"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

White Double Daffodils (1 of 2)

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From “Daffodil Definitions” in Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower by Noel Kingsbury:

“The genus Narcissus is one of some sixty in the family Amaryllidaceae, which also includes snowdrops, clivia, and of course Amaryllis. What sets Narcissus apart is the cup or corona….

“The standard pattern for flowers is for them to be made up of four whorls of tissue: sepals (which often form the protective bud), petals, stamens (carrying male pollen-bearing organs), and carpels (protecting the female organ)…. Debate among botanists has raged since the middle of the nineteenth century about whether the corona is derived from the stamens or the perianth segments; similar structures can be seen in other members of the amaryllis family, although it is thought that they arose independently. Now, it appears as if the question has been solved — the daffodil cup is a structure that has evolved independently of either perianth segments or stamens and is unique to the daffodil. What evolutionary advantage it serves remains open to question — possibly it helps directs pollinating insects or protects the stamens from rain.

“There are some seventy species of Narcissus, although some botanists might reduce this to fifty, and others increase to a hundred. As with many plant genera, there are a few species spread over a large area and a ‘centre of diversity,’ where a small area includes a much larger number of localised species. For the daffodil, that centre of diversity is the mountains of the Iberian peninsula (i.e., Spain and Portugal) and the mountains just across the water in the Maghreb (i.e., Morocco and Algeria). Only one species, N. pseudonarcissus, has a really wide distribution in western Europe; N. poeticus (the familiar pheasant’s eye) and the white N. serotinus are found across the regions immediately north of the Mediterranean, while the heavily fragrant white N. tazetta is found further eastwards around the Mediterranean into Iran.”

From “White Narcissus” in Sunlight and Shadows by Mabel Clare Thomas:

Winds across my garden,
Damp and chill,
Bring a breath of Springtime
To my window sill
From the ivory chalices,
Filled with gold,
Of my first narcissus
Braving the cold.

Other flowers sleeping
In their beds,
Miss the fragile beauty
Above their heads
Where my white narcissus,
Harbinger of Spring,
Dances with the breezes
While the robins sing.

Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photos of a double form of the well-known daffodil Narcissus tazetta that I took at Oakland Cemetery on March 30. Each photo is of one or more flowers integrated into the memorial display shown below, one that represents a very typical and complex Victorian garden arrangement with a raised platform, large and richly surfaced stone walls, access steps, and varied plant populations providing visual interest with contrasting colors and textures.

This location is just a few steps beyond that of the Lady Banks’ Rose (Rosa banksiae var. lutea) I wrote about previously (see Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (3 of 4)), and — as you can see here — the Duncan memorial and some of the double Narcissus tazetta flowers are visible from a distance, toward the left side of this image from the earlier post.

This entire section of Oakland includes some of its oldest and most elaborate displays, and any single wider-angle photo necessarily includes elements from more than one memorial plot. The weathered gazebo you can see in the first image — which looks like it’s within the Duncan memorial — is actually part of another family section, shown here, where it is included as a representation of living activity among the headstones, memorial urns, and intricate mausoleum that I’ll write more about later — when I introduce photos of the tiny yellow daffodils providing abundant spring color to this scene.

I included the excerpt from Noel Kingsbury’s Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower because its description of the parts of a flower and the distinctive corona (or cup or trumpet) of many daffodils can help us understand the unique characteristics of a double daffodil. As you can see from the galleries below, these daffodils don’t have coronas. They possess, instead, a genetic variation where the corona has mutated into a layer or layers of flower petals at the center of each bloom, surrounded by several additional rows of white petals. The yellow-orange color you see at the centers of these flowers would have been the corona, were it not for the mutation that caused the plant to essentially reconstruct that corona into petals instead.

This means — as the excerpt also implies — that double daffodils don’t possess the reproductive structures that are present in daffodils with coronas, so even if they attracted pollinator attention, they wouldn’t reproduce by pollination or seed. There is nothing, as it turns out, for the bugs and bees to do — so it’s quite convenient for the double daffodils that they’ve evolved to reproduce by bulb division. This garden space likely contains descendants of original white double daffodils planted decades ago, with succeeding generations enabled by human caretakers digging up and replanting regenerated daffodil bulbs to maintain the landscaping characteristics of this historical design.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (4 of 4)

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From “The Banksian Roses” in Climbing Roses of the World by Charles Quest-Ritson:

“The Philadelphia nurseryman Robert Buist declared in 1844 that the Banksians were ‘the most graceful, luxuriant, and beautiful of roses.’ They are also the first to flower (a month before other roses) and among the most vigorous….

“The largest rose-tree in the world is a plant of the double white Rosa banksiae var. banksiae on the corner of Fourth Street and Toughnut in Tombstone, Arizona, which was planted in 1886. By 1969 its trunk had a circumference of nearly 2.5 m and the plant was spread over a trellis of more than 550 m. Now it is said to cover 800 m.

