“The most popular of the spring growers is Lycoris squamigera, an old garden selection known as the magic lily. One rarely finds a more beautiful flower possessed of such an undemanding disposition. It’s nearly ideal for gardens in the middle and upper South, and even into the cold climates of the Midwest. On both sandy acid soils and heavy alkaline clays, L. squamigera thrives.
“Sometime after the Fourth of July, rainfall triggers the thick scapes of surprise lilies to bolt upward from the ground. They rise swiftly, in four or five days expanding to crowns of succulent, lilac-pink buds. The clustered blossoms open to look like small amaryllises, shimmering with lavender highlights on their broad rounded petals.
“Like the triploid Lycoris radiata, this strong-growing species enjoys an extra set of chromosomes, which fuel unusual vigor. Genetic evidence suggests that these were acquired through hybridization….
“Lycoris squamigera reportedly came to America with a certain Dr. Hall of Bristol, Rhode Island, who grew the flowers in his garden in Shanghai, China, prior to the American Civil War. Several other spring-growing lycoris have made their way to North America, but none approach Lycoris squamigera in prominence or widespread adaptability….
“Lycoris incarnata is occasionally offered as well; its rose blooms are accented by electric-blue petals…. [They] have gray-green spring foliage and produce flowers in late summer along with Lycoris squamigera….”
It was late in September when you took me To that amazing garden, hidden in the city, Tranquil and complicated as an open hand, There among green pleasances and descant of fountains, Through walled paths and dappled loggias Opening to distant trees, We went conversing, smoking, often silent, Our feet cool in sandals, nonchalant as the air.
It was at the end of September, warm for the season. Nothing had fallen yet to bruise the grass. Ripeness was all suspended, The air aromatic and fresh over sun-drenched box.
Critical as Chinese philosophers, We performed the garden by easy stages: Should we move toward shade or toward sunlight, The closed dark pool or the panoplied fountain?
Clearly each path had a metaphysical meaning, Those rustic steps, that marble balustrade. It was late in September when time, Time that is not ours, Hid itself away.…
I’m posting this on the last day of September, so I was glad to find a poem — “The Metaphysical Garden” by May Sarton — that seems to capture the sense of exploring a historical garden on one of those days marking the transition from summer to fall. I excerpted just the opening four stanzas; but it’s much longer than that and you can read the whole poem here, if you’d like.
“Lycoris are becoming fashionable and more popular with every succeeding season.
“For years Lycoris Squamigera has been a lovely garden flower in the North, blooming before the leaves appear in late summer, and marked by an exotic beauty of violet-rose Amaryllis-like blooms in good-sized umbels.
“In the lower South, Lycoris Radiata, which… is commonly known as the ‘Red Spider Lily,’ is a well-known plant in every dooryard through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. It does well in North Florida, but seems to like an alkaline soil, so usually has to be replaced in Peninsular Florida every few years.
“One of our fortunate achievements of the past year is the importation of a modest stock of the handsome Lycoris aurea, long grown in old gardens around St. Augustine, where it is called the Golden Hurricane Lily and blooms in early Fall, during the Caribbean ‘tropical storm’ season. It is a rich golden yellow, with crinkled petals in a strangely enchanting and exotic umbel which opens practically all of its 5 to 10 flowers at the same time or in rapid succession. This is one of the choicest bulbs of all horticulture and was painted by Redoute, floral artist to the Empress Josephine, and it appears in his famous ‘Liliacees,’ of 1815 or so, although it really belongs to the Amaryllis family….
“We also offer three rarities, Lycoris alba, a creamy white and pinkish novelty, not yet positively identified, L. squamigera var. purpurea, a lovely thing for the North and Lower South as well, being quite hardy, and Lycoris incarnata, as received from China.
“We are not sure what this last will turn out to be.”
“Hall’s amaryllis, Lycoris squamigera, is a hardy bulb from Japan. The naked scapes come up in summer, and the wide, grey, narcissus-like leaves do not follow until January. The spot where the bulbs are planted should be marked so that they will not be disturbed when nothing shows above ground. The clumps should be left alone until they cease to bloom, and then lifted and divided after the foliage dies away in late spring. They bloom indefinitely in poor soil, increasing very slowly in the borders. From four to seven fragrant, opalescent flowers are borne in umbels on tapering, thirty-inch scapes.
