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

Category: oakland cemetery

Dogwood Study (1 of 2)

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From “Names” in Self-Portrait with Dogwood by Christopher Merrill:

“Cornus means ‘of the horn’ and is related to the Latin words for tusk, the horns of the crescent moon, the wing of an army, a musical instrument played by Roman soldiers, the end of a book or scroll, power, strength, might. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Florida‘ begins, ‘The state with the prettiest name.’ The same holds for the botanical name of the dogwood native to the eastern United States, Cornus florida, which may be translated as ‘flowering horn.’

“It is surely one of the prettiest trees in forests and backyards from Maine to Florida and westward to Illinois — a small nesting tree, rarely more than forty feet tall, with opposite or adjacent pairs of oval leaves and clusters of what botanists call perfect inconspicuous yellow flowers, surrounded by four white or pink petal-like leaves known as bracts. Its bark, ridged and broken, is said to resemble the hide of an alligator…. White-tailed deer and rabbits feed on its twigs and leaves, and in the fall its scarlet fruit, which is mildly poisonous to humans, provides food for squirrels, foxes, beavers, skunks, and black bears, as well as thirty-six species of birds, including bobwhites, cardinals, cedar waxwings, robins, mockingbirds, wild turkeys, and woodpeckers.

“It is an understory tree, which grows in the shade of the forest canopy….”

From “A Cold Spring” in The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop:

A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born….

The next day
was much warmer.
Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,
each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt;
and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.
Four deer practised leaping over your fences.
The infant oak-leaves swung through the sober oak.
Song-sparrows were wound up for the summer,
and in the maple the complementary cardinal
cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke,
stretching miles of green limbs from the south….

Hello!

For this post and the next one, we have a study of an old dogwood tree that I’ve previously photographed (see, for example,Dogwoods with White Blooms (1 of 2) and Dogwoods with White Blooms (2 of 2) from 2023) at Oakland Cemetery.

On most of those earlier trips, I tended to focus on closeups of small clusters of the dogwood’s flowers, since — especially on sunny days — it can be challenging to get a satisfactory photograph of larger sections of the tree. The combination of bright sunlight and the tree’s massive quantity of individual white flowers would make it difficult to find a focal point for the composition that wasn’t just overpowered with white light. The overcast day I took this batch of photos on, however, gave me a chance to examine the tree from different perspectives and zoom levels and capture it more as a whole tree than individual branches and flowers. Not having to contend with too much backlighting in particular meant it was possible to observe and capture details that would have otherwise gotten lost in the light.

Let’s talk about the first four photos below, as they show off some of a dogwood tree’s unique characteristics. This is most likely Cornus florida — a dogwood common to many regions, and quite prevalent in and native to the U.S. Southeast. What is conventionally referred to as this dogwood’s flower or bloom is a more complex structure, consisting in part of tiny, conical flowers at the center surrounded by white (or sometimes pink or red) petal-like bracts — whose job is to attract pollinators to visit the less visible yellow-green flowers.

Dogwood branches often extend wider than the tree’s height, so the tree in bloom occupies a much larger horizontal space than other trees with trunks of similar height. That the branches reach or stretch as far as they do creates a striking visual effect, as each row of branches tends to alternate with other rows in slightly overlapping layers. When photographed at wider angles, the tree gives the impression that it’s too wide for its height, especially since the main trunk (or typical split trunk, in this case) leans toward the reaching branches at about a 30-degree angle. You might think it’s going to fall over; but it’s really just trying to get your attention with this somewhat contradictory design.

The dogwood’s branching pattern is often described as a fishbone or herringbone effect, something that becomes more evident as you study (or photograph) the tree. And the effect is especially noticeable during the tree’s blooming season, as the branches extend in opposing directions over each other. Once the leaves appear, much of the space occupied by the blooms will get filled in, and the contrast between white bracts and the surrounding landscape is less apparent. That the branches are gnarly adds to the effect: they don’t proceed straight out from the tree, but instead appear to twist in multiple directions as their terraces of flowers seek out the light. On those layered, threaded branches, the blooms float like a blizzard of snowflakes in even the slightest breeze. The effect carries through to the photographs (I hope), and I should add just for fun that I had to take several breaks while working on the photos: the intense contrast between the white petals and the rest of the photo caused me a bit of snow blindness as they seemed to light up my desk and the corner of my office.

This tree — accurately described as an understory tree in the quotation at the top of this post — grows in the shade of several taller oaks, maples, and a magnolia tree nearby, but its branches reach with great determination in the opposite direction, toward the sun rising over the cemetery’s gardens. The third photo below shows that directionality: on cloudless mornings, the sun would be seen rising over the buildings in the background.

