“The flower that comes to mind for most Southerners when squill is mentioned is the Spanish bluebell or wood hyacinth. Although long known in garden literature as Scilla campanulata, botanists have shuffled these poor flowers about, first to the genus Endymion, and more recently to an uncomfortable resting place with the alliterative appellation Hyacinthoides hispanica.
“None of these names do justice to the stately spikes of wisteria-blue that blossom in April gardens. The unscented, bell-shaped flowers of the Spanish bluebell hang down from twelve- to sixteen-inch stalks. Their thrifty bulbs seed and multiply in lavish pools, which spread out under the trees. This old Southern favorite is one of the finest spring bulbs for naturalizing in woodland, and will even succeed in the dark shade under live oaks. The round, white bulbs are happy anywhere they receive ample spring moisture. They have been popular since Elizabethan times and came to the South with the earliest settlers.
“In addition to the common sky-blue strain of the species, there are several fine selections of Spanish bluebells with darker violet, pink, or white flowers. Nurseries sometimes offer these in a mix, but such combinations are best avoided or quickly separated following bloom, as the various colors combine in a gaudy pattern. Although beautiful, the related English bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) needs cooler, damper conditions than the South can provide.”
“The squills are companions to the tulips, the large late-flowering types blooming along from the end of March to the end of April. They bloom well under all conditions and present no difficulties. The Spanish bluebells, Scilla hispanica, bloom in all degrees of shade, also in full sun, and in any kind of soil. They are in delicate tints of lilac and blue-violet, and are particularly useful in white. These are among the first of the flowers that give much and ask little….”
A fine and subtle spirit dwells In every little flower, Each one its own sweet feeling breathes With more or less of power.
There is a silent eloquence In every wild bluebell, That fills my softened heart with bliss That words could never tell.
Yet I recall, not long ago, A bright and sunny day: ‘Twas when I led a toilsome life So many leagues away.
That day along a sunny road All carelessly I strayed Between two banks where smiling flowers Their varied hues displayed….
Hello!
Here we have a collection of Bluebell photographs that I shot at Oakland Cemetery on March 30. When I passed some of my photos through PlantNet to identify the species, the site provided three probable scientific names: Hyacinthoides non-scripta (English or Common Bluebell), Hyacinthoides hispanica (Spanish Bluebell), and Hyacinthoides × massartiana (an English and Spanish Bluebell hybrid). With the above excerpts from Garden Bulbs for the South and A Southern Garden in mind, though, I’ve decided these are Spanish Bluebells, given their growing environment (a large open field with normal to dry soil conditions); their height (many stems a foot tall or taller); and their colors (a blend of blue and violet, sometimes translucent enough to approach white). The blended colors especially became important to their identification when I was working on them in Lightroom, where the presence of purple and violet (and not just blue) became very apparent, in the same way those two colors are more evident in my photos where the sunlight was brighter.
This is only the second time Bluebells have posed for me. The first time was in 2024 (see Blooming Bluebells) where I photographed them mostly at the base of a gigantic Water Oak, where they’re still thriving…
… and where they’ve expanded to nearby areas along a wooded and azalea’d path, producing some lovely color contrasts with the azalea’s pink, and some texture contrasts with another smaller Water Oak.
They’re also moving into new territory either on their own or by intentional planting (or a little of both) as they’re now growing far from their original oak tree location and spreading into the rest of the field, whose characteristics and layout I described in a previous post, Ambitious Spring Snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) (3 of 3).
Given the consistent spacing between many of the plants, I think I can speculate that Oakland’s landscapers may be attempting to fill this entire corner of the field with Bluebells — so we’ll keep an eye on it because an unbroken sea of Bluebells every March would be a visually epic addition to the gardens and to this corner of that field.
You may have noticed that the two book excerpts above use the word “squills” to describe Bluebells. This was a new word to me, one I feel like I could have made up; yet it turns out it has ancient Greek and Latin roots, becoming part of early European botanical literature in such writings as those of herbalist and botanist John Gerard. It was later used as a substitute for the plant genus Scilla, under which the Spanish Bluebell was once known as Scilla hispanica; and is often associated with the botanically and medically significant Sea Squill (Drimia maritima) — a plant in the same family (Asparagaceae) as Bluebells. I still might make up my own definition for “squill” and use it inappropriately, because I like how it sounds when you say it out loud.