“The first fades as the last opens so that as many as six may be out at a time. The petals are like a changeable silk in Persian lilac with tints of violet, tints that are repeated in the drooping flowers of the wild bleeding-heart. The lacy foliage of the bleeding-heart softens the effect of the bare scapes. The scapes appear about the middle of July and last into August.
“Lycoris incarnata comes from central China. It blooms a little later than Hall’s amaryllis, the first scapes usually making their appearance late in July, but sometimes not until August. The flowers are smaller, the scapes shorter (to two feet) than those of the Japanese species, and the bulbs multiply faster and bloom more freely. There are from six to eight (mostly eight) flowers to an umbel. The segments are very narrow, very pale (almost white), keeled with tourmaline pink and tipped with blue. The edges are crisped. The filaments and style are daphne red. The striped buds open in succession, the first flower lasting until all are out. An umbel in full bloom is very lovely.”
Hello!
This is the third of four posts with photos of members of the Amaryllis family that I took during the summer. The first post is An Amaryllis Family Gathering (1 of 4) and the second post is An Amaryllis Family Gathering (2 of 4). For this four-part series, I photographed Crinum bulbispermum, Lycoris squamigera, and Lycoris incarnata. The last two — commonly known as Surprise Lillies and Peppermint Surprise Lilies — were plants I was previously unfamiliar with, that made their debuts at Oakland Cemetery only recently. This third post, and the next one, include photos of the Peppermint version of the Surprise — whose striped appearance is even evident in the unopened flowers, where they look a lot like pieces of Christmas candy.
It’s always fun to come across a new-to-me species or genus of plants. The Lycoris plant that I see most often in the southeast, one you can typically buy at local garden centers and see at public gardens, is the richly colored and complex-looking Lycoris radiata, usually called the Red Spider Lily. Oakland also has some of the Red Spider Lilies, which can be challenging to photograph creatively because of the large number of anthers that emerge from the base of its fist-sized flower, curve outward toward the center, and make it difficult to find a good focal point. The saturated red color doesn’t help, especially in bright light (which they prefer), contributing to the camera’s inability to find a combination of exposure and depth of field that doesn’t just create a flat, two-dimensional image. But as one of the most frequently planted members of the Lycoris genus, it’s easy to find information about Red Spider Lilies, which I’ll take advantage of if I find some in bloom and photograph them this fall.
Surprise Lilies (like those in the first and second post) are also relatively easy to research, as they’ve been known and used in gardens for over a century. Peppermint Surprise Lilies, on the other hand, are much harder to find in botanical literature. As an unscientific indicator of the difference, there are about 700 references to Surprise Lilies (by either their botanical or common names) among the Internet Archive’s 3.7 million Books to Borrow, but only about 20 for the Peppermint version.
Among my own gardening and botany books, the only author who mentioned the Peppermint Surprise Lily at all was Elizabeth Lawrence, which is why I included an excerpt from her book A Southern Garden: A Handbook for the Middle South at the top of this post. It also seems to be true that the genetics of the Peppermint Surprise Lily have not been well-studied, nor has the genetic relationship between the two been fully researched. Surprise Lilies hail from Japan and Peppermint Surprise Lilies hail from China — which doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not close relatives; they still could be, despite the geographic distance between their natural origins. My first excerpt above — from a flower distributor’s flyer that was produced in 1948 — hints at the mystery surrounding the Peppermint Surprise Lily and its bulbs, describing them as rarities and noting: “We are not sure what this last will turn out to be.”
So perhaps it’s also a mystery how it came about that Oakland’s horticulturalists chose the Peppermint Surprise Lily to add color to some bland spaces between shrubs and trees, for late summer and early fall when many other flowers have blown away. While Lycoris (and Crinum) are both plants whose variants have appeared in historical or heritage gardens for many decades, this specific plant’s appearance here is unusual. It will be interesting to see how they progress over the next couple of years — most Lycoris are quite hardy and environmentally adaptable — since they will likely propagate and create even larger spreads of striped color that contrasts beautifully with the more muted tones of the Lycoris squamigera.
“In midsummer, when heat and drought have drained all color from leaf and blossom — in spite of all of the city water that is poured on them — the surprise lily rises mysteriously from the ground. One day there is nothing, and the next there is a tall, pale stem that grows to about three feet and then produces, at the top, a circle of flowers of the most luminous and delicate pink….
“The surprise lily is not really a lily. It is a Lycoris, as lovely as the nymph it was named for, and it belongs to the amaryllis family. It is sometimes called Hall’s amaryllis for the New England doctor who brought it back from a Japanese garden nearly one hundred years ago….