I tried to cajole the tree into revealing its age; but no matter how many times I questioned the trunk, it refused to answer. In dogwood-years, though, it’s probably in its middle or late middle age — six to eight decades as evidenced by its height (thirty to forty feet), the diameter of and split in the trunk, and the wide sweep of its branches. Architectural structures surrounding it are even older than that, but it’s not likely that the dogwood has been there since the late nineteenth century and was probably planted in the mid-twentieth. Nevertheless, it does, at this point, fit so well with the aesthetic qualities of what’s around it that it’s easy to think of it as a tree as ancient as the property where it flourishes, protected by the trees around it and well-maintained by the garden’s caretakers.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Spring Snowflakes (2 of 2)

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From V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book, selected and edited by Philippa Nicolson:

“The spring Snowflake, Leucojum vernum, which started coming into flower at the beginning of this month, is worth noticing now with a view to future bulb orders. It is one of those things which repay looking closely into, turning its white, green-tipped bell upwards, as you might turn a child’s face upwards by putting your finger under its chin.

“Any right-minded child would resent and resist; the Snowflake has no option. You may then peer into the delicacy of its structure and its markings, always the best way to appreciate the tinies of drooping habit. Not that the Snowflake fails to make its own little effect in the garden. It accompanies the snowdrops and the aconites, and thus is welcome on a dreary morning when every harbinger and prophet means the beginning of spring.

“Practical note: plant the bulbs early, in September. Do not be disappointed if for the first year they do not do much. They need a year to settle down; so, obviously, you must never disturb them again once you have got them established. They like a bit of shade, so are useful to fill up a shady corner where other bulbs might not flourish.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of Spring Snowflakes (Leucojum vernum) from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post — with a little Snowflake botanical history — is Spring Snowflakes (1 of 2).

Thanks for taking a look!

Spring Snowflakes (1 of 2)

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From “Snowdrops and Snowflakes” in Garden Bulbs for the South by Scott Ogden:

“The spring snowflake (Leucojum vernum) is as ill-suited to Southern conditions as most snowdrops, but this failure is of little consequence. Although the species often appears on the lists of importers, they invariably ship the similar summer snowflake (L. aestivum) in its stead. This one positively thrives in the South, and you could hardly ask for a more appealing spring flower.

“The name leucojum, an old one used by Theophrastus, translates as ‘white violet.’ These tiny, pure white, bell-shaped blooms have a subtle, sweet fragrance and appear in drooping clusters of two to six. They rise on twelve-inch stems directly from the robust, clustered bulbs. The six snowy petals are marked with unique thickened, green spots at the tips, and these give the fairy-sized blooms an air of unreality.

“This is somewhat overcome by the tremendous bunches of lush green leaves that rise from the round, narcissuslike bulbs. This excess foliage is needed to set off the tiny sprays of bloom, and does a fine job if the bulbs are planted in clumps of at least six. ‘Gravetye Giant‘ is a select large-flowered form that originated in the garden of English horticulturist William Robinson. Worth seeking out for its large blooms, it does not seem to be as rampantly vigorous as the ordinary strains common to Southern dooryards.

“In their homes around the Mediterranean these bulbs grow in mucky soils along streams. In such situations they prosper on a surplus of spring moisture and a long summer baking. This prepares the flowers especially for the heavy clay soils of the South, but they perform well on moist sand, also, thriving equally in sun or full shade.”

Hello!

This is the first of two posts featuring photos of Leucojum vernum, or Spring Snowflakes — which grow and spread in abundance in several shaded areas of Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. They seem to have a relatively long blooming period; I took some of the photographs on March 4 and the rest on March 29, and there were still plenty of unopened blooms getting ready for later visitors. The plants’ habit of filling in shaded spaces — along with the way its thimble-sized, bell-shaped flowers nod back and forth at the end of thin stems — can make it a challenge to photograph, but I did manage to convince quite a few to stand still for the camera. I try to make sure that the green dots at the bottom of the bells are in focus; if they are, then the rest of the flower is usually in focus too.

According to Wikipedia, the Spring Snowflake “is native to central and southern Europe from Belgium to Ukraine. It is considered naturalized in north-western Europe, including Great Britain and parts of Scandinavia, and in the US states of Georgia and Florida” — which means, in effect, that the plant has managed to establish itself so well and for so long in these two southeastern states that its presence is nearly indistinguishable from a plant that was native to the region.