“The public are indebted to Mr. Evans of the India-House, for the introduction of this plant from China, where it is a native.
“It flowered last year, at different periods, for the first time, in many collections near London; this irregularity of its blowing was occasioned, we presume by its being kept in different degrees of heat, in the stoves of some, and the green-houses of others; Mr. Thomson, Nurseryman of Mile-End, at the close of the year, had it growing very luxuriantly in the open ground; but the very severe winter of 1796–1797, in which the thermometer at Brompton was three degrees below 0, destroyed it; nevertheless, there is no doubt but it will bear the cold of our ordinary winters, and thrive better in the open ground, in a moist situation, than in the stove, or green-house, in either of which, however, it will flower very well; and, where the plant is luxuriant, continue to do so for a considerable length of time, the blossoms being numerous, and unfolding gradually: in a strong plant at Mr. Colvill’s, Nurseryman, King’s-Road, we counted seven blossoms expanded at one time on its different branches.
“It differs from all other known Iris’s, in having a root perfectly of the creeping kind, sending out shoots to a considerable distance, by which it is rendered very easy of propagation; its flowers, in form and colour, come nearest to those of Iris cristata, and have a considerable degree of fragrance.”
From “Iris japonica” by Kayoko Miyazawa in Flora Japonica by The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew:
“Rather unusually among irises, this species spreads by a slender branching rhizome on the surface, forming handsome spreading clumps of dark, glossy foliage. The flowers, which open in late spring, are relatively small but very attractive when examined closely. This is a popular plant in gardens in southern Japan, where it is also common in the wild….
“Iris japonica is also appreciated in Western gardens, where it prefers a rather sheltered position in the sun or light shade in cooler regions. and where it does not always flower freely. Each leaf fan dies off after its flowers finish. A few selected forms have been named, including one with striking white-striped foliage.
“Iris japonica is just one of many plants first named by Carl Thunberg, the Swedish pioneer of Japanese botany, some years after the publication of his Flora Japonica. It was first introduced into Britain by Thomas Evans in 1812, and the informal group within the genus to which it belongs is called Evansia in his honour, although its formal classification is in the section Lophiris….”
Not a tree, A plant, a leaf, a blossom, but contains A folio volume. We may read and read, And read again, and still find something new Something to please, and something to instruct.
Hello!
This is the second of two posts with photographs of Iris japonica from Oakland Cemetery, that I took at the end of March. The first post — where I wrote about some of the plant’s visual characteristics and described how I banished unattractive background fronds from the images — is Iris japonica (1 of 2) / Notes on Image Reconstruction. In this post, we’ll spend some time taking a look at individual flowers, with close-up and macro photos of one or two blooms per stem that I photographed while sitting on the ground and meshing with the plants, as we take a compressed tour through the plant’s representation in historical botanical drawings.
As I mentioned in the previous post, Iris japonica is known by common names including Japanese Iris, Fringed Iris, Butterfly Flower, and Shaga or Shaga Flower — names reflecting its flowers’ visual appearance or its natural origins in China and Japan. In iris horticulture, it’s classified among crested irises or Lophiris, and passed through a number of scientific names once it migrated to Europe and began to be propagated and observed by eighteenth-century Western botanists. Plants of the World Online lists ten prior scientific names (see Iris japonica synonyms) from 1784 through 1980. The first one from 1784 — Iris squalens — was later discarded since it was already associated with a known plant, and 1797’s Iris chinensis (derived from its Chinese nativity) then took its place as the inaugural scientific name.
The 1797 iris chinensis name leads us to the first known European botanical drawing of the plant we now call Iris japonica, a fine rendition of a specimen where parts of the composition — in this case, the flower itself and the base with roots and rhizomes — are drawn in larger proportions to the rest to show their botanical characteristics. Use of magnification like this — which may have actually involved using a magnifying glass — helped document detailed characteristics of the plants for scientific evaluation and study.