“Although it has been in gardens so long, and is one of the easiest bulbs to grow, the surprise lily has never become common…. The bulbs do their growing in late winter when the wide, gray-green leaves come up. The time to plant new ones, or to dig and divide old clumps, is when the leaves die. The bulbs need not be dug unless you want to increase the supply. They will go on blooming indefinitely in the same spot. The flowers bloom whether they are watered or not, even in the driest season, and no spraying is required….
“I think the other reason that surprise lilies are so little known is that their specific name, squamigera, is so long and so ugly. It means scaly, which sounds equally unattractive, and means that with a hand lens small scales can be seen in the throat of the flower — a fact of no interest to the gardener. Nevertheless the Latin name will be needed when the bulbs are bought, for they will be listed by the bulb growers as Lycoris squamigera.”
In this post, we see a second planting of Lycoris squamigera, located in a separate area of Oakland Cemetery than those I showed you previously. While the environmental conditions were similar — filtered sunlight for plants growing among larger greens — these either got more sun or were a little older, as most of the plants had produced multiple stems topped with flowers in bunches. They are, however, otherwise identical — and they were mixed among plantings of Lycoris incarnata, which you can see in the backgrounds of the first three photos. This landscape of pine bark and stubs of grass — which in previous years was mostly barren — is now punctuated with the alternating colors of the Surprise Lily and the Peppermint Surprise Lily, creating a fine, fetching scene.
While I was working on the Lycoris squamigera photos, I noticed that many of the flower petals had a bit of blue at their tips, almost as if someone had dabbed the edges with a watercolor brush dipped in blue. Because I took the photos in low light, I thought it might be an artifact present in the image, something that I see occasionally with low light and any Sony camera I’ve used. I ended up leaving the blue color intact rather than trying to remove it, though, when I discovered this botanical drawing by Matilda Smith (who I wrote about in an earlier post about Regal Lilies), which shows the same blue color in similar locations.
I cropped the drawing a little to make it fit in this post better, but you can see the full version on Flickr, or see it in a Curtis’s Botanical Magazine issue from 1897 here. I thought it was fun to confirm that my color choices were accurate using an image published 128 years ago from one of that era’s preeminent botanical artists.
As I mentioned in the previous post, Surprise Lily is one of this plant’s common names, a name that recognizes how the plant drops all its leaves and becomes a dormant stalk before it produces any flowers. But it apparently it has other surprises, as the excerpt above suggests: unlike most bulb plants that are typically divided and transplanted at the end of their blooming season, Surprise Lilies should actually be split up between the time they drop their leaves and the time they start blooming. I had never encountered this unusual maintenance sequence before, which made me wonder if Lycoris has still more surprises in store.
“The most prolific and abundant crinum in Southern gardens is a distinctive species with tapered, blue-green foliage. Each leaf reaches as much as two feet in length and three or four inches in width at the base. These wrap around each other to form a thick column topped with gracefully arching fountains of foliage. In the center of the rosettes, there are usually a few thin, wispy, blue leaves just emerging; this unique appearance makes this crinum easy to distinguish wherever it grows….
“All crinums bear peculiarly large, fleshy seeds, which makes most varieties easy to raise. If left on the surface of the soil in a humid, shady position, the thick, green embryos germinate and form perfect miniature bulbs. These usually send down long roots, which pull the young plants deeply into the soil. Three or four years’ growth on rich earth will mature the fledgling bulbs enough to begin flowering. Because of its prolific seed bearing, Crinum bulbispermum has sired numerous hybrids: this species is the forerunner of many of the old garden flowers of the South.
“The succulent leaves of Crinum bulbispermum stand more frost than most other crinums, and this is the best species to plant where freezes regularly penetrate the ground. The bulbs thrive anywhere in the South and are hardy in protected situations as far north as Denver and Long Island. Blossoms are most prolific in April and May but come almost any season if stimulated by rains. In sheltered gardens C. bulbispermum flowers welcomely through December and January.”
“One of our overlooked hardy Amaryllids, Lycoris squamigera, sometimes listed as Amaryllis Halli, would well repay more attention from discriminating gardeners. The name Lycoris refers to some unknown Greek lady. The species Squamigera was introduced to American gardens from China by Dr. G. R. Hall, a New England physician who spent considerable time collecting plants in China and Japan.