I have mostly seen them at Oakland (though occasionally see smaller batches in yards or in wilder spaces) where I like to imagine that they were planted around the time of the cemetery’s founding (in the 1850s) — but that’s probably fanciful. To be fair, though, I’ve been aware of them in the same several spaces for about ten years, and they’re always robust, filling the sections they occupy with dense presentations of flowers and swordlike leaves, while also spilling around the edges of any structures trying for containment. The shape of the flower — a bell — perhaps fits as a memorial metaphor, with white suggesting purity, and its early bloom time reflecting the cycles of life and spring renewal that’s common to plantings selected for garden cemeteries.

Thanks for taking a look!

Daffodils, Mostly White, Definitely Not Imaginary Blue

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From “Narcissus” in Flowers and Their Histories by Alice M. Coats:

“The art, hobby or profession of breeding garden varieties of daffodil is not of recent origin; it had already begun in Jacobean times, and instructions for raising seedlings were given by John Rea in 1665. The majority of early gardeners, however, seem to have been content to import their new varieties from the Continent, for Philip Miller in 1724 complained that ‘in England there are very few persons who have patience to propagate any of these flowers that way, it being commonly five years before they can expect to see the fruits of their labour’. It was not until Dean Herbert of Manchester conducted his experiments in hybridizing, in preparation for his book on the Amaryllidaceae, published in 1837, that interest in daffodil-raising was really aroused in England….

“His work inspired Edward Leeds of Manchester, William Backhouse of Darlington, and finally Peter Barr, to specialize in the flower. Peter Barr was justly called the Daffodil King; for besides founding the firm of Barr and Son, and continuing the development of the strains started by Backhouse and Leeds, he travelled extensively in Spain and southern Europe in search of wild daffodils, and was instrumental in restoring to our gardens many species that had been lost since the time of Parkinson….

“He also wrote a book called Ye Narcissus, and was largely responsible for the organization of the first Daffodil Conference in 1884. He died in 1909, but his work was carried on by George Herbert Engelheart, whose honorary title was Father of the Modern Daffodil. The first Daffodil Show was held at Birmingham in 1893; and the flower has made steady progress ever since. It has now become one of the world’s most popular flowers, and specialists devote to it the attention and care once lavished on the carnation, the tulip and the auricula. In 1903 the Rev. W. Wilks (then Secretary of the R.H.S.) expressed the opinion that no further advance in daffodil-breeding was either possible or desirable; but to us, looking back, the modern daffodil seems only to have been in its infancy at that date. Since then the lovely pink-cupped varieties have made their appearance, led by ‘Mrs. R. O. Backhouse‘ in 1923; and a later achievement was a trumpet daffodil with a white perianth and a scarlet cup exhibited by her son, Mr. W. O. Backhouse, in 1953….

“We may yet see an all-red daffodil, or a white-and-green trumpet, or even a shade approaching blue.”

From “Blue Daffodils” in Blue Daffodils and Other Poems by Bryan Owen:

I saw blue daffodils
swaying in a lilac breeze
one warm afternoon in May;
a lime-green sun shone down
from a pink-striped sky
as below me
dirty black cars crawled
creepily back to their holes
in the ground.

A bee buzzed brightly,
a cat flew overhead
and it was good to be alive.

Hello!

We have arrived at the end of Daffodil Season — which tends to start in February here in the Southeast and wind its way into late March or (if we’re lucky) early April. While I have photos of other flowers (such as snowflakes, tulips, dogwoods, and quinces) in my backlog, I’ll take a couple of trips to Oakland’s gardens in the next few days to see if there are any daffodils left. Most likely, early irises — probably white ones — have started to bloom, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they get my attention even if there are a few stray daffodils remaining.

The flowers in this series are a mix of four cultivars: the large white and yellow daffodils are identified as Narcissus × incomparabilis and Narcissus pseudonarcissus; the smaller ones are Narcissus tazetta and Narcissus poeticus. Toward the middle of the galleries, I’ve included four photos showing where the large daffodils were growing, in a shaded section of the gardens where you can listen to them shift in the wind as they bloom, while you rest on a stone memorial bench.

A funny thing happened on the way to writing this blog post. As a summary of early daffodil breeding efforts, I had selected the quotation at the top (from Flowers and Their Histories by Alice M. Coats) to wrap up my daffodil series, and noticed how she mentioned the future possibility of blue daffodils toward the end. Since the book was written in the 1970s, I wondered if progress had been made toward developing daffodil blues, especially since — as is often the case when I analyze colors produced by my camera — I’m very aware that white flowers will appear to have blue tones (something I wrote about here), depending on surrounding colors, the presence of cool sunlight in shadows, and the reflective qualities of the flower I photographed. So I started hunting down the elusive blue daffodils with a simple Google search, thinking that if they did exist, I’d link to their images so you could take a look.

