of so much fern-life, alone with the nearby pond, means that this third location likely has not only higher humidity but richer, more nutrient-dense soil, enabling the lily to produce darker green leaves and stems as well as large, robust flowers with swatches of pink “painted” along their ribs. While these environmental variations aren’t nearly as dramatic as those described in the excerpt at the top of this post, it’s still possible to see — by observing that sunlight and growing conditions change between sections at Oakland — how the plants’ behavior and appearance changes based on where it was planted.

Thanks for taking a look!

Discovering the Formosa Lily (2 of 3)

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From “Lilies in the Wild” in Lilies by Carl Feldmaier: 

“Lilium formosanum (Wallace 1891): As the name indicates, this lily comes from Formosa, where it grows among grass and bamboos in the volcanic and sandstone soils of the northern parts of the island….

“Distributed from sea level up to 10,000 feet, the height of the plant varies according to the altitude at which it is growing: at sea level its stem is 6 feet 6 inches long, decreasing to only 1 foot at an altitude of 10,000 feet…. In the subtropical lowlands, flowering follows unfailingly six to eight months after sowing, irrespective of season. But when it is grown in Europe the blooms do not appear until late October and the rather small, exhausted bulbs rarely overwinter and are often destroyed by frost.

“The very small bulbs, about 1/4 – 1/2 inches thick, are either white or pale-yellow; grass-like, leaf-covered stems of dark-purple grow to a height of 4 – 5 feet, although selection makes it possible to produce plants up to 10 feet tall. Nodding, white, funnel-shaped flowers, 4 1/2 – 6 inches long, narrow throat, wide-open mouth, tinged with pink along outside-centre rib, yellow pollen. Mostly only one or two flowers, long, cylindrical seed capsules, thin seeds with membrane around margins. Immediate germination. Easily recognized by its small bulb, which continually produces fresh shoots enabling the plant to flower throughout the year — unless damaged by frost….

“Because of its high susceptibility to virus infections, it is often used as a test plant. For this purpose it is inoculated with the sap of a lily which is suspected to have virus but shows no visible symptoms. Results are judged by whether the inoculated L. formosanum survives or dies.”

Hello!

This is the second of three posts with photographs of a lily with the scientific name Lilium formosanum, also known by the common names Formosa Lily, Taiwan Lily, or Taiwanese Lily. The first post — where I describe my discovery of this new planting at Oakland Cemetery and discuss some of its unique botanical characteristics — is Discovering the Formosa Lily (1 of 3).

The first two photographs below show something I found to be quite rare on my Formosa photoshoot: a pair of plants producing about ten blossoms simultaneously. Most of the other photographs in this series show only one or two flowers per plant — which may reflect differing soil conditions, their response to excess rain and thunderstorms damaging the plants, or other environmental factors affecting their growth cycle. Given this pair’s more protected space — it’s surrounded by trees and shrubs — it may have been safer from weather damage and reacted accordingly. This does suggest, though, that if I capture the Formosa’s at a different time in their lifecycle next year, I may find more large groupings of flowers like this. The exuberant display is likely designed to attract pollinators from greater visual distances, as part of the plant’s overall reproductive strategy.

Toward the end of these galleries, you can also see how the flowers are sometimes “tinged with pink along [the] outside-centre rib” as described in the excerpt from Lilies by Carl Feldmaier at the top of this post. You’ll see more flowers with pink tinge in the third post in this series — something the plant appears to produce when it receives less sunlight or is growing in richer, more nutrient-dense soil (as opposed to sandy soil). The presence of this additional color is a normal variation among Formosa Lilies, one that — if it is a response to less light — may be produced to encourage pollinator visits by showing them color contrasts.

Thanks for taking a look!

Discovering the Formosa Lily (1 of 3)

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From “The Species and Varieties of Lilies: Lilium formosanum” in Lilies for American Gardens by George L. Slate:

“The flowers are narrow funnel-shape, with the tips of the segments gracefully recurved, pure white within, suffused with wine-purple without, or occasionally white, fragrant, and from one to ten in number. The purple-brown stem is slender, variable in height from two to six feet, and clothed with numerous, narrow, grasslike, dark lustrous green leaves which are crowded near the base of the stem, but few in number and short below the flowers. The bulb is white, tinged with rose-purple, and nearly round. This lily is a native of Formosa from sea-level to 10,000 feet altitude, where it grows in the sun among coarse grasses in a light, well-drained, somewhat acid soil….