“Dr. Hall stated that the dainty pink trumpet flowers were highly regarded by the Chinese. Several other species are included in the genus, among them L. sanguinea, with reddish orange flowers.
“Lycoris sends forth strap-shaped foliage in early spring, which matures and disappears in early summer, only to be followed by naked stems, which often rise three feet, producing, in August, small clusters of soft pink lily-like blossoms that are delightfully fragrant…. Lycoris will thrive in partial shade and has been naturalized in woodlands.”
Hello!
We’re going to spend this post and the next three looking at photographs of plants in the Amaryllidaceae family, more commonly referred to as the “Amaryllis family” since some of its most prominent, well-known members are in the genus Amaryllis. The family encompasses about 1600 species of plants, including plants in the Crinum genus and Lycoris genus.
This first post includes images of Crinum bulbispermum — a large flowering plant often referred to by names containing “Swamp Lily” or “River Lily” — along with half of my photographs of Lycoris squamigera, also known as Resurrection Lily, Surprise Lily, or Naked Lady after its habit of blooming on tall slender stalks only upon dropping all its leaves (and appearing to be dormant) weeks earlier. The second post will contain the second half of my Lycoris squamigera photos, and the third and fourth posts will show one of its close relatives, Lycoris incarnata, whose candy-cane stripes have earned it the common name Peppermint Surprise Lily.
The Crinum bulbispermum — the first eighteen photos below — is a long-time Oakland resident that I’ve seen for at least a decade. It grows as a mass of numerous individual plants between sidewalks, in the sun, not far from the entrance to the property. As such it’s an eye catcher, drawing your gaze to one garden area that is surrounded by hydrangeas, daffodils, tulips, and flowering vines like quince and wisteria. Its later spring to early summer bloom period means that its colors and shapes replace many of those other flowers, ensuring that color endures through seasonal change.
The last fifteen photos below show Lycoris squamigera — whose name sounds a bit like an Italian casserole. It’s a much smaller and more compact plant than Crinum bulbispermum, and one that I encountered for the first time in June, so it must have been planted either late last year or early this year. The second quotation at the top of this post — from Garden Bulbs in Color by J. Horace McFarland — describes this plant’s Oakland environment accurately (“Lycoris will thrive in partial shade and has been naturalized in woodlands“) in that it was planted in the shade of numerous trees and shrubs, filling in previously empty spaces and catching filtered sunlight. As this may be its first blooming season, some plants appeared quite isolated from each other, while others — typically those that got more sunlight — managed to produce multiple stems and overlapping, bouquet-style collections of blooms. Either way, though, I found them fun and interesting to photograph, as the filtered sun produced some nice side-lighting and back-lighting, showing off the wide range of colors the flowers can reveal.
“It took the remarkable abilities of a French horticulturalist, Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, to change the world of water-lily culture. Inspired by an article written in 1858 lamenting the lack of bright colours and exquisite shapes in hardy water lilies, Latour-Marliac set about changing things, and judiciously crossed the brightly coloured tropical species…. It took him thirty-two years and his hardy successes… are still immensely popular….
“Producing some seventy beautiful varieties in the years he spent breeding these plants, Latour-Marliac’s work was then carried on by his son-in-law and by others all over the world. Just how he obtained his hybrids is not known, for their parentage was never revealed and he kept his methods strictly secret….
“Since water lilies are easy to propagate vegetatively by rootstocks, his cultivars are still available and have in turn been used in hybridizations for the creation of more new hardy varieties. Growing water lilies en masse creates a marvellous impression; indeed, many consider Claude Monet’s magnificent series of paintings of water lilies at Giverny (his garden in northern France) to be the epitome of Impressionism. Monet was the leading spirit of the Impressionist school, and he painted the world as he saw it — quivering with light and atmosphere. He and Latour-Marliac were exact contemporaries and the first of the water-lilies series was painted in 1903, twenty-four years after Marliac’s first hybrid successes had been introduced to the gardens of the time. The pale-pink water lilies in Monet’s exquisite Giverny masterpiece are Marliac creations — another incidence of the inspiration these most wonderful of flowers have given to all sorts of people.”
