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Category: atlanta

Red and Yellow Daylilies (1 of 3)

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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!

Orange Double Daylilies (2 of 2)

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From A Passion for Daylilies: The Flowers and the People by Sydney Eddison:

“Daylilies are native to China, Japan, Korea, and Eastern Siberia. Long before the birth of Christ, they were mentioned as an anodyne for grief in the religious writings of Confucius, China’s greatest philosopher. By the fourth century A.D., they were being used to relieve physical as well as mental pain. A Chinese herbal of the period makes extravagant claims for juice extracted from their roots: ‘It quiets the five viscera [the heart, lung, liver, kidney, and stomach], benefits the mind and strengthens the will power, gives happiness, reduces worry, lightens the body weight and brightens the eye…. Now people often collect the young shoots and serve as a pot green. It gives a pleasant feeling in the chest.’ In addition, the thick roots were boiled and eaten like potatoes.

“It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that daylilies became cherished ornamentals for the pleasure garden. In a Chinese gardening treatise published in 1688, author Chen Hao-tzu describes a plant with leafless flower stalks (scapes in daylily parlance) and arching foliage: ‘The flower when it first appears, resembles the beak of a crane, then it opens with six radiant segments, yellow dusted red, opening in the morning and withering by night.’ This description still fits some of the old-fashioned daylilies.

“No one knows by what circuitous path these plants came to Europe in time to be recorded and described in medieval herbals…. However they traveled, the ubiquitous orange daylily (Hemerocallis fulva) and its yellow companion, the lemon lily (H. Lilioaspbodelus) had arrived in Europe by the sixteenth century. A hundred years later, this same pair crossed the Atlantic with pilgrims and took root in American soil. From the eastern seaboard, the tougher, more adaptable tawny orange daylily moved west with the settlers, earning itself the name of homestead lily. And during the late nineteenth century, a root or two of this hardy species wound up alongside the porch of a midwestern farmhouse. Here, it became an object of interest to young Arlow Burdette Stout, whose mother had planted it….

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a handful of breeders using half a dozen wild species were producing yellow and orange hybrids. Today, hundreds of hybridizers working with an enormous gene pool are producing a thousand new cultivars a year. (Cultivar combines the words cultivated and variety to distinguish garden plants from naturally occurring species.) Previously unknown colors and designs are now emerging from nurseries and backyards all around the country, thanks to Dr. Stout and Hemerocallis fulva.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of a double form of the daylily Hemerocallis fulva from Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Orange Double Daylilies (1 of 2).

Unlike those in the previous post, where they were planted as part of a precisely designed garden memorial…

… I found the daylilies in these photos in one of the “wild” sections of the property, where several different kinds of plants and flowers live together in a transitional space, arranged and layered for visual appeal. Their presence among densely planted variegated grasses produced interesting contrasts between the bright orange flowers and the green and white or gray stripes in the background, while that grass hid most of the daylily stems and leaves. I took about half of these photos using the gray/green grass as a backdrop, then changed positions so I could focus more closely on individual blooms.

The impressive height of these daylilies meant that they were easy to photograph not far below eye level, so zooming in reveals more of the structure and detail than I could capture from a distance in the previous post. Here we get a better look at not only the blended shades of orange, yellow, and red present in each flower, but also get a closer look at their structure. The layered petals appear to unfold like ribbons, with lower petals terminating in flat or rectangular shapes, and upper petals drawn to a point that is common to many daylilies, including the single form of Hemerocallis fulva itself. In early stages of blooming, each flower has a few upright petals surrounding and protecting its young stamens and pistils, which fold down to the lower layers as these reproductive segments strengthen and mature.

The shades of orange in these daylilies are remarkably stable; you can increase or decrease saturation substantially in Lightroom and still end up with an image that contains adequate contrast, detail, and color variation. That’s actually very common among orange flowers, whose colors — spectrally wide-ranging between yellow and red — are densely packed into the flower petals’ cells. Imagine, if you will, how these colors don’t just exist at the surface level, but at multiple microscopic levels stacked on top of each other. Luckily, our eyes (and our cameras) detect and perceive all these layers, even if they don’t actually register to our vision as multi-layered or multi-dimensional.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Orange Double Daylilies (1 of 2)

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From “Hemerocallis Fulva” in The Heirloom Flower Garden: Rediscovering and Designing with Classic Ornamentals by Jo Ann Gardner:

“The Orange or Tawny Daylily is a vigorous species with large flowers about 5 inches across — orange with darker zones and stripes in shades of red and mahogany — giving the effect of a tawny color, preserved in the Latin epithet fulva….

“In Asia, where Daylilies have been cultivated for thousands of years, they are regarded as a source of food and medicine. The flowers are picked fresh and fried in batter or dried and used to thicken soups. Preparations from the plant are used to relieve jaundice and dropsy and to reduce fever and pain….

