From Daylilies: The Wild Species and Garden Clones, Both Old and New, of the Genus Hemerocallis by Arlow B. Stout:
“There is no doubt that from the dawn of civilization, in the Far East and in the West, flowers have been sought and treasured, at first for their practical value — imaginary or real — but later for their beauty. It seems to me that those of us who continue to search for the beauty of flowers bestow a blessing not only on ourselves but on others by influence. We have so ransacked the world for flowers that in the more temperate climates of north and south there is not a week of the year passes — except when frost holds all in its iron grip — when there is nothing in flower. Every year the pageantry of flowers starts with the snowdrop and aconite; before they are finished the earliest daffodils and hyacinths appear, to be quickly followed by the tulips and irises. As the air warms so the scene becomes even more enriched, working up to the magnificence of peonies, roses, and lilies.
“We never tire of the progression. The flowers greet us afresh in their season yearly…. Each flower exerts a spell upon us, each has its season, and the season of each is elongated by early and late varieties….
“But what have we in daylilies? Hemerocallis flava, the Lemon Daylily, is not only the first to flower but it is also the first lily of any size to produce its blooms, which open in early June in England. We are then poised in anticipation of the opening of the lily season, and there is no doubt that this gracious, easily grown plant has considerable influence upon us. Moreover this lily is easy of culture and it produces a dense group of graceful leaves which remain in fresh green until their demise in a brief flash of yellow in autumn….
“The flowers are borne for about three or four weeks and have a pronounced and delicious fragrance. Through hybridization, daylilies now come upon us in a great variety of colors and sizes. These variations are not created by the ardent hybridists; rather do they select seedlings which please them, knowing full well that all colors are inherent in the different species and only await cross-pollination in order to be released. It is as well, when contemplating a great range of seedlings, to decide in advance what are the criteria that make a good daylily….
“Apart from saying that the light colors are most telling in the garden landscape I should not presume to dictate the choice. But it is interesting that the vast range of peach, pink, red, maroon, and mauve colorings derive from only one species, H. fulva and its variety rosea. All the others are of some tone of yellow or orange. As the eye sweeps round the garden, it is these yellows and also the orange, apricot, and pale peach tints that are at once picked out….”
Hello!
I found another favorite daylily! Of those I’ve photographed at Oakland Cemetery, this one possesses some unique characteristics that we’ll explore in this post, and display in this post and the next two.
When I went looking for this variant during the first week of June, I found only one flower in bloom, so I guess I was a little early — obviously! Here’s where the plants live, at the base of a large monument, where I’ve seen them blooming nearly every year for the past five years, and where they’ve expanded to surround the statue.
Among the leaves were hints of many more flowers to come, but I went ahead and took a couple dozen photos of the single blooming flower from different angles, so that if I didn’t get back to them a few weeks later, I’d at least have images of the one flower. This post contains photos of that single flower; the next two posts, from a second visit toward the end of June, will show off the later bloomers.
Let’s talk about one of the images, which will inform how we see all of them.
The daylily below this paragraph displays a distinct ruffle around the edges of its petals, placing it in the sculpted category of daylily forms. That ruffle, however, isn’t an isolated element: it actually emanates from the midrib (the line that bisects each petal from the throat of the flower to the edges of a petal) that is raised slightly above the rest of the petal, then curves into a concave depression. This downward pressure on the petal causes the edges of the petals to twist like a partially formed corkscrew, the extent of that twisting more pronounced on petals with higher raised midsections. Note how the top three petals show much more ruffle than the petals underneath, which, by comparison, are nearly flat. The colors in the ruffle reflect those throughout the flower, including the lighter tones that would be visible underneath the flower if you turned it over. In this image, you are seeing the first bloom from this plant; behind it are about a dozen buds at various stages of growth, which the daylily will not open at once but on consecutive days — as its intention is to extend its blooming period (and provide pollination opportunities) for several weeks.
The late morning sun was ablaze during most of this first photo session, except when I took the five photos about halfway through the galleries where the brick walkway provided the background. That amount of light had both advantages and disadvantages. Since the sun’s yellow color aligns with the throat of the flower and its stamens, those flower sections got a nice yellow and orange glow that contrasts well with the rest of the flower. The petals, on the other hand, were flooded with too much yellow light, leading to both yellow color cast across the entire image and shifting the petal colors too far in the yellow (or warm) direction. In other words, they initially appeared to be too red, though it took a bit of color detective work to determine how to represent their colors realistically.
Here’s how the camera and Lightroom interpreted the scene, with only a white balance adjustment to remove some of the excess yellow light from the sun.
The flowers appear to be red, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to present this image as having red flowers (after all, I did call this post “Red and Yellow Daylilies”). But what we’re actually seeing here is a shade of red — which we might even call reddish-orange — that doesn’t reveal the color variations that are present in the flower, because the scene is overpowered by yellow light from the sun. We can determine that, counterintuitively, by looking at parts of the image other than the flower itself: the leaves to the left of the bloom and the stone on the right side behind the flower buds. Even after correcting the image’s white balance, the leaves are still too yellow; and the stone on the right side should be a shade of gray to blue-gray, as represented in the image at the top of this post where I showed where these daylilies were growing.
With this evidence that the colors aren’t quite right, then, we can see what closer examination of the flower colors tells us — and whether it’s consistent with or contradicts our observations about the image’s colors overall. Passing Lightroom’s color picker over the flower petals shows us that they are primarily blends of two colors: magenta and red, and that these two colors are present in roughly equal proportions. This is a much different color presentation than in one of my previous posts — Pink Daylilies and Magenta Colors — where the magenta to red relationship was perhaps 80% magenta and 20% red, so those flowers appear pink to the eye rather than red.
Now that we know the colors need to be corrected — our mental shorthand for this is that the image is too yellow — correcting it is pretty straightforward: reducing yellow and green saturation, and adding a bit of bounce to magenta by shifting it toward red, this shift supported by the fact that the shades of magenta we find are those which are darker or redder than the base (somewhat pinkish) magenta color. These changes affect three sections of the photo I mentioned above: the green leaves come to demonstrate a more natural, consistent green color; the stone behind the buds turns gray or blue-gray; and the flower now shows a proper range of colors between magenta and red, instead of mostly red:
As you might conclude if you read the excerpt up-top from Stout’s 1934 book Daylilies: The Wild Species and Garden Clones, Both Old and New, of the Genus Hemerocallis, the potential for a daylily to produce this stunning combination of red, magenta, yellow, and orange colors is derived from its genetic heritage. While I don’t know the genetic background of this specific flower, most of our daylily color combinations are derived in part from the yellows produced by native or naturalized versions of Hemerocallis flava, and shades of orange provided by native or naturalized versions of Hemerocallis fulva. To that, Stout adds the probable contribution of a variant called Hemerocallis fulva var. rosea — rosea, in this case, encompassing a range of color tones that enabled breeders to essentially mix primary yellow and secondary orange with colors such as peach, pink, maroon, mauve, and apricot — or to produce complex combinations like the red and magenta present in the daylilies I photographed for these posts.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