“[Monet’s] goal, which he frankly admitted was unattainable, was to paint his carefully chosen object… under singular and fleeting conditions of weather and light. As he told an English visitor, he wanted ‘to render my impressions before the most fugitive effects.’ [Since] objects changed their color and appearance according to the seasons, the meteorological conditions, and the time of day, Monet hoped to capture their visual impact in these brief, distinctive, ever-changing moments in time. He concentrated not only on the objects themselves but also, critically, on the atmosphere that surrounded them, the erratically shifting phantoms of light and color that he called the enveloppe….
“But freezing the appearance of objects amid fleeting phantoms of light and air was no easy task… Recording the fugitive effects of color and light was integral to Monet’s art. Setting up his easel in front of Rouen Cathedral, or the wheat stacks in the frozen meadow outside Giverny, or the windswept cliffs at Étretat on the coast of Normandy, he would paint throughout the day as the light and weather, and finally the seasons, changed….
“Because lighting effects changed quickly — every seven minutes, he once claimed — he was forced, in his series paintings of wheat stacks and poplars, to work on multiple canvases almost simultaneously, placing a different one on his easel every seven minutes or so, rotating them according to the particular visual effect he was trying to capture…. In the 1880s the writer Guy de Maupassant had likewise witnessed Monet ‘in pursuit of impressions’ on the Normandy coast. He described how the painter was followed through the fields by his children and stepchildren ‘carrying his canvases, five or six paintings depicting the same subject at different times and with different effects. He worked on them one by one, following all the changes in the sky….’
“One irony of Monet’s approach was that these paintings of fleeting visual effects at single moments in time actually took many months of work.”
As I mentioned in the previous post, I had never photographed Oakland’s Water Lilies before. While I briefly had some Water Lilies in my own small backyard pond about a decade ago, they never bloomed because they couldn’t get nearly enough sun (most variants require close to a full day of sunlight), and my wee but voracious goldfish snacked on the plants roots, leaves, and stems. So they didn’t last long enough to get their pictures taken, and photographing Oakland’s was my first experience with these plants.
As a photographer without an aquatic camera and scuba gear, I’m limited to what’s visible above the surface, mostly, except for those plant stems we can see twizzling just below the water line. Despite the stability provided by each plant’s overlapping leaves, the slightest breeze — or the landing of a visiting pollinator — would send enough ripples through the pond to set the plants in motion and shift them out of focus. Exposure bracketing came in handy — where I set the camera to take a series of photos from a single shutter press — to freeze the plants in place. This is typical of my botanical photography — because plants wiggle around far more than we register visually — since I learned that I could pick from these multiple shots of the same scene and keep only those with the sharpest focus.
By far, the most challenging aspect of photographing these Water Lilies came from a combination of complex relationships between how flowers produce color, how we perceive color, how cameras interpret it, and how programs like Lightroom let us edit our photos. Here, for example, is one of the photos from the gallery below — which we would refer to as a pink Water Lily — taken when the sun was out, in its fully-edited, final version.
Because of the bright sunlight, however, the camera actually saw the flower like this…
… where the color red is highly saturated (especially toward the bottom of the flower) and red overpowers the subtle shades of pink or magenta tones the flower actually produces. In addition to red color blowout, though, note how the flower petals seem out of focus, and how that blurriness extends even to the yellow pistils at the center of the flower. These combined effects occur not just because of the color relationships and how the red tones are over-saturated, but because the flower petals themselves are quite translucent — so excess color seeps through different parts of the flower and we can no longer perceive sharp boundaries between individual petals or between the petals and the pistils.
Let’s compare the photos side-by-side. By substantially desaturating red (using Lightroom’s Calibration panel), the photo on the right more accurately represents the pink Water Lily as I saw it at Oakland. You should now be able to better differentiate individual flower petals, and see more contrast between parts of the flower. Nearly every photo in this entire Water Lily series got similar treatment, because nearly all of them have red, pink, or magenta variations in color — even those whose tones lean towards orange or yellow — and all of them have translucent flower petals.
So my first time photographing and processing Oakland’s Water Lilies turned into a series of learnings for me, linking color theory to post-processing to the botanical characteristics of color production in certain kinds of flowers, and, finally, to a better understanding of the effects of bright sunlight on plants and flowers containing colors like this. It resonated with me, then, to read about Monet’s obsession with repeatedly painting the same subjects (see the second excerpt above) in different light, and frequently painting the same (or very similar) scenes to present them in varying lighting and weather conditions.