“L. formosanum was discovered in 1858 and in 1880 the firm of Veitch in England received bulbs which they flowered. It passed out of cultivation, but was reintroduced in 1918 by E. H. Wilson. Seeds and bulbs are now generally available from American, Oriental, and European sources in quantity at reasonable prices and the lily is rapidly increasing in popularity.

“L. formosanum… is a beautiful lily well worthy of a place in any garden. The pure white trumpets come in mid-September at Geneva, N. Y., the species remaining in flower until the first frost….

“Seeds of selected pure white strains are now available from various commercial sources. Seedlings, if started early in the year, may be expected to flower the first season and field-grown seedlings will flower the second fall…. In warmer climates the bulbs grow continuously, sending up new shoots which keep the colony in flower over a long period…. The Award of Merit of the Royal Horticultural Society was given to this species in 1921.”

Hello!

This is the first of three posts with photographs of an astonishing lily whose formal name is Lilium formosanum, also known by the common names Formosa Lily, Taiwan Lily, or Taiwanese Lily.

“Formosanum” in the plant’s species name reflects its discovery and its native location: the country of Taiwan was primarily known in the West as Formosa until the post-World War II era, after which “Formosa” declined in use in favor of “Taiwan.” As is often the case with the scientific names of plants, though, the designated species name Lilium formosanum wasn’t changed; but botanical literature would evolve to reflect the political realities by treating Formosa Lily, Taiwan Lily, or Taiwanese Lily all as informal synonyms for the same plant.

On July 17, I was at Oakland Cemetery photographing a variety of midsummer bloomers — including anemone, amaryllis, crinum, early zinnias, and many of the Japanese Show Lilies for my last three posts (see, for example, Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (3 of 3)) when I came upon these new plantings. Here’s the first photograph I took:

This is not a particularly good photograph simply because the sun was too bright to properly separate the foreground from the background and clearly show one of these plants’ most distinctive features: their height. Lucky for me, though, all I had to do was turn around to find additional plantings, where the plants were growing against a shaded background provided by numerous trees. Here their height is even more apparent and now you can see their incoming flower buds, each one a long, bright yellow oval glowing in the filtered light:

Given how much of my photography takes place at Oakland, it might seem surprising that I keep discovering new species. But the cemetery is in year seven of a 20-year, $43.5 million renovation plan, which is so comprehensive that it includes architectural and structural changes, as well as the rejuvenation of and often addition to its existing landscaping. Click the first image below if you’d like to see the entire timeline; this project started in 2018 and extends through 2037.

So for this rather obsessive botanical photographer, the ongoing renovations mean that — in addition to natural changes that occur in dynamic gardens like those at Oakland — I can often encounter newly established plantings of species I’ve never seen before from one season to the next. I can even pretend to be one of those intrepid Victorian naturalists, don my floppy hat and sport my camera, slink and shoot among the flora, then return home to scour various sites and libraries to identify and learn more about the plants.

That, of course, is exactly what I did with these Formosas, and how I learned about its unique capabilities (like those I excerpted from George Slate’s book at the top): its adaptability to multiple soil and lighting conditions; its ability to reach and maintain substantial heights and even weather thunderstorms; and — importantly for my discovery — the fact that it can achieve this growth in the same year it’s planted. I can hardly wait to see how it expands its territory in the next year or two of its lifecycle.

I wasn’t sure how long it took these lilies to bloom, though, so I had planned to go back in about two weeks from July 17th and check on their growth. Summer thunderstorms intervened, keeping me away for longer than that; but I got a second look at them about three weeks later, on August 9. On that date, some of the plants had indeed been damaged by the storms, but most showed the strength and resilience that’s typical of these lilies, many now standing nearly six feet tall, with long, nodding blooms spread across their tops. The first two photos in the galleries below provide a wide-angle view of about 15 plants at the intersection I show above; the rest (and those in my second post) are from both locations I show above, from various angles and distances to adequately represent all this lily plant’s characteristics.