That drawing is from Volume 11 of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, published in 1797, which is available in scanned form on the Internet Archive, so (lucky for us!) we can see how the magazine published the image originally with a detailed description of the plant on its facing page. The text of that description (transcribed to modern usage by Claude.AI for me) appears as the first excerpt at the top of this post.
A decade later in 1807, famed illustrator Pierre-Joseph Redoute published his own version of Iris japonica, in Volume 3 of his book Les liliacees — a book whose title (“The liliaceae”) reflects the fact that the Lily (Liliaceae) and Iris (Iridaceae) families were less distinct than they are now, and plant membership overlapped. That drawing (on page 152) shows Redoute retaining the plant’s scientific or botanical characteristics in accurate detail without exaggerating the plant’s proportions, thus blending science and art to produce drawings that merged both visual approaches and served botanical experts as well as the general public.
By 1827 when Redoute produced another Iris japonica illustration in his book Choix des plus belles fleurs: et des plus beaux fruits (“A Selection of the Most Beautiful Flowers and the Most Beautiful Fruits”), as Plate 46, he stylized the image further, dropping all but one of the plant’s leaves from it as well as its roots, and eliminating the inset sketches showing other parts of the plant. Alert observers will also notice that despite the twenty-year gap between the two illustrations, the flowers and the single leaf in this second image are identical. They were likely created from the same initial drawings or plates, then altered and cropped to focus the viewer’s interest on the flowers.
The artistic connections to photography, photo editing, and selective image reconstruction (like I described in the previous post) are so obvious I won’t use up more words to explain them. But I thought Redoute’s evolution in the use of color was as interesting as his compositional choices: the 1827 version shows the wider range of colors that Iris japonica flowers can produce. While in both images the color blue appears to dominate when we first look at them, the second image actually contains subtle and transitional blending of blue, purple, and violet tones that reminded me of the red and magenta color exploration I did with Camellia photographs (see Camellia japonica (1 of 2)).
To verify that Redoute’s color interpretation wasn’t my imagination, I imported copies of both of his images into Lightroom and added purple saturation. Here’s how that turned out…
… where you can now more readily see where Redoute added purple tones to the image, tones that aren’t present in the first one (whose colors didn’t change when I saturated purple). We might speculate here that in designing the 1827 image, Redoute knew that the plant’s botanical structure was scientifically accurate (so he reused the 1807 image as the starting point), but had learned about or observed the plant’s ability to produce additional colors, and incorporated them in 1827. Or he may have simply expressed a new style preference by adding purple and violet tones so their softer colors blended better with the alterations he made to the leaf and stem colors. Either way, the second drawing retains the botanical precision of the first one, more accurately demonstrates the color potential of Iris japonica variants, and represents the shift toward enhanced artistic renderings of plants and flowers that was common to nineteenth-century advancements in botanical art — expressed as “something new, something to please, and something to instruct” in the poem I included at the top of this post.
From “Iris Japonica” in The World of Irises by The American Iris Society, edited by Bee Warburton and Melba Hamblen:
“The much frilled and fringed flowers of Iris japonica lie almost flat and are 8-10 cm (3-4 inches) in diameter. The multibranched stalks, up to 60 cm (2 feet) in height, carry as many as 24-30 blossoms, two to each spathe. Generally four to six are open on each stalk, but when plants are well grown there may be many more. The pale lavender flowers have finely traced orange markings on their falls consisting of three slight ridges. The margins appear on a white ground outlined with splashy dots of deeper lavender shade. Smaller orange dots are contained within this area. The lavender style arms are finely fimbriated above the lip…. “Iris japonica is a native of moist woods and grows best outdoors in cool, frost-free conditions…. Since it blooms in early spring, early to mid-March in climates where temperatures seldom go below 3 degrees C (26 degrees F) and freezes are rare, it enhances the azalea and camellia garden….
“Because of their shallow root growth, some kind of mulch is desirable at all times except under circumstances of excessive heat and moisture. New plants emerge some distance from the main rhizome… traveling on the surface of the soil. The damp mulch provides anchorage for these proliferations and encourages their rooting….
