“When Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg discovered Lilium longiflorum in 1777 in southern Japan, he could never have known that it was destined for glory. Biding its time, the flower headed west to Europe before hitching a ride to Bermuda, where it changed its name, winning hearts and minds and being grown in huge numbers as the Bermuda Lily, until the crop was struck with a virus and production reverted to Japan…. “The bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 put an abrupt end to trade between Japan and America, and the price of Easter lilies rocketed. But, serendipitously, a new supply of the nation’s favourite flower presented itself.
“When soldier Louis Houghton returned from the First World War he had brought with him a suitcase of L. longiflorum bulbs for his gardening friends in Oregon. These amateur lily growers suddenly found themselves with a profitable enterprise: lilies were dubbed ‘White Gold’, and business boomed. By 1945 there were an estimated 1,200 lily growers in the region and it remains a centre of large-scale production.”
“The Madonna lily has a strong claim to be considered both the oldest domesticated flower, and the loveliest. It was in existence 3000 years B.C., and is represented on Cretan vases and other objects of the middle Minoan period, between 1750 and 1600 B.C.; it was known to the Assyrians and to other eastern Mediterranean civilizations, and was probably carried westward by the Phoenicians….
“Its native country is not certainly known, but is thought to be in the Balkans; a theory which is supported by the discovery near Salonika of a hardier, disease-resisting variety, which unlike most Madonna lilies produces abundance of fertile seed. If this theory is correct, it is possible that this flower is a survivor from before the Quaternary Ice Age, which destroyed the plant life of most of the rest of Europe.”
“The debt that we stay-at-home gardeners in comfortable England owe to brave botanists who risk their lives in dangerous territories can scarcely be over-estimated…. We forget the adventures, the dangers, the hardships, which men have willingly experienced in order to enrich us casual purchasers of their spoils. We forget the preparations for expeditions, the struggle to engage native porters, mules, packs, and what not, the long trek over difficult tracks, the alarming nights and days, the frequent poises between life and death, the unique and thrilling moment when after all this cost of courage and endurance, the reward is suddenly found in a flower hitherto unknown to European eyes….
“We now, in 1937, accept Lilium Regale, the regal lily, as a commonplace of our English gardens, forgetting that only so recently as 1905 was she discovered in Western China by Dr. Ernest Wilson. The bulbs were scarce and remained expensive for several years, but owing to the ease with which the regal lily may be grown from seed, only two or three years being needed to produce a flowering bulb, the nurserymen’s prices rapidly came down and the bulbs may now be obtained for a few pence.”
Hello!
Above we have three quotes from three different books — each a tidbit about the history of three different kinds of lilies, whose images appear in the galleries below. These snippets from botany’s past always entertain me, and it was really only until I started searching for quotes to accompany my flower photos a couple of years ago that I began to realize how botanical history and the history of humanity were so entwined. The “big histories” we study formally tend to focus more on human events with, perhaps, only passing reference to natural history; but there is certainly something to be said for merging the study of human events — with plants!
The lilies in the photographs — which I took at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens toward the end of June — are a mixture of…
Lilium longiflorum, instantly recognizable and commonly known as the Easter Lily, with pure white flowers and nearly white or very light yellow throats;
Lilium candidum, often known as the Madonna Lily and similar in appearance to the Easter Lily, but displaying shades of light green on the flower petals, especially on their backsides or on the blossom’s throat; and
Lilium Regale, or Regal Lily, noted for red, pink, or burgundy colors on its tube-shaped, unopened flower buds and for retaining those colors on the backs of its petals.
Unless I got my differentiators wrong, you should now be able to identify which lilies are which in this post (and in the next two).
“There are not very many species of Day-Lily — about thirty in all, including several which are probably only sub-species of the ubiquitous H. fulva, whose range extends from Europe to China. In that flowery land it was cultivated at a very early date, and appears in a painting of the twelfth century; it was called Hsuan T’sao, the Plant of Forgetfulness, because it was supposed to be able to cure sorrow by causing loss of memory….