In the third post in this series, I’ll show these same lilies in a different location, where they’re tucked near an Oakland pond and surrounded by ferns. The three posts together demonstrate yet another characteristic of this lily: its ability to thrive in a variety of conditions that other lilies would find intimidating. These three locations show the lily capable of excelling in: full-day sun with sandy soil; part-day sun with more compact soil it shares with smaller plants like amaryllis; and towering above thick ferns, where the sunlight is diminished and the soil — supporting the ferns — is more like that of a shade garden or even a bog. These characteristics help account for the excitement about this lily in the quotation at the top of this post, especially given that the lily achieves this level of growth in the very same year its bulbs are planted or its seeds are sown.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (3 of 3)

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From Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery: An Illustrated History and Guide by Ren and Helen Davis:

“In nineteenth-century New York, Boston, and Atlanta, the provision of burial places was another new municipal service that local governments were forced to provide as a result of their burgeoning populations. The dead became too numerous to be buried in the churchyards that had served colonial-era towns….

“Boston, whose population topped seventy thousand in 1830, created a model for addressing the burial needs of its citizens. The city government did not establish a city cemetery; rather, it delegated the task to the not-for-profit sector. Like most large urban centers, Boston had its share of voluntary associations dedicated to promoting the common good, one of which was the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The society decided to combine its interest in flora with the city’s need to bury the dead, so it created a ‘garden cemetery,’ a place where the dead would be surrounded with trees, shrubs, and flowers. The place envisioned by society members was to be not just a burial ground visited by the families of the dead, but also a destination for the living of Boston, a place where its residents could come to see a landscaped garden….

“In his 1831 address at the dedication of the cemetery, named Mount Auburn, Joseph Story explained that the crowded conditions in Boston, which is surrounded by a harbor and tidal waters, necessitated the location of the cemetery in the countryside, well beyond the city limits. Because of this, he called Mount Auburn a ‘rural’ cemetery, a descriptive that was applied to garden cemeteries in other cities….

“Other cities quickly adopted the Mount Auburn model, establishing private societies that purchased rural land, landscaped it, and sold the first lots to a wealthy elite. Philadelphia established Laurel Hill in 1836; Baltimore, Green Mount in 1838; and New York City, Greenwood in 1839. The multiple functions of the rural cemetery fit into an emerging consensus among progressive thinkers about the need for civic improvements in American cities….

“Established as a burial ground, the Atlanta City Cemetery acquired greater cultural and material significance because of its hilly location and the course of its development. Twenty-two years after its establishment, with expansions, the erection of monuments, and the growth of a cover of oak trees, the cemetery was renamed Oakland. It had become a garden cemetery with artistic monuments…. America’s larger urban centers incorporated the garden qualities of the cemetery, park, and suburb into their expanding perimeters from the 1820s to the 1870s. It was in the 1880s that Atlanta became large enough to support these developments, and Oakland Cemetery led the way…. “

Hello!

This is the third of three posts with photographs of the Oriental lily Lilium speciosum — also known by the names Japanese Lily and Japanese Show (or Showy) Lily. The first post is Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (1 of 3), and the second post is Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (2 of 3).

In my last post, I introduced these three photos, which show where the Japanese Lilies are located:

The photos show the kind of integration — across history, culture, landscape design, botany, and historical memory — that was common during the rise of Victorian garden cemeteries in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century. The entire plot is bounded by a short concrete wall on all sides, one that separates the space from those surrounding it yet still provides visual and physical access to the family memorial from any direction. More than one structure is present within the plot’s boundaries, a common occurrence in spaces like this. In this case, though, the bell-shaped monument has a ragged break at the top — one that wasn’t caused by aging but was sculpted that way, probably to represent a life cut short. The presence of grass, ferns, shrubs, and flowers within the same space softens the appearance of the monument’s more harsh stone structures, creating calming shadows while adding contrasting colors to its other visual characteristics. These elements all come together as staging for a story and a history, one that is simultaneously a narrative containing family memory while potentially indicating a family tragedy.