Here’s a screenshot of my interaction with Google on the question of blue daffodils (poke for a larger version):

“Yes, blue daffodils are real” — I am told. Except they aren’t.

Notice the confidence with which Google’s AI has informed me that blue daffodils do indeed exist, while including an image of a painting of blue daffodils for reference. If you try an image search for blue daffodils, you’ll probably see that same painting among the results, along with pictures of blue daffodils which — this should be obvious — aren’t showing a natural blue color, but one added by an image editing program. Note also that toward the end of Google’s response, it mentions Gardens Illustrated, the well-known gardening and horticultural magazine, to which it provides (at the right of the response) a link to this article…

World’s first blue daffodil finally flowers

… published on April 1, 2022.

Does that date seem odd? Or maybe — if you know a minimalist amount of French like I do — you may have noticed that the blue daffodil cultivar’s name — Narcissus ‘Poisson d’Avril’ — appears to have the word “fish” (“poisson”) as part of its name. So a literal translation of that name would be “April Fish Daffodil” while a more accurate, contextual translation would be “April Fool’s Daffodil” since the historical French origins of April Fool’s Day often referenced fish instead of fools. It’s a clever pun on the part of Gardens Illustrated, one that does a nice job of obscuring the joke, and manages to combine gardening, plant breeding, history, and botany in a short but endearing article.

As someone who often can’t resist tunneling down a rabbit hole once I’ve stuck my head in, I decided to learn a little more about how prevalent the misinformation parroted (“hallucinated“) by Google’s AI was around the internet. I’m not going to link to the things I found (spam abounds under the covers) but you can certainly find these and other variations if you want to “do your own research.” And I discovered, among other things:

  • an AI-generated website describing the botanical history of blue daffodils, and which daffodils were used to breed them;
  • another AI-generated website which goes into detail about the chemical process used to create blue daffodils, which, after paragraphs of implausible but scientific-sounding words and phrases, points out at the end that they don’t actually exist;
  • yet another AI-generated website that considered Narcissus ‘Poisson d’Avril’ a real daffodil cultivar, and used a copied page about yellow daffodils from the same site, replacing “yellow” with “blue.”
  • references to their commercial availability for gardeners to purchase blue daffodils for their gardens by the year 2030;
  • websites describing how to grow and propagate them (presumably not until 2031 🙂 ), with links to photographs of flowers that are actually blue irises rather than daffodils;
  • repetition of content from the original April Fool’s Day article from Gardens Illustrated, with the “10 years in the making” updated to 12 years, and repeating references to the “top secret location in Wales” (one of these?) where the flowers were (not) being engineered.
  • impossible images showing their presence among other daffodils in gardens, where their blue colors contrast with the more traditional yellow daffodils; and, finally:
  • actual sellers on some of the world’s most well-known online shopping sites offering “blue daffodil seeds” (daffodil seeds dyed blue?) for sale that will allegedly produce blue daffodils similar to those in the fake photos accompanying the listings.

The last one is especially interesting to me because it demonstrates the commercialization of misinformation. We got there, apparently, from long-standing botanical curiosity around the idea of blue daffodils; to an April Fool’s prank; to the proliferation of the prank as a fact on AI-generated websites that didn’t get the joke; to Google’s AI assuring us that blue daffodils really do exist and it’s just a matter of a few years before they make it into our gardens; to random sellers offering “blue daffodil seeds” for sale from online shops.

Continuing further down the rabbit hole, I decided to ask three other AI tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, and ClaudeAI — about blue daffodils too. ClaudeAI — the one I use the most — recognized blue daffodils as part of a joke right off the bat, as did Perplexity and ChatGPT. ChatGPT even had a little more fun with the joke, offering to create a photo of imaginary blue daffodils for me, so I’d have one on hand if blue daffodils someday came to be:

Of the four AIs I queried, then, only Google — the most ubiquitous source of information on the internet — seems to have been fooled. Because the idea of “dueling AIs” amuses me, I went further with ClaudeAI: I uploaded Google’s response and asked for an explanation of how this misinformation made its way around the web. Here’s what it told me:

This is such a fascinating digital folklore situation you’ve uncovered! I love that both Google’s search AI and Gemini confidently presented the April Fool’s joke as fact, complete with the future commercial availability prediction.

