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

Category: oakland cemetery

Eriocapitella japonica, the Japanese Anemone (1 of 2)

 , , , , , , , , 0

From “Begonia and Other Flowering Herbs” in The Garden Flowers of China by H. L. Li:

“The anemone, a perennial free-flowering plant with pink and white flowers, is one of the most desirable herbaceous flowers of the autumn garden. It has a long period of cultivation in China, where it is known as Pai Tou Weng (White-haired Old Man), and is a familiar plant in the autumn garden. The plant was formerly used in medicine for a variety of diseases from rheumatic pain to dysentery.

“The anemones now ornament the Western garden, and these are mostly hybrids of European origin evolved from the Chinese species. Called the Japanese anemone, Anemone japonica, this, like many other garden plants, did not originate in Japan but was first noted by European naturalists in that country in the eighteenth century. These naturalists named many a species japonica that was only Japanese by cultivation but actually Chinese in origin (Bowles and Stearn, 1947).”

From “September’s Farewell” in My Garden in Autumn and Winter by E. A. Bowles:

“Anemone japonica is a plant I should like to grow every known form of, even some of the very double ones, but space forbids, so I have limited myself to a few. It is one of those plants that when first introduced to Britain was treated as a greenhouse plant, and instructions for so growing it may be found in old gardening books, of the date of Mrs. Loudon’s. Also, like so many introductions from China or Japan of that date, it was a garden form that came, a semi-double, crude pink one, still with us, but one of the least desirable. It is only within the last few years that the really wild type has arrived….

“It is a charming plant, perfectly single, of a soft tone of pink, with neat habit, round flowers about two and a half inches across, and one of the best of the many plants that have poured into our gardens lately from the Chinese province of Hupeh. It was at first called Anemone hupehensis, but is now generally regarded as a wild form of A. japonica. I like it as well as any of the larger forms, for it has the look of a species about it, and a wonderful substance in the flowers….

“Then there is the beautiful old white form, formerly known as Honorine Joubert, and a plant one should allow to naturalise itself among shrubs and in cool, half-shaded borders as much as it likes, for it will give nearly three months’ display of its well shaped pure-white flowers, which have the most lovely of golden centres, both for form and colour, of any flower I can think of except Rosa bracteata.”

Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photographs of a plant from Oakland Cemetery that has come to mark the transition between summer and fall for me. I’ve so far encountered two (probable) species on the grounds, one of which (Eriocapitella japonica, formerly named Anemone japonica (among other names)) appears around September, and one (Eriocapitella × hybrida) that’s more likely to start blooming later in October. Since it’s still just barely September, this post includes only Eriocapitella japonica, but I’m sure I’ll hunt down the other species in a few weeks, and may even find some Eriocapitella japonica plants still producing blooms.

Like the Clematis from my own back yard (see Clematis Abundance (1 of 3)), plants in the Eriocapitella genus are members of the Ranunculaceae family, and they carry the distinctive center structure that earned the whole family the common name Buttercup. Coincidentally, one of the Eriocapitella japonica plant’s earliest botanical names was Clematis polypetala, perhaps as an observation that the flowers looked like tiny versions of Clematis blooms. This is of course something I just made up, yet it’s not an unreasonable theory given that Clematis polypetala goes back to the early 18th century and early scientific plant names were often developed around appearance similarities. For my part, I’m just glad I finally learned to spell the name of these delightful plants without having to copy and paste it from another document. And the pronunciation tip I created in last year’s post — see Eriocapitella, or: The Plants Formerly Known as Anemone (1 of 2) — has held up pretty well, which also helps me get the spelling right.

Farewell September!

Thanks for taking a look!

Yellow and White Irises: Reverse Amoena Patterns (2 of 2)

 , , , , , 2

From “Genetic Domains in Tall Bearded Iris Flowers” in Irises: The Bulletin of the American Iris Society, Volume 93 No. 2 (April 2012), edited by Kelly D. Norris:

“Rhizomes, leaves, stems, standards, falls, hafts, beards, styles, even veins in the iris flower have different functions — hence the term functional domains. These domains have their own regulatory genes that form their respective organs during development. Some of these regulatory genes turn on or off the carotenoid and anthocyanin color pathways — the sequence of biochemical reactions necessary to produce a colored pigment….

“There are at least six genetic domains in tall bearded iris flowers. These are the standards, falls, hafts, beards, veins, and styles. Remember, the falls, standards, and styles differentiate from different whorls of developing plant cells and take their own color pathways with them. Therefore, these floral parts should not be considered as one unit. Each of these domains has a duplicate gene that regulates its color pathway. We know these genetic domains exist because of the different colors expressed….

“A solid colored flower, or self, has its color genes in sync — the standards, falls, hafts, beards, veins, and styles all express the same alleles for color. Thus the duplicate regulatory genes in a self have similar alleles, but once the synchrony between alleles is changed a wonderful world of color combinations opens up….