This space actually memorializes members of two families related by marriage — that of Daniel Dougherty and Patrick Connely, who both died in 1851, so it’s likely that the tall monument was constructed and erected around that time. The Dougherty name is inscribed on one side of the monument; the Connely name on another. Connely died of natural causes but Dougherty was murdered by a perpetrator who was never identified — an event that lends credence to the idea that the broken monument represents a tragic circumstance. The inscriptions on the broken monument are no longer legible, so this may be speculation on my part; but even if I’m wrong, you can see how interpreting a historical space while recognizing the symbolism of something like a broken structure can lead to reasonable conclusions about its original intended meaning.

You can read a bit more about Dougherty here, and Connely here; and read about the family relationship on Oakland’s Irish Resident’s page. The square building to the right of the monument is not part of the Dougherty-Connely memorial, but is that of Timothy Burke, another Irish immigrant to Atlanta who’s also mentioned on the same Irish resident’s page. It’s quite common — especially in this old section of the cemetery, its Original Six Acres established in 1850 — for memorial spaces to appear to merge from certain angles simply because they’re so close to each other, which was perhaps another reason the Dougherty-Connely section has boundaries defined with a wall.

These three photos also illustrate another defining principle of garden or rural cemeteries: their blend of constructed and natural elements that were intentionally planned to combine the two. The movements that created this element blending — which started with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston — evolved from a confluence of several emergent nineteenth-century concerns: rapidly growing populations in U.S. cities and the resulting need to expand cemeteries; backlash towards the unrelenting effects of capitalist progress and its effects on the environment; and rising worries about how urban centers detached human beings from the natural world.

Garden cemeteries like Mount Auburn or Oakland — often called “rural cemeteries” to reflect their design rather than their location — were proposed and developed with these concerns in mind. They were created as memorial spaces that served multiple purposes simultaneously, including that of providing a resource for living residents to explore history, architecture, and nature not far from their homes. The compressed history I excerpted from Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery: An Illustrated History and Guide at the top of this post connects Mount Auburn’s development to Oakland’s; and the book Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition by Aaron Sachs takes up their representation of nature and the environment, starting with an evocative description of Mount Auburn and leading us to its nationwide influence:

Many Americans came to see Mount Auburn as a new paradise. Their experiences of the cemetery, though, suggest a garden not of carelessness but of caring — not of gratification but of gratitude. It was a grounded, earthly Eden. Within just a few years, Mount Auburn became perhaps the leading tourist attraction of the young republic, often mentioned in the same breath as Niagara Falls and George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon….

The cemetery offered serenity but also excitement — a sense of seclusion in sheltered dells, but also the confusion of labyrinthine trails and the stimulation of broad views…. It taught the ravishing beauty of autumnal decay, the Romantic pleasure of melancholy. It suggested that the fullness of life could be tasted only through a constant awareness of death. It offered the consolation of regeneration even as it reinforced the pain and anxiety of limitation. It was an asylum, a sanctuary, but not necessarily an evasion. Visitors sometimes came to the cemetery not just to recuperate from modernity, but to rethink their role in it….

Both men and women spent their leisure time at Mount Auburn…. The cemetery clearly cultivated a spectrum of emotions, and it was large enough to accommodate expressions of both joy and grief, but most people at Mount Auburn seem to have experienced a reverent, satisfying mixture of the two….

This embrace of social unity, of a public spirit manifested in environmental terms, of wild nature as a tonic and a countervailing force against a hubristic Progress, was expressed by civic leaders again and again, in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Rochester, Albany, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Providence, Louisville, Savannah, Charleston, Richmond, Buffalo, Detroit, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis, and Cleveland — each of which consecrated a nonprofit rural cemetery between 1836 and 1853.

Taken together, these developments show us how garden cemeteries have evolved to embrace so many cross-cultural characteristics. Grounded in both history and nature, we see why it happens that a place like Oakland contains such a mixture of often-exotic plants and flowers, while simultaneously representing Georgia-native and naturalized flora and fauna within the same physical space. And much of its architecture takes all this into account: it’s common for monuments like that of the Dougherty-Connely families to mirror the landscaping around it. Here, for example, we can see how the monument’s carvings are not incidental or accidental: from top to bottom, fleur-de-lis that resemble the lilies planted at its base are sculpted in stone…

… likely proscribed in the initial design of the memorial, then maintained in historical continuity for the next 175 years. The monuments reflect the landscape, and the landscape is constantly being developed and revitalized to reflect the art and symbolism in the monuments, throughout that entire time.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!