“These irises have no genuine dormant period since the foliage remains evergreen the year round.”
“Iris japonica, sometimes also called I. fimbriata, is the most distinctive and beautiful of the crested irises. From fans of thin, bright evergreen foliage it sends up two-foot widely branched stems which bear over several weeks a succession of somewhat fugitive but lovely pale lavender flowers, fringed, and with orange crests. A single stem will bear dozens of blooms, so light and airy and so like orchids that this particular species is often referred to as the ‘orchid’ iris….
“Japonica is not in the least demanding as to soil, though its preferences are for one that is not too heavy and that contains humus and leaf mold. In contrast with almost all other irises, it succeeds far better in considerable shade than in sunlight and often will be found growing luxuriantly in the dappled shade of overhanging trees. Unfortunately japonica cannot be grown outdoors in very cold climates, but all along the Pacific Coast and through the southern states it is well worth trying.”
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of Iris japonica from Oakland Cemetery, that I took on one of my early spring photoshoots. Iris japonica is known by several common names, including Japanese Iris, Fringed Iris, or Butterfly Flower. You might also find it called Shaga or Shaga Flower, “Shaga” being a translation of its Japanese name, one that was used in early horticultural trade before European botanists assigned it scientific names. Both the Butterfly Flower and Fringed Iris names connect to the flower’s visual appearance: Butterfly Flower has Chinese origins reflecting how its spread flower petals resemble butterfly wings; Fringed Iris descends from one of its earlier scientific names, Iris fimbriata, where the Latin word “fimbriata” referred to the distinctive fringed edges of the flower petals. In iris classifications, Iris japonica is included in a group of visually similar crested irises, more formally known as Lophiris.
While they’re members of the same family as upright irises like Iris germanica or other tall irises — the Iridaceae family — their growth pattern is much different. Iris japonica grows close to the ground, as an understory plant that I’ve often found surrounding the trunks of Oakland’s massive magnolia and oak trees. Their early spring bloom time under those trees means that the plants emerge above layers of discarded leaves from the prior autumn as well as built-up winter debris. The evergreen leaves are abundant and large compared to the sizes of individual flowers; and the flower stems push through the layers of natural mulch to bloom just a few inches above ground.
In my last two posts about Camellia japonica (see Camellia japonica (1 of 2) and Camellia japonica (2 of 2)), I mentioned that I photographed the Camellia plant because I wanted to take on the challenge of properly rendering the red and magenta color blending in the flower petals. I took these Iris japonica photos to pursue a different challenge: to see what I could do with their untidy backgrounds, which we tend to ignore when viewing the flowers in real life but dominate any photo featuring both the flowers and their surroundings.
Here’s one of the photos in this series as it came out of the camera, where the flowers look just fine but the rest is a mess — a visually disturbing mix of broken, cut, or winter-damaged leaves that overwhelm the image:
In the olden days of a few years ago, I would — and occasionally did — produce photos of these flowers by zooming in on only the flowers, hiding the backgrounds as much as possible, or converting them to black. Despite how tedious that was, converting them to black — which involved carefully detailed masking around the edges of flower petals — would create a presentable image of the flowers, but only the flowers and maybe a few stems and leaves. I used that black background technique often with different kinds of plants (see here), and my black background period taught me a lot about how to use Lightroom’s masking tools to emphasize the subjects in my photos. Its biggest drawback, however, was the loss of environmental and botanical context since the images isolated only the blooms and eliminated everything else.
When Adobe added Generative AI Remove to Lightroom in 2024, the capability was introduced as a “distraction removal” tool to get rid of spots or unwanted objects in an image. It indeed does that (and does it well), but for my nature photography, I’ve adopted it as a reconstruction tool that’s perfect for conditions like those present in these Iris japonica photos. I can use it to rebuild or reconstruct severely damaged leaves; or, as I’ve come to think of it: replace damaged elements with what might have been there, if the damage had not occurred.