“Iris breeding for the past 100 years has focused on changing the synchrony between floral genetic domains to develop new color combinations (not new pigments). For example, first there was the amoena and then came the reverse amoena. The development of amoena, bitone, and luminata flowers has been a progression of changing the synchrony between duplicate genes in different domains.”

From “In Zurich” in So That It Flower: A Gathering of Poems by Melville Cane:

In Zurich,
Au lac,
As soon as it is June,
They deck the tables on the terraces
With yellow irises,
And serve a brand of scrupulously fine
Gay sunshine,
To mix with equally clear and sunny
Amber honey
And butter-balls, like curled tea-roses.

Then, if you so incline,
A draught, or two, or three, of wine;
And, as the blood begins
To sing with the violins,
One muses
And drowses.

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photographs of irises with yellow standards and white falls that I took at Oakland Cemetery earlier this year. In the first post — Yellow and White Irises: Reverse Amoena Patterns (1 of 2) — I included irises planted in some of Oakland’s oldest landscapes where the irises hung out in solitary groups. In this post, we see some rejuvenated landscapes (like the first gallery image below) where the irises have complementary neighbors: the tall white-flowered Veronica spicata (also known as Spike Speedwell); and purple-flowered Verbena bonariensis (also known as Tall Verbena, Brazilian Verbena, or Purpletop Vervain), which I’ve positioned as the subject of a few of the photos with the irises in a supporting role. Is it just me, or do “Spike Speedwell” and “Purpletop Vervain” sound like they could be the names of cartoon characters?

With this post, I’ve reached the end of spring and summer 2026 photographs from Oakland. In past years, I’ve photographed lots of lilies in July and August, but doing so has meant that I’m still working on lily photos into fall and early winter, leading me to skip or miss out on photographing autumn color with the attention it deserves. Given how many asters and mums Oakland produces after summer subsides — and the variety of colors that its trees and shrubs produce — I hope to spend more time in an autumn frame of mind before the holidays roll around, without the lily photos pressuring me (!!) to edit, post, and write about them.

This, of course, assumes the temperatures start to turn cool here soon — we’ve been in the mid-to high-nineties every day throughout August and September so far — as asters, mums, and all the shrubs and trees really do use the cooling temperatures to tell them how to proceed toward fall. There’s no evidence of that cooling yet…

… but if we start dropping into the 50s at night this weekend and next week…

… the plants will likely take notice. And I will too.

Having lived half my life in northern New York, I have lingering nostalgia for the temperature changes that occur there between August and September, right when summer’s humid heat has worn out its welcome. Memories of my earliest visits to Oakland add to that nostalgia: I first explored its history and architecture extensively in October and November of 2007 for a series of research papers. So I’m planning regular stomps through the grounds of Oakland (as well as nearby Grant Park) in jeans, sneaks, and a nice fluffy jacket this fall — and recently bought a more landscape-appropriate new (used) camera lens just for that purpose.

The excerpt at the top of this post describes six “genetic domains” for tall bearded irises like these reverse amoenas, explaining how the flower’s standards, falls, hafts, beards, veins, and styles are all considered distinct (and open to manipulation) by geneticists producing iris variants. While I don’t claim to understand that part of the science well enough to explain it (yet), I still thought it was interesting that these genetic domains can be useful to a photographer (or any observer) as a way of isolating and focusing on various color regions our cameras capture. To help me visualize that better, I asked Claude.AI to produce a drawing mapping the genetic domains to their locations on the flower.

Using photos like this as guidance…

… Claude came up with this, a skeleton version of the reverse amoena irises that includes the domains mentioned in the excerpt (except veins, which could appear anywhere among the other sections).

If we put them side-by-side, it’s easy to see how the drawing is an abstract map to the living color regions of the flower I photographed….

… and it’s these regions, along with the color and texture transitions between them, that can be the most compelling ones to zoom in on. Close-up and macro photos of irises, in particular, are often composed to fill the frame with the regional transitions — not necessarily because the photographer knew about genetic domains and their color influences, but because these flower parts so deftly illustrate the ability of an iris (through genetic manipulation or natural mutations) to produce distinct arrangements of color, form, and texture within and at the boundaries of these regions — and color, form, and texture are so consequential to photography, photographic theory, and other kinds of image production.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Yellow and White Irises: Reverse Amoena Patterns (1 of 2)

 , , , , , 2

From “Yellows from Tangerine Pinks” in The World of Irises by The American Iris Society, edited by Bee Warburton and Melba Hamblen:

“During the 1930s hybridizers, concentrating on eliminating lavender from the so-called pinks of that era, created pastel beauty in tones of orchid, amethyst and lilac; but true pink was tantalizingly elusive. When it appeared through the tangerine pinks, another mystery was added to irisology, for no one has established beyond doubt when or how the tangerine character evolved. The mystery is further compounded by its almost simultaneous appearance in widely separated areas of this country with one report of its appearance in England. But this is a problem for geneticists and cytologists; we can only trace its development from the first recorded variety to the present-day wonders, which eclipse the most extravagant dreams of the pioneer pink breeders….