One of Monet’s goals — “to capture their visual impact in these brief, distinctive, ever-changing moments in time” (excerpted above) — is not unlike any photographer’s goals, since as photographers we’re always dealing with “instants” that disappear as soon as the camera clicks. What we do next is up to us and can lead to many different results; but it seems that photography and painting, as creative processes, might have more similarity than is readily apparent, sharing similar concerns about lighting and color fidelity that we can learn from if we approach deliberately.
By looking through enough of the images in Monet’s series of 250 Water Lily paintings, we can also see how so many versions of similar subjects became both a botanical and environmental or ecological study, where Monet alternated between “zooming in” on individual flowers and widening the view towards the broader habitat. Of course, I’m co-opting photographic theory and language here and applying it to another visual art; Monet was believed to occasionally paint from photographs (considered scandalous, by some) but apparently preferred his “exposure bracketing” and different zoom levels in the form of jockeying multiple canvases. According to Mad Enchantment, “Monet’s apparent lack of interest in technologies such as photography and film is curious and even paradoxical in someone otherwise so obsessed with the immediacy of the visual impression.” But maybe it’s not that paradoxical, since all of Monet’s Impressionist paintings represent a kind of abstraction — in part, what Monet called enveloppe, or the depiction of impressions — where his visual language emphasizes relationships among color, light, and form rather than the more literal reproduction that a camera (or realistic painting) would render.
“The endlessly popular water lily dominates planting design in open water. There is very little that can rival it for what it does. The Latin name, Nymphaea, is derived from the mythical Greek beings who were often associated with water. Water lilies are among the most primitive of all flowering plants, since fossils have been found in Jurassic rocks (201 million – 145 million years ago) and many species are thought to have changed little since….
“Water lilies in gardens are often hybrids, many bred in the nineteenth century by the Frenchman Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac. He produced about 100 varieties, initially as a hobby, but later realizing their commercial importance and subsequently naming only sterile selections, so that other growers could not obtain them from seed. He produced varieties that grew at various depths, including dwarfs. Tropical water lilies have also been extensively and gloriously hybridized.
“The flower is particularly associated with the prolific French Impressionist painter Claude Monet, who in 1883 bought a house at Giverny outside Paris and dedicated himself increasingly to gardening, including making extensive ponds in which he grew wild and hybrid water lilies. Many among his final series of paintings, which record his progressive loss of sight, feature his ponds and water lilies on vast, highly atmospheric canvases.”
“Plants adapted to life in the water are called hydrophytes (water plants). The evolution of vascular plants involved increasing adaptation to a terrestrial environment. Hydrophytic vascular plants — especially those that live submerged — therefore demonstrate specific adaptations to overcome their own terrestriality! To adapt to loss of essential radiation by the light-filtering effects of water, leaf surfaces may be large and expansive near or above the water surface, like those of the water lily (Nymphaea)….
“Because water loss is not a problem, leaf area is not limited by this factor. Similarly, a dense cuticle is not critical to survival except for the exposed surfaces of emergent or floating leaves, like those of the water lily. Large intercellular spaces in the leaves enhance gas exchange and provide buoyancy to keep leaves near surface sunlight….
“Hydrophytes obtain oxygen and carbon dioxide by direct diffusion between plant tissues and the water or through stomates on surfaces exposed to the atmosphere. In the water lily, for example, stomates are localized primarily on the upper surface of the leaf. In contrast, terrestrial plant leaves usually have a preponderance of stomates on the lower leaf surface.
“Most hydrophytes have reduced water-conducting systems, apparently as an evolutionary response to very restricted (if any) net water loss. In addition, large air channels provide internal gas exchange pathways for stem and root tissues.”
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of Water Lilies that I took on one cloudy and one sunny midsummer day at Oakland Cemetery. I had never photographed their Water Lilies before, though the fountain and pond have occasionally snuck into other photos — such as those of the Formosa Lilies that I posted a couple of weeks ago (see Discovering the Formosa Lily (3 of 3)).
Water Lilies are conveniently included on Wikipedia’s List of plants known as lily page, which, despite its title, actually lists many plants that are commonly known as lilies but aren’t — that is, they aren’t members of theLilium genus that encompasses “true lilies.” They are, instead, members of the Nymphaea genus — a name that’s easy to remember given how the word “Nymphaea” (pronounced “nymphia”) is connected to water nymphs of Greek mythology.
