From “Spring Flowering Vines” in A Southern Garden: Handbook for the MIddle South by Elizabeth Lawrence:
“Rosa Banksiae has been in the South since 1860, when it was brought to Macon, Georgia. The fine pale leaves, and bunches of small, sweet, double, yellow flowers are on smooth, thornless canes. The flowers are sweetest early in the morning before the dew is off, or just at evening. In my garden the Banksia is twined on the summerhouse with Akebia quinata….
“When March is nearly over, and April is beginning, the pale yellow roses and the curious little mauve and maroon flowers of the vine bloom together. It is a combination to be recommended. The Banksias should not be much pruned because they bloom on old wood. Any pruning that is done should be undertaken immediately after the bloom is over.”
From “Age of Hybrids: Late Nineteenth Century and After” in The Complete Rosarian by Norman Young and L. A. Wyatt:
“A Chinese importation… is the Banksian Rose, R. banksiae, which also bears small flowers in clusters, although its habit of growth is not that of the typical ramblers…. The wild, single white form was first introduced in 1796, but remained no more than a botanical specimen for nearly a century; in 1807 came the double white (R. banksiae banksia), and in 1824 the double yellow (R. banksiae lutea); the single yellow (R. banksiae lutescens) did not arrive until fifty years later….
“It was named for Lady Banks, the wife of Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), traveller and naturalist, the companion of Captain Cook, President of the Royal Society, and founder of the Royal Horticultural Society. Lady Banks’ Rose, as it is sometimes called, is tender and needs a warm wall to enable it to flourish in our climate — a situation in which the true ramblers are usually very unhappy, being martyrs to mildew unless the wind is allowed to blow freely through their branches.”
Hello!
This is the third of four posts with photos of two variants of Lady Banks’ Rose (Rosa banksiae) that I took at Oakland Cemetery in early spring. The first post is Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (1 of 4) and the second post is Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (2 of 4). Those two posts included photos and writing about my discovery of a Lady Banks’ Rose with double white flowers (Rosa banksiae var. banksiae) near the entrance to Oakland, festooning its guardhouse. This third post and the fourth feature the more well-known variant with double yellow flowers — Rosa banksiae var. lutea — that I’ve returned to photograph each spring for the last four years.
This photo shows the Lady Banks’ demanding attention from a distance, its abundant yellow flowers standing out against the early season greens of nearby shrubs and other plants. From here you can only see about twenty percent of the plant’s overall breadth, so I produced the first eight photos in the galleries below to show it from different angles. It has spread to fill the entire corner at the intersection of the sidewalk and roadway, packing its way into a rectangular space about fifteen by twenty feet, rising at least that many feet into the air. Its flowers and canes add color over the trunks and branches of several Crape (or Crepe, if their bark reminds you of the paper) Myrtles (Lagerstroemia indica) that have not yet started to develop new leaves or blooms. While this Lady Banks’ probably does get cut back when its branches extend into the walkways, it has largely been left to expand as it sees fit and create a seemingly endless collection of double yellow flowers.
When the name of a plant references a specific color — “lutea” in Rosa banksiae var. lutea is derived from a Latin adjective for “yellow” — I’ve learned to look very closely at the flower colors while photographing them and in Lightroom when I work on them. Yellow color in the flowers of the Rosa banksiae var. lutea is remarkably consistent: even when lighting conditions darken or saturate the colors toward what we perceive as orange, there’s actually very little orange in any one of the flowers or its petals. The yellow is nearly as pure in this yellow variant as the white is pure white in the Rosa banksiae var. banksia flowers in my previous two posts. But unlike white, shades of yellow can include a range of colors between green and orange, which our cameras capture even as our eyes assign “yellow” as a color label. And because we’re photographing biological subjects whose color production — in this case by carotenoids — is alive, the amount of color and its tones vary naturally in the plants’ cells and is also influenced by environmental conditions.
In the past when I’ve photographed the yellow Lady Banks’ Rose, I’ve edited the photos to reconcile differences in yellow color expression to approximately the same tone — an approach to color correction that is not uncommon at all, especially with a series of photos of the same subject. But this botanical subject — one whose flowers have expanded to fill six thousand cubic feet — exists in several environments simultaneously, and the lighting (and therefore the colors we perceive) can vary dramatically from one section of the plant to another. Those lighting variations, in turn, influence the level of yellow saturation we see or capture because each flower’s photographed form reflects or absorbs light in different amounts, and the entire scene captured by the camera includes ambient light bouncing from objects nearby that contribute their own color tones to the composition. So a more botanically accurate representation of a yellow Lady Banks’ Rose in photographs should take into account the context created by each single frame, with fidelity to the natural color variations visible when spending time with the plant in real life.
As you look at the photographs in the galleries below, here are some ways to observe the relationship between flower color, absorbed or reflected light, and the “mini-environment” captured in each individual frame:
- The most saturated yellow color — trending toward orange — will be present when the scene I photographed was not shaded by other parts of the plant or by nearby trees. The colors will appear to be even more like orange for parts of the plant nearest the white-walled building you can see on the left side of some photos, because that wall reflects even more sunlight back onto the Lady Banks’ Rose flowers.
- Those flowers that are in the shade and surrounded by the plant’s rambunctious collection of dark green leaves will appear to have light green tones on the most translucent parts of the flower petals — those which opened first, are therefore older, and are nearer the edges of flower clusters.
- Those flowers that are in the shade but whose surroundings are more neutral or light yellow in color with very little nearby green will present a yellow blend that fades to pale yellow or very nearly to a creamy white.
- Those taken from the furthest distance — like the first three below — register to our eyes and to the camera as just yellow, simply because we’re not close enough to see or capture the varying color tones visible close up. This is one thing that makes botanical photography so fascinating to me: what seems from a distance to be flowers of a simple yellow color is gradually revealed to contain complex color relationships combining the natural capabilities of the plant, where it grows and in what environmental conditions, and what we can observe when we give it our attention.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