“In England both H. fulva and H. flava were cultivated before 1597, and called by the early botanists Lilly-Asphodills or Liliasphodelus, because they seemed to embody the characteristics of both families — a lily flower with an asphodel leaf. H. flava, the yellow day-lily or Lemon Lily, ‘is a native of the northern Parts of Europe; it gilds the Meadows of Bohemia; and in Hungary perfumes the Air, in some places for many Miles’. It is very hardy, flourishing even under trees and in towns, and was recommended for London gardens as early as 1722. The foliage is reported to make excellent fodder for cattle, particularly for cows in milk….
“Hemerocallis comes from two Greek words meaning the beauty of the day.”
“The botanical name [hemerocallis]comes from the Greek hemera (day) and kallos (beauty) because the flowers’ beauty lasts but a day, which is also why they are called ‘day lilies.’ They were named by Linnaeus, and the names ‘fulva‘ for the tawny lily and ‘flava‘ for the lemon lily are rare instances where he named specific plants by the color of their flowers.”
One by one, the unborn announce themselves — risen from green shadows day lilies tremble into light.
Hello!
It was only last year that I learned that daylilies are no longer classified as lilies — yet I still associate them with an invented summer time period I call “Lily Season” since they tend to bloom along with true lilies such as Easter Lilies, Madonna Lilies, and the lily-like Amaryllis family’s Swamp Lilies or Crinum. My Lily Season doesn’t have a set start date, though: it starts when I post my first batches of lily and lily-adjacent images, so this year begins on July 6 and will end when I run out of photos. Imaginary seasons can be very flexible.
I took the photos below — along with some of the other varieties I just mentioned, which I’m working on — in the first half of June. They seemed to have bloomed earlier than usual this year, but even though I was iris hunting at the time, I didn’t want to miss them. “Plants behaving strangely” is sort of a theme for gardens and gardening this year (see, for example, Dogwoods with White Blooms (1 of 2)). I’m still puzzling about the lingering effects of a long and unusual deep freeze we had at the end of 2022 — which did a lot of damage to plant life throughout the area — that was followed by a second one a few weeks later that did further damage to plants that were just beginning to recover. Even this late in the year, I see quite a few plants in my own garden that produce new leaves, lose them, then produce another set. I have read elsewhere that some plants — especially struggling shrubs like mine — may need another season to return to their normal cycles, since they’re clearly not dead but not exuberantly alive either.
I’m hoping that there are additional batches of daylilies and true lilies this month, but recurring stormulous weathers have kept me away from the gardens for the past few weeks so I hope my hope is not misplaced.
“Hemerocallis” — the daylily’s genus — is a favorite new word for me, one I only learned when researching their botanical characteristics and history. It looks like a word I might make up, but — alasp! — I did not. Sometimes I holler it to The Dog just because I like how it sounds. And somehow he got it associated with his playtime… so now when I yell “Hemerocallis!” — he runs off and gets his ball…. 🙂
Try this: Let “Hemerocallis” roll off your tongue once or twice the next time you’re out at your favorite speakeasy; it’s sure to impress all your friends!
“The age of the photograph has become the age of gesture and mime and dance, as no other age has ever been….
“[To] say that ‘the camera cannot lie’ is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name….The technology of the photo is an extension of our own being and can be withdrawn from circulation like any other technology…. But amputation of such extensions of our physical being calls for as much knowledge and skill as are prerequisite to any other physical amputation….”
“The still photograph turns out to be a poor metaphor for understanding visual perception, for the simple reason that the world is not still, nor are we in relation to it. This has far-reaching consequences, because some foundational concepts of standard cognitive psychology are predicated on the assumption that we can understand the eye by analogy with a camera, in isolation from the rest of the body. Nor is this a mere intramural fight between quarreling academic camps; what is at issue is the question of how we make contact with the world beyond our heads….
“The world is known to us because we live and act in it, and accumulate experience.”