Since this was the first time I had dwelt with my camera on Oakland’s Water Lilies, I didn’t know much about them, but I believe I’ve identified this collection of plants as a mix of Nymphaea candida, Nymphaea odorata, and Nymphaea mexicana. I’ve also learned that since Water Lilies are “extensively and gloriously hybridized” — as Noel Kingsbury notes above — they could be hybrids of any of those three (or others). We won’t worry about that too much; the genus identification of Nymphaea is close enough for now. With that in mind, we have quite a few interesting stories to explore here (and in the next post) about these plants, their flowers, their botanical and cultural history, the fountain and pond where they live at Oakland, and the use of Water Lilies in Victorian garden cemeteries. Let’s begin!
The fountain in these photos is called “Out in the Rain” and features a boy and girl holding an umbrella as they stand above the center of the pond. When the fountain is in operation, water sprays from the finial or ferrule (the very top of the umbrella tube), then cascades down the umbrella’s canopy to sprinkle into the pond, with soft sounds like rain tapping at a puddle. In my first photo below, you can see — at the bottom of the frame — part of the inlaid historical marker near the edge of the pond wall. Regrettably, The Photographer neglected to take a picture of the whole marker, but subsequently found it on a fascinating website called The Historical Marker Database, so you can see it here. The marker was my initial introduction to the fountain’s story — which has a variety of interconnected threads that can start us traveling through the learnings I mentioned above.
“Out in the Rain” was commissioned by the city of Atlanta from a company called J. L. Mott Iron Works, and installed at Oakland around 1913. Its cast-iron design was based on that of a fountain created by the terracotta company Galloway & Graff, who based their commercially popular design on that of a similar fountain presented by an Italian artist at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition in 1876. Its appearance, then, derives from several generations of artistic inspiration; and, while I’m unable to find any exposition photos of the original Italian design, I did find a photo of Galloway & Graff’s version. You can see it on an auction house website, here — where the fidelity between the terracotta version and Oakland’s iron version is very apparent.
The fountain and pond have undergone multiple restorations and renovations — though you can’t tell from its appearance now, which is quite pristine. The oval-shaped, concrete-bound pond again reflects its 1913 design, which was supplanted for a few years by being covered with bricks until 2008 when it was rebuilt to reassert its 1913 roots. I didn’t know this, having never seen the brick version; but found a photograph of it here — where, by comparison, you can see the extent to which Oakland has enhanced the grounds around the fountain with considerably more plants and the dense fern plantation behind the pond.
These iterations of the fountain — and the addition of more recent, thick plantings — demonstrate the extent to which foundational thinking about historical cemeteries has changed to re-emphasize elements of their original Victorian characteristics over the use of more modern-looking materials like rows of bricks. This approach of looking back to original designs and intentions reflects broader shifts in how Victorian cemetery landscapes like Oakland’s are being imagined anew — something I covered in a previous post, Discovering the Formosa Lily (1 of 3) — and are consistent with trends that now emphasize the cultural, botanical, and memorial elements of their historical design.
Fountains, and fountains filled with Water Lilies, are often used in public gardens like Victorian cemeteries to create transitional scenes of serenity. “Out in the Rain” was established with that in mind: it’s not placed to memorialize an individual or family, but is located at a central intersection of several Oakland walkways, walkways that lead to gardens filled with the irises, lilies, roses, and zinnias (among other flowers) that I’ve shared with you on this site.
The second excerpt I included at the top of this post from Botany, Principles and Applications provides some insight into how Water Lilies differ from their landlubber counterparts. While a bit technical, it does reveal that Water Lily leaves — which spread profusely as they expand to cover the water’s surface — gather sunlight for each plant and its flowers, overlapping enough to provide the plant with stability while ensuring that most of each leaf is exposed to the light. Each leaf contains cells that, like pillows of air, enable them to float; while their waxy coating helps them shed water so they won’t absorb it like a sponge and sink. The plants’ submerged roots and the winding stems connected to the leaves help them collect and move nutrients needed for photosynthesis and growth. The plant’s leaves and roots might be considered its most important features, botanically speaking; while, like all plants, the flowers help enable its propagation by attracting the interest of pollinators with bright, highly reflective colors.
The remaining excerpt above provides a brief introduction to the artistic significance of Water Lilies throughout history — one of the most well-known being that of Claude Monet’s approach to acquiring the plants then creating a series of 250 Water Lily paintings. Monet’s Water Lilies may be the most ubiquitous cultural reference connecting an artist to a plant genus, and we’ll compare the visual characteristics of Water Lily photographs with Monet’s impressions of Water Lilies in the next post.
