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

Category: exploring place

Stargazer Lilies, Stargazing (2 of 2)

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From “Attracting Attention” in The Reason For Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives by Stephen Buchmann:

“Here for you to identify is a living organism, much loved and admired. Having no say in the matter, millions are bought and sold, removed from their natural habitat for the pleasure of the buyers, living fast, dying young, without offspring — then discarded without a second thought. Sometimes they enjoy a better fate, free to live outdoors, reproducing prolifically, enjoy full life spans, their beauty on display for all to see.

“The smell of this organism is a hauntingly sweet fragrance, once inhaled, never forgotten. The appearance is dramatic. A long, tumescent rod, topped by a broad, gray-purple tip oozing a clear, sticky liquid, juts suggestively from the center of a yellow, starlike throat…. Surrounding the long rod, six yellow-green arms project from the starlike mouth, the bulging, orange packages at their tips….

“Lacking legs or wings, this regal-looking organism is grounded — unable to move during its entire lifetime — and thus dependent upon animal intermediaries. If its concentrated appeal is able to reach out, it is the bees or perhaps other animals that transport its sperm helping it to reproduce. Earthbound and immobile, it casts a gaze upward, to the stars, as it whispers a name sending a message of fanciful dreams, optimism, and unlimited possibilities. What am I?

“A flower of course, but more specifically a Stargazer lily. The Stargazer, which came to market in 1978, is the result of many years of crossbreeding efforts by the eccentric genius lily-breeder Leslie Woodriff, who wanted a beautiful, fragrant, spotted lily that would hold its blooming head proudly high, unlike any other horticultural lily of the time.”

From “Green Finger Secret” by John Lyons in The Second Anthology of Poetry at the Albert, edited by John Bosley and others:

Sunlight caught you
on hands and knees
sniffing stargazer lilies,
moving with wonderment
among mosses and ferns
in cool places diffused with green light.

Later you returned home,
looked in the mirror;
your face was smudged orange
with lily pollen;

you smiled,
turned to water a plant
you once found tangled in your hair.
“Laughing grass,” you called it.

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring Stargazer Lilies from my garden; the first post is Stargazer Lilies, Stargazing (1 of 2). Here we take many close looks at the flowers’ intricate details, from a day, in real life, when we ingested an intoxicating amount of Stargazer Lily aroma while taking photos.

As is often the case with the flowers I photograph, I spent some time trying to learn about the Stargazer’s history. Since many of the books I use for digging into the past are not recently-published, there wasn’t a lot of information to be unearthed about this flower. So I turned to my imaginary research assistant ClaudeAI and asked for a summary of the plant’s background and how it got its name. Here’s what Claude told me — and it was a nicely written overview, so I thought I’d share the whole thing:

Stargazer lilies are a relatively recent addition to the world of flowers. They were first bred in 1974 by Leslie Woodriff, a lily breeder in California. Woodriff was known for his work with oriental lilies and was always striving to create new, exciting varieties.

The development of the Stargazer lily came about as Woodriff was trying to breed a lily with upward-facing flowers. Most oriental lilies at the time had downward-facing or outward-facing blooms. He wanted to create a lily that would “look at the stars,” hence the name “Stargazer.”

The name also has a poetic quality, evoking the image of someone gazing up at the night sky in wonder. This ties in well with the flower’s upward-facing blooms and its striking appearance.

Woodriff created the Stargazer by crossing Lilium auratum and L. speciosum, two species of oriental lilies. The result was a flower that combined the best qualities of both parent plants: the large, showy blooms of L. auratum and the hardiness and petal recurve of L. speciosum.

The Stargazer quickly gained popularity after its introduction. Its unique appearance, strong fragrance, and relatively easy cultivation made it a hit with both commercial growers and home gardeners. It became particularly popular in the cut flower industry due to its long vase life and dramatic appearance.

Today, Stargazer lilies are one of the most recognizable and beloved lily varieties worldwide. They’ve also been used to breed other lily cultivars, continuing Woodriff’s legacy of horticultural innovation.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Stargazer Lilies, Stargazing (1 of 2)

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From “Stargazer Lily” in Anthology of Flowers by Jane Field-Lewis:

“It’s been dubbed a floral celebrity for its striking good looks and, in plant terms, its relative youth, having only been introduced in the 1970s. The stargazer is a hybrid lily of the Oriental group, specially adapted so its blooms face skywards but still retaining the perfume of its cousins.

“Part of its popularity with the flower-buying public is the stargazer’s ability to rise to almost any occasion. Need to say sorry? The stargazer can. Congratulations? Its associations with aspiration, wealth and prosperity should do the trick nicely.

“It can also call on the lily family’s wealth of cultural and religious symbolism over the centuries, from ancient Greece, where it was linked to sexuality, to early Christian paintings, where it represented chastity and purity. It crops up in folklore, too, especially in determining the sex of an unborn child.

“Nowadays the flower has made common parlance. We talk about ‘gilding the lily’ to refer to unnecessary ornamentation or over-embellishment because it is viewed as a benchmark for idealism and flawlessness.

“Nothing, William Blake once wrote, can ‘stain her beauty bright.'”