“How do we fit what happened to us into life without turning it into an anecdote with no teeth and a punch line you’ll mouth over and over for years to come…. [We] become these human juke boxes spilling out these anecdotes….
“But it was an experience. How do we keep the experience?”
Hello!
This is the second of two posts wrapping up Iris Season for 2023, with a selection of my previously posted iris photos rendered on black backgrounds. The first post is Irises on Black / Notes On Experiences (1 of 2).
I ended the previous post — a discussion of my experiments with the artificial intelligence image generator Adobe Firefly — with the following:
“Outside the realm of graphic arts, photography typically captures an instant in an experience, with the experience implied in the relationship between a shared photograph and its viewers. With an AI-generated image, the photographer’s experience is eliminated: there is no living interaction with the external world and whatever story a photograph might represent is reduced to phrases typed at a keyboard. What this might mean for the evolution of photography is something I’ll speculate on in the next post in this series….“
I have always enjoyed the entire process that ends with sharing my photography. From trudging around with my camera in the woods or a park, an urban landscape or a tourist attraction; to culling and sorting the images through post-processing; to organizing the results around some loose theme and posting them here — I like it all, even when any given step might stretch my patience or stress my aging joints. The idea that new software tools — AI image generators — could theoretically replace most of that workflow is more than astonishing….
Photography differs from graphic arts or digital art in two important ways. The second difference — implicit in my previous post and in the paragraph you just read — is that photography includes an experience that occurs in the external world (the world outside your head). Graphics or digital images produced by artificial intelligence tools don’t require such an experience, even if the images they produce are based on or derived from composites of images used to train those tools.
But the first difference between photography and AI tools (and digital art) is this: photography starts with a photograph, taken with a camera. This may seem glib and self-evident, and there are more complex ways to describe this inception by swapping “photograph” with “image” then talking about light, color, image sensors, and lots of imaging technical terms, but the “first principle” remains:
Photography starts with a photograph, taken with a camera.
It may — or may not — matter what happens to that photograph next. Every photo I publish here goes through some post-processing: at minimum, there are colors, lights, shadows, and details that get adjusted every time. And there are always spots to remove — outdoors is very spotty! — which sometimes means I reconstruct damaged leaves or flower petals, or remove background elements that interfere with the photo’s balance or the way your eye might follow its lines. All of these are forms of image manipulation, but the image that results is still a photograph — because photographs are, and always have been, manipulated by the technologies used to create them or the technologies used to refine the results.
But as you’re probably already imagining, things start to get a little muddy when you think about different kinds of image manipulation, even those that have long been available with tools like Lightroom and Photoshop. If I take one of my photos of a flower in a field, and remove the field by converting it to black — is that image still a photograph? If I take elements of several photographs and use Photoshop to create a composite, is that image still a photograph? Image manipulation is a subject that Photography — with a capital “P” — remains uncomfortable with, yet it will be more and more necessary to develop a shared understand of the differences between “photographs” and “images” as artificial intelligence tools continue to advance.
As I was cobbling together some research for this post, I came across this interesting article: Copyright Office Refuses to ‘Register Works Entirely Generated by AI’ — which describes how the United States Copyright Office will not allow AI-generated works to be copyrighted, because “human authorship” is not present in the creation of those works. This may seem like a woo-hoo moment for the regulation of AI images — but how long before someone effectively challenges that restriction because the prompts used to generate an image were typed into a computer by a human being?
But this isn’t the pinhead I want to dance around on; instead, I ask: how will they know the image is AI-generated? I knew that there were tools supposedly capable of differentiating between text written by humans and text written by, say, ChatGPT — but only learned recently that there were tools designed to identify AI-generated images. I won’t name them, though; here’s why:
I tested three of the tools using the images I generated with Adobe Firefly for the previous post and this one. Two of the three tools identified every one as likely human-generated (which they were not). The third tool fared better, but only got about half of them right. This could be because Firefly is newer than some of the other AI image generators, I suppose, but I still think it suggests we’re going to need better detective tools!
If you go here, you can see some of the images people have generated with Adobe Firefly, without signing in. You’ll notice, I’m sure, that many of the images clearly are not photographs and don’t try to be: they are, instead, fantastical renderings of different scenes that I like to call: imaginaria. I have no doubt that the ability to create images like this requires significant technical skill and creative insight, one that includes training in tools like Photoshop and a great imagination — or at least it did, until now, provided the artist is willing to concede a lot of their creative energy to a tool that will approximate their request, and fill in its own blanks.
But I did wonder what else I might come up with if I decided to stay within the realm of (imitated) photographs, with bits of imaginaria. So I started with something simple, but slightly exotic, and asked Firefly to generate “a photograph of a Bengal tiger, in natural light.” Here’s what Firefly gave me…
… and I don’t think I would have obtained a better Bengal tiger photo if I’d gone to Zoo Atlanta and taken one myself.
I thought it might be cool to find a Bengal kitty-cat sleeping on my porch, so I updated the prompt to “photograph of Bengal tiger sleeping on someone’s front porch, in natural light.” And I got just what I asked for:
So then I decided to create some photos for my catering business web site (I have no catering business, and it has no web site) — one that offers wine tastings, including wine and cheese parties for iguanas. I used the prompt “photograph of an iguana on someone’s front porch, with a plate of cheese, and wine in a glass with a bendable straw.” Here are the resulting photos, which include me (not me) training the iguana to use the bendable straw, since, of course, iguanas can’t drink from wine glasses — unless you give them a bendable straw.
I then finished out the day with a little Birds, Bees, and Beers party (prompted with “photograph of a hummingbird drinking beer from a frosty mug” and “photograph of a bee drinking beer from a frosty mug”) for some of my closest friends:
I made only two kinds of post-processing changes to all the photos above: I cropped or used healing tools to remove the Adobe Firefly watermark and (sometimes) straighten the images; and I removed spots that annoyed me because… spots! The colors, shadows, lighting, and textures are exactly as Firefly produced them.
There is, of course, really no reason to do this (except to entertain oneself); but it does illustrate that: even outside the realm of fantasy or imaginaria, it’s possible to AI-generate images that emulate photographs, but are completely implausible. Yet while implausible, the images still could be considered “logically correct” in that there’s only one obvious error: the bendable straw in the first iguana image is both inside and outside the wine glass. Still, these “photographs” fail my photography test: they don’t capture a living being’s experience, and they aren’t produced with a camera.
We have little understanding of how these photos are created, other than a sense that AI engines undergo training — but with what? We’ve all long ago ceded much control of whatever we post on the internet, our ownership obfuscated by incomprehensible, seldom read privacy policies and terms of use. Adobe maintains that it uses “stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content” to train Firefly — but that distinction also implies that other AI engines may be doing something different. For some delightfully contrarian views on how AI is being trained, see AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are, where Naomi Klein asserts that AI training with our content is the greatest theft of creative output in human history; and AI Is a Lot of Work, one of many recent articles about the legions of human beings exploited to keep AI models on track. This paragraph just hints at some of the cultural (and legal) issues that AI tools are already presenting — even as the tools are teaching themselves to do things they weren’t designed to do.
The play (and film) Six Degrees of Separation, quoted above, is about many things, and the story revolves around the intrusion of an imposter (pretending to be the son of actor Sidney Poitier) into the habituated and aristocratic lives of a wealthy couple, Flan and Louisa Kittredge. The imposter uproots their lives by involving them in a series of his deceptions, leading Flan to compartmentalize what happened into stories he tells friends, but leading Louisa to a climactic speech where she demands what I quoted: How do we keep what happens to us from being turned into anecdotes? How do we keep our experiences?
We seem to be in a similar position with respect to new technologies: AI image generators — even in their infancy — attempt to imitate photography, potentially supplanting actual photography; just as language generators (like ChatGPT) exert their ability to replace writing. But AI image generators won’t help someone become a photographer and language generators won’t make someone a writer, because they can’t answer the questions: Why do we need — and how do we keep — our experiences?