What you’re witnessing is essentially the birth of a modern gardening myth, spreading through AI systems. The “Poisson d’Avril” blue daffodil has become a perfect case study in how misinformation can cascade through digital ecosystems:

– A reputable gardening magazine (Garden’s Illustrated) publishes an April Fool’s joke
– Various websites and content farms pick it up as fact
– Search engines and AI systems ingest this information without recognizing the context
– The information gets repackaged and disseminated as factual content
– Eventually, opportunists create commercial listings for impossible products

The irony of multiple AI systems missing the “April Fish” joke while confidently explaining the nonexistent genetics is particularly delicious. It demonstrates one of the current limitations of large language models — they can process vast amounts of text but often miss cultural context clues that would be obvious to humans familiar with traditions like April Fool’s Day.

For gardeners and plant enthusiasts, this serves as a good reminder to approach unusual plant claims with healthy skepticism, especially when they involve dramatic color breakthroughs that haven’t been widely celebrated in horticultural circles.

So there you have it! We’ve debugged a myth about the existence of blue daffodils. The only thing that would make this even more fun is if I ordered some of the seeds and they turned out to grow daffodils with blue petals after all!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Yellow Daffodil Miniatures

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From “Jonquilla and Jonquil Hybrid Narcissus” in Garden Bulbs in Color by J. Horace McFarland:

“The true Jonquils are natives of [southwestern] Europe, and are also found across the Mediterranean in Algiers.

“Jonquils have narrow, upstanding foliage and long-stemmed, deliciously fragrant flowers which are not only popular in gardens but are forced in large quantities by the florists for use as cut-flowers.

“Of the species, N. Jonquilla, Simplex, single, and N. Jonquilla flore-pleno, with double flowers, have been garden favorites for generations, furnishing with little or no care generous quantities of long-lasting cut-flowers. The trumpet-shaped flowers are rich yellow in color and produced in close clusters.

“The Jonquil hybrids present interesting variations in size and character of both plant and flower, in coloring, and in time of blooming. One of the oldest of these is Buttercup, with flowers of pure buttercup — yellow, distinctly different in color from the modern Chrysolite which usually has only one light golden flower to a stem.”

From “Ballet of Springtime” in Gifts from the Heart: A Poetry Journey by Ruth Scarr Inglis:

Ballet of springtime
performed in cool wooded glen;
costumed green and gold.
My eyes see yellow jonquils
but my heart hears the music.

Hello!

Here we have some very tiny daffodils — all yellow ones, each with an even tinier cup that is either a darker shade of yellow or a soft shade of orange. I’ve seen these many times on my photo walks, but passed them by — mainly because whenever I saw them, I was usually hunting for their larger or double-form relatives, and there were just a few of these little ones sparsely arranged along the edges of a sidewalk.

Maybe it was a question of timing or very favorable weather conditions, or perhaps some of these are new to Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, but — as you can see from the first photos below — they gathered en masse this year, providing a stunning display while showing off how they look in big bunches. Poseurs that they are, they captured the photographer’s interest for about an hour while I took pictures of the gangs from different angles and distances. These are all most likely Narcissus jonquilla — often called jonquils instead of daffodils because they have their own division in daffodil classification.

Those I photographed close-up show one of the common characteristics of this type of daffodil: flowers nodding at a sharp angle to the stem, at an angle more pronounced than you’ll find in other members of the family. Another characteristic that’s more apparent in the photos toward the end — something they have in common with the double daffodil forms like those I photographed previously — is that multiple flowers will emerge from a single stem, which is very helpful when they hang together in large groups and they’re trying to attract pollinators.

I imagine these are handy evolutionary features — since each individual flower is less than an inch in diameter, and single flowers might not capture the attention of busy bees and bugs buzzing by. Notice how, though, when there is a large number of flowers clustered together (as in the first two photos), the varied angles at which individuals drop away from their stems ensure that the blooms don’t overlap very much — so most of every flower is exposed both to the sunlight and to foraging pollinators.

Earlier in the botanical history of daffodils, there was a tendency to use “jonquil” and “daffodil” somewhat interchangeably, a vernacular that still exists today. I hadn’t paid that much attention to the Jonquil division of daffodils until taking these photos, but did notice when searching some older literature how common it was (especially in poetry and narrative prose) to treat them the same. With the emergence of more precise and standardized classification practices in the 18th and 19th centuries, jonquils got their own scientific honoraria — but you have to admit the word “jonquil” does sound quite artistic and literary, and makes a nice name for a color.

If you’d like to learn more about the differences between jonquils and daffodils (all of which are in the Narcissus genus, here’s a good overview and some excellent background information:

Is There Really a Difference Between Jonquils and Daffodils? 

Thanks for taking a look!