“In Europe and the New World, the Daylily has always been cultivated for its beauty alone.
The Lemon Yellow was a special favorite in English cottage gardens. Both the Orange and Yellow Daylily were brought to the New World during the 17th century and widely cultivated across the land. The more vigorous Orange Daylily remains a faithful signpost to many heirloom plant collectors, who know that where it grows, an old garden cannot be far away.

“Until the late 19th century, only these two species were grown in America. By 1860 a double form of the Orange — crowded with petals — was introduced from Japan, where it had been noticed by European travelers since about 1712…. In 1897 a new Orange, ‘Maculata’, was added to the pool of Daylilies, offering later bloom and larger flowers with a deep bronze patch on each petal….

“By the 1920s, America had become the leading center for hybridization, the goal being the creation of ever-new types with larger flowers of diverse forms — wavy, frilled petals, for instance — an expanded color range, and a longer blooming period. The old Orange, naturalized along roadsides across the country, was one of the leading contributors to the breeding process….”

Hello!

This is another one of my favorite daylilies to photograph at Oakland Cemetery — which is probably something I can say about all the daylilies that I’ve ever photographed as well as those I haven’t photographed yet, but will.

It’s been three years since I dwelled with this particular batch of flowers. The last time was in 2022 (see Summer Daylilies (2 of 3): Double-Double Orange-Orange), when I determined that they were a double form of a more common yellow/orange daylily called Hemerocallis fulva.

Here’s where they live:

This is an especially distinctive space among the many distinctive spaces throughout Oakland Cemetery, notable for much more than the orange double daylilies standing tall at the back. When I took this photograph, the steel chain was in place to discourage entry; but in the past, it’s been accessible (note how there’s a rust stain on the top step, where they chain often sets) so I’ve walked up the steps and sat on the stone bench at the right of the photo.

From that position, the space demonstrates how it’s so unique. The use of grass throughout the space is unusual; and that, along with the placement of shrubs and trees around the edges, creates a sense of visual and auditory isolation from the rest of the property. That your sight is contained within its boundaries, and external sounds are effectively muffled to near silence, actually mirrors the design of the entire cemetery, with its acreage surrounded by hefty brick walls that separate you from the busy streets outside. It’s like a microcosm of the rest of the cemetery, one with its own independent architecture. And that architecture includes the use of plants whose appearance will vary with the seasons, since much of the greenery you see here will exhibit rich fall color in October and November.

Many of the designed plots at Oakland Cemetery contain elaborate sculptured memorials — statues, mausoleums, or other structures representing the people memorialized there and aspects of their lives. Note, however, this one contains only a single memorial stone (right in front of the daylilies) — which doesn’t necessarily convert the square into a straightforward garden, but suggests that its designers favored the creation of a contemplative space rather than a simple (or even complex) memorial. From the bench, there’s a sense of peace that unfolds while you sit there — one that is still quite powerful even if you can only observe it from the outside.

Some of the irises I photographed for my iris project made an appearance here a few weeks earlier, their remnants visible among the green leaves surrounding the daylilies. This daylily cultivar may have been bred to increase its height (while doubling its petal production), as some of its stems extend nearly four feet above ground. This was convenient for The Photographer, who — unwilling to jump the chain and invade the space (this time anyway) — used a zoom lens from outside positions to get a closer look at the flowers.

With a zoom lens and limited sight lines, I had to take whatever lighting conditions I could get, which meant that some of the flowers had a lot of sunlight on them when I took their pictures. The effect — which I didn’t notice until I got home — was that the saturated orange from the flowers combined with the yellow that is natural to sunlight caused the flower petals to act like reflectors casting yellow and orange throughout the entire scene. The effect is similar to results you could intentionally achieve in a photography studio, using a yellow or gold reflector to bounce light from the reflector onto your subject.

This level of warmth in an image of orange flowers isn’t necessarily wrong, nor is it uncommon. See, for example, all these images of double orange daylilies that display similar colors throughout the subjects and backgrounds. But I knew — from what we like to call “real life” — that while the stone behind the flower could have been that sandy brown color, it wasn’t. Much of the stone near these flowers was typical of Oakland Cemetery’s stonework: it’s gray to very light blue, with textures that alternate between the two colors. The leaves, too, didn’t seem quite correct; they should have been a more unadulterated green than the yellow-green in this image.

So these two characteristics of the image told me that some color correction was appropriate, to more accurately represent the colors that I saw. In this case, only a simple white balance adjustment coupled with reducing orange and yellow saturation a smite or two was necessary to remove the color cast, clarify the colors, and create better contrast between the blue-gray stone, the green leaves, and the star of the scene: the daylily’s rich orange.

When I last photographed these daylilies in 2022, this was the only family of them on the property. This year, however, I subsequently stumbled across another colony whose flowers were close to eye level and weren’t visitor-inhibited. That enabled me to get some much closer shots of individual flower blossoms and a few photogenic groupings, which I’ll feature in the next post.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!