Lightroom previously had (and still has) its traditional healing and cloning tools, which operate by replacing something you select with pixels from another section of the photo. That means, in effect, you could select something like the tip of a broken leaf and replace it with the tip of another leaf that wasn’t damaged. But that would only work if you could find a suitable match. Scroll back up to my sample photo and see if you can find structures, colors, or textures — which matter a lot with botanical photographs — that would match those with any single piece of damage you might want to eliminate. It would be like trying to assemble a puzzle from pieces out of several boxes: most of them just wouldn’t fit.
Like a lot of photo editing tools, the original healing and cloning tools did exactly what you told them to do. Their behavior was literal and restricted to the image you were working on, with no broader context. Generative Remove, on the other hand, isn’t restricted like that; it can draw on an enormous amount of information beyond what’s present in a single image. While I don’t have technical knowledge about exactly how Generative Remove does what it does, I can see — from experimenting with it — that it recognizes patterns in the colors, forms, and textures of botanical (and other) subjects. It may or may not know anything about Iris japonica specifically, but manages to take selections I make and suggest replacements that are aligned with the natural appearance of parts of the plants.
Equally important, I’ve learned that I can influence Generative Remove’s replacement suggestions. If I want to replace the flatly torn end of a leaf in this image with a properly pointy Iris japonica leaf, I can make a roughly triangular selection and the replacement will look more like the tip of an unbroken leaf. And if I make an angled or curved selection aligned with the directional flow of the leaves, the replacement will mimic those angles or curves. These then lead to a more complex form of influence: the sections of the image I reconstruct first help establish how Generative Remove “sees” the image as I continue the reconstruction work, which enhances the quality and effectiveness of its additional replacement suggestions. That led me to develop a specific reconstruction workflow: remove smaller defects first so that some of the leaves are restored early on, then proceed to those with less damage, then finish up with those that are the biggest messes of all.
In this image, for example, I’m about halfway through leaf reconstruction. I’ve finished fixing those on the right side of the flowers, which had less damage than those on the left; and those in the upper right corner now match the natural appearance of Iris japonica leaves when they’re fully intact. These patterns then become additional context that Generative Remove can use as I move to the more seriously damaged leaves on the left side of the photo…
… which, when completed, look like this, and show why I think of this reconstruction as “what might have been there, if the damage had not occurred.”
Here you can see the transition from the original image, to partial reconstruction, to the final reconstructed version — that final version including color adjustments to reflect the flowers’ subtle blend of blue, violet, and purple tones. Select the first photo to view the series in a slideshow, where it should be evident how well the tool (with two hours of my help!) has managed to generate a botanically accurate and naturally plausible background for the flowers.
That the final image doesn’t reproduce exactly what was present at Oakland when I took the photo isn’t, of course, the point. All images — whether drawn or painted, produced by a film camera and retouched in a darkroom, or captured and enhanced by a digital camera’s creative modes — are interpretations rather than precise representations. A tool like Generative Remove provides a way to approach image editing differently, because the tool infers what should occupy any area I select from what’s actually present in the surrounding scene. That makes it possible to render a composition as our human visual system and memory experienced it, where distracting elements like damaged leaves in the background are filtered out in favor of the subject that attracted our attention to begin with. And — unlike the hyper-realism that often surfaces in an image created by an image generator, or even one where the background is replaced — this kind of editing preserves fidelity to the experience of taking a photograph and recalling what we found significant when we did that.
That the Generative Remove tool’s behavior can be influenced is one of the most interesting things about using it for reconstruction like this. But it’s also very different from tools that do exactly what they’re told, as the influence isn’t obvious at first and the results it produces seem ambiguous or random until you repeatedly observe how your influence can work. I don’t tell the Remove tool what I want to do in words; instead, I have to make selections, see what results it produces, decide whether they fit visually and look natural, then use them or modify them — with those choices (and the accumulation of many choices) influencing what the tool does each time I make another selection.
The closest description I can come up with is that it’s like a picture-based dialogue between a human and a machine toward a creative goal. This ambiguity and uncertainty can feel uncomfortable at times, yet embracing it means that the nuanced responses produced by AI-based tools — photo editing tools or even language models like ChatGPT or Claude — are not necessarily mysterious, but are within realms we can understand if we step back from the kind of literal instructions and expectations we’re accustomed to, when interacting with these new technologies.