“Banksian roses have long been popular in China, where there are records of cultivated forms as far back as the sixteenth century. Rosa banksiae var. banksiae was the first to be introduced to the West….

“A single form with yellow flowers was introduced from China in the mid-nineteenth century as Rosa banksiae f. lutescens. It is sweetly scented (but not of violets), and its slightly larger flowers (2.0-2.5 cm) indicate that it is a hybrid with a form of R. chinensis…. Its yellow colouring, as well as that of Rosa banksiae var. lutea, probably came from a cultivated form of R. chinensis….

“[John] Lindley named the double yellow Banksian rose Rosa banksiae var. lutea. It was collected in Nankin by John Parks on behalf of the Horticultural Society of London in 1824 and has large clusters of small (1.0-1.5 cm), fully double, straw yellow flowers with a green eye. They are scentless but borne in immense profusion. The plant usually has five leaflets and few prickles. It is the hardiest of the Banksians….”

From “Rosa banksiae ‘lutea'” in A Garden of Roses by Alfred Parsons:

“A spring-flowering rambling rose, which adds its soft yellow colouring to many a wall-grown Chinese Wisteria in Britain. The two make a delicate contrast and it is as a wall specimen in warmer districts that this rose is usually found. Though hardy, it needs all the sun’s warmth to encourage it to flower well….

“The double yellow form is most frequently seen in British gardens and is no doubt an old Chinese garden favourite; it arrived from China in 1824. Strangely, the single white form of the species, Normalis, had arrived earlier, in 1796, but was planted on the wall of Megginch Castle, Strathtay, Scotland, where it grew well but never flowered. Cuttings were taken to Nice where in the warm sunshine they flowered well. A double white form… was introduced from Canton in 1807 and a single yellow ‘Lutescens‘ later in the nineteenth century….

“The two singles and also the double white have a penetrating and delicious perfume; the double yellow is also fragrant — a delicate primrose-like scent. Dean Hole, the famous rosarian-founder of the (Royal) National Rose Society, wrote of the double white that it had ‘a sweet perfume as though it had just returned from a visit to a Violet’.

“Willing as I should be to give wall space to any and all of them, I have to remember that they are very strong growers and cannot easily be curtailed. It is of course quite easy to cut their long green thornless shoots, but flowers are only produced on side shoots from two-year-old wood and thereafter….”

Hello!

This is the last of four posts with photos of two variants of Lady Banks’ Rose (Rosa banksiae) that I took at Oakland Cemetery in early spring. The previous posts are:

Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (1 of 4)
Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (2 of 4)
Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (3 of 4)

We wrap up this series (until next year!) with close-up and macro photos of Rosa banksiae var. lutea flowers, including some that show incoming blooms with the same corymb and pedicel structure I described in the second post. Buds were a little harder to find on the yellow variant than on the white-flowering one (Rosa banksiae var. banksiae), but I encountered a few deep within the plant rather than near its outer regions. As we discussed, the yellow plant is older than the white one and tends to bloom slightly earlier — so most of its flowers were fully established on the day I took photos of both plants. The few remaining unopened buds are less extravagant than those I posted of the white variant — likely because they don’t get as much sunlight — but still reveal the plant’s visually elegant way of producing new flowers and making them available to pollinators.

Until I came across the excerpt at the top of this post, I was unaware of the Godzilla-sized Lady Banks’ Rose at the Rose Tree Museum in Tombstone, Arizona, that has been growing there since 1886. Officially designated by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest rosebush in 2001, the plant sports a trunk with a diameter of more than 14 feet — which you can see at the bottom of this page. While at first these struck me as fun and fascinating facts, they also made me realize that I don’t know if the yellow Lady Banks’ at Oakland is one single plant, and I don’t know how old it is. I do know that it’s in a well-established and deeply landscaped section of Oakland — as we can see in these photos, where the first one is from my previous post and the second is from a series I’m working on (of double daffodils) adjacent to the plot with the Lady Banks’ Rose:

The connected sections here feature plants that I know from experience have been there for many years, and have not been altered by any of Oakland’s ongoing reconstruction work. This means that the Lady Banks’ Rose could be decades old — yet I’m missing the key visual we could speculate on as evidence: a photograph of the plant’s main trunk where all the canes, stems, and flowers emerge from the ground. So we’ll have to leave this series with a mystery for now, but that a Lady Banks’ Rose is capable of building a trunk with a 14-foot diameter and live for 140 years (so far!) certainly makes the mystery a compelling one to address. There’s more discovering — and rediscovering — left to do….

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Discovering (and Rediscovering) Lady Banks’ Rose (3 of 4)

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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!