From “Stargazer Lilies” in All of You on the Good Earth: Poems  by Ernest Hilbert: 

The vase itself is a spent shell casing —
Lush petals pour out like surging steam,
Lacquered battle-bent cuirasses, photograph
Of fireworks in humid July skies, racing
Into an umbrella of spark and cream,
Falling as luxurious glittered ash.
The arrogant smudged stamens jet high
And proud like vapor trails, the whole bouquet
Unfastening like a vast nebula,
Long pour of poisonous gas; arms fly
Out and fade, and the soft leaves, in late day,
Aim down, oar blades in air above Formica,
Limp and breathing in a dry universe,
Wet pennants, green ghosts, long surrendered spears.

Hello!

Returning to my garden once again, here we have the first of two posts with photographs of Stargazer Lilies, whose official name — Lilium ‘Stargazer’ — is uniquely not-confusing. These lilies made a cameo appearance in a previous post along with my Witch’s Hand Daylilies, but here we leave the daylilies backstage and promote the Stargazers to a well-deserved starring role. The first image below will give you a sense of how the lilies — living in two pots in my back yard — produced this boisterous batch of blooms in June and July.

I bought the Stargazers in 2023, but it was too late in the season for them to produce more than the single blooms they sported at the garden center — so I never took their pictures. I was pretty excited (possibly even surprised, as gardeners often are) to see them return this year and give me something striking to zoom in and out on with my camera. The images in the galleries below progress through a few of their large unopened flower buds to studies of the fully opened petals from various angles and distances. In the second post, we’ll do more of the same, and we’ll also push our faces right into the centers of the flowers. Since the Stargazer was “specially adapted so its blooms face skywards” and mine actually do that — this will be very easy and fun to do!

I liked the poetry I included up-top because it’s one of those unusual poems about a flower that mentions the flower only in the title. You’re left to decide, instead, how and to what extent the poet has described the flower accurately, or metaphorically, or with flourishes of realism and metaphor. Words and phrases like lush, lacquered, fireworks, spark and cream, glittered ash, vapor trails, oar blades, and spears — among others — all produce a mental image that reflects the flowers’ colors, texture, structure, scattered pollen, leaves, and even aroma. You might also gather a contrasting war-and-peace metaphor as well as reflections on the Stargazer’s life cycle ending in a vase on a kitchen countertop, from the poem as a whole.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Canna Lily ‘Cannova Yellow’ (2 of 2)

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From “Awaiting the Last Blaze of Summer” in On Gardening by Henry Mitchell:

“The long hot days… are soon coming to an end. Already the signs of approaching fall may be seen — the first flowers on the wild white almond-scented clematis, a brilliant red leaf here and there on the dogwood, swamp maple, and sourgum trees.

“But early September may yet show us some of the hottest days of the year, all the more wonderful for being the last true burst of summer….

“My enthusiastic admiration today centers on a quite tender canna, C. iridiflora, the iris-flowered canna of Peru. It is said to tolerate far less cold than ordinary garden cannas, which is probably why you never see it in gardens here. A quite small plant with two leaves arrived in late May, and I suspected it would take two or three years to raise it to flowering size. On the contrary, it has grown to shoulder height and is now flowering.

“An established plant reaches ten feet or so, with leaves three feet long and a foot wide. Flowers are borne on curving drooping stems at the top, and the rich coral-rose flowers, smaller than those of garden cannas, hang down. They resemble individual florets of a gladiolus, except for seeming to hang upside down.

“Three friends from England saw the plant and were only routinely polite. No fits. I have often thought the most intense pleasures of a garden are reserved for rather odd people.”

From “The Men in the Family” by Jack Ridl in Southern Poetry Review, edited by Robert Grey:

Quietly, next to the old toy drum, my grandfather
tired from rehearsing his bitter life in the mill,
sits and draws stick figures, then staples them
to the edges of the window where he watched
himself walk away two weeks after his 46th year
on the line. His son learned basketball and that took him
into a new language, one that took him
farther from home than any work. In my
grandfather’s yard, the tea roses, the necklaces
of allysum, the cornflower, and the canna lilies wait
in the sun, well-weeded….

And in another time, a ruddy
young Bohemian, a rose in his lapel, cursed his team of horses
as they pulled him and his wagon of beer barrels
across the brick streets of Mt. Pleasant,
Irwin, Wilkinsburg, Aspinwall, and Pittsburgh….

I am the last son. I write this.

Howdy!

This is the second of two posts featuring Canna Lilies from my garden, photos of three plants I bought in the spring called “Cannova Yellow.”

As I mentioned in the previous post — Canna Lily ‘Cannova Yellow’ (1 of 2) — these Cannas had two distinct blooming cycles, one in May and one in June, betwixt which flowers from the first batch disappeared but were then replaced by fresh ones in slightly smaller forms. Still they maintained the same “canna style” for which the plant’s flowers are well-known, and, perhaps, produced even more swatches of orange throughout their yellow petals than the first batch.

Thanks for taking a look!

Canna Lily ‘Cannova Yellow’ (1 of 2)

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From “Over the Horizon” in The Origin of Plants by Maggie-Campbell Culver:

“Rather like the African Marigold, which was seen growing wild along the coast of north Africa, so Indian Shot eventually naturalised itself in Spain and Portugal. This was found to be Canna indica and was an early introduction from the West Indies towards the end of the 1560s. It may have attracted attention when Spain was earlier castanetting itself through Central America between 1511 and about 1530. The genus has about 50 species in the family of Cannaceae and is spread over tropical South and Central America and also Asia….

“When