“By-products were an unexpected bonus from tangerine bearded breeding. Yellows appeared among the progeny of initial crosses for pinks, and hybridizers were amazed and pleased with their quality. These yellows had a sheen and brilliance and a degree of laciness rarely found in conventional yellows.

“[Tell] Muhlestein’s Queen’s Lace, a creamy white deepening to yellow in the center and at the petal edges, is the most lavishly laced iris of 1950 vintage. Its pedigree includes Chantilly twice, Hall’s 42-10 and Gold Ruffles.

“In 1952 [David F.] Hall introduced the first Award of Merit yellows from pink lines: Limelight, a self in canary to greenish yellow with yellow beards; and Temple Bells (from seedlings), a sensation in deep yellow flushed apricot, flaunting bushy, tangerine-red beards. Temple Bells was followed by a sister seedling, Top Flight, with a richer infusion of apricot and brighter beards. Techny Chimes from Bro. Charles Reckamp was the first clear yellow self with tangerine-orange beards.

“Hall’s Golden Garland, from a seedling crossed with Palomino pollen, was the first introduction from tangerine breeding with yellow standards and white falls bordered yellow, a color pattern that has always been popular….”

From “The Moment” in The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine by Kathleen Raine:

…The sun that rises
Upon one earth
Sets on another.
Swiftly the flowers
Are waxing and waning,
The tall yellow iris
Unfolds its corolla
As primroses wither,
Scrolls of fern
Unroll and midges
Dance for an hour
In the evening air,
The brown moth
From its pupa emerges
And the lark’s bones
Fall apart in the grass.

The sun that rose
From the sea this morning
Will never return,
For the broadcast light
That brightens the leaves
And glances on water
Will travel tonight
On its long journey
Out of the universe,
Never this sun,
This world, and never
Again this watcher.

Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photographs of irises with yellow standards and white falls that I took at Oakland Cemetery earlier this year. They’re among the tallest of the tall bearded irises I find at Oakland; yet even at their impressive three- to four-foot height, they still manage to produce multiple large flowers layered near the tops of very thick stems that never seem to bend even after days of windy spring and summer thunderstorms.

About half of the irises below appear in one of the older sections of Oakland, where the original Victorian garden design philosophy is evident in the blending of sloping landscapes, structures of mixed sizes and shapes dating back to the late nineteenth century, and plantings within memorial structures called grave curbs that echo contained raised gardens built outside of a memorial context. These tall bearded irises are especially suitable for this purpose, as they’ll expand to fill concrete-bordered spaces and tower over them to draw the observer’s attention to the memorial structures. There’s a visual randomness to a scene like this that’s quite different from the more precisely orchestrated landscape design I wrote about in two previous posts, shown in the second and third images below (from Amoena and Plicata Iris Patterns (3 of 3) and Amoena and Plicata Iris Patterns (1 of 3)). The three images together illustrate the historical evolution in memorial garden design through the twentieth century that emphasized symmetry while still retaining the same intermixing of natural and constructed elements.

When we zoom in on the flowers produced by these irises, we get to see and introduce a specific color pattern — a variation on the term “amoena.” Recall that the amoena classification describes an iris with white standards and purple or other single-colored falls. These irises reveal the opposite color arrangement with colorful standards and white falls, for which Clarence Mahan’s book Classic Irises and the Men and Women Who Created Them gives us a precise definition: “A name applied originally to a natural hybrid or variant of Iris variegata. Now a flower color pattern in which the standards are white and the falls are violet, yellow, pink or some other color. When the standards are colored and falls white, the pattern is called “‘reverse amoena.'”

The condensed excerpt up-top from “Yellows from Tangerine Pinks” in the book The World of Irises races through the decades between the 1930s and the 1950s to explain how the development of yellow irises with colors like these stemmed from efforts to improve tangerine-colored irises specifically, “tangerine” having been used to describe various orange tones present in many irises used for breeding.

These efforts have their own distinctive thread in the history of iris genetics, detailed in a reproduction (supplemented with images) of the entire chapter I excerpted in the American Iris Society’s article Development of Tangerine Bearded Tall-Bearded Irises. Scroll down on that page to the section “Tangerine breeding with yellow standards and white falls bordered yellow,” where you’ll encounter photos of three irises next to each other that closely match Oakland’s yellow and white reverse amoenas: Golden Garland (produced in 1957), and Debby Rairdon and May Melody (both produced in 1965). Debby Rairdon, in particular, is a nearly identical visual match to the irises I photographed. That (and my photographs) illustrates how these variants can produce pronounced waves or ruffling in the standards; richly saturated orange beards; distinctive and precise raised-texture veining near the throat of each falls petal; clear boundaries between the yellow and white colors; and a yellow rim surrounding the edges of many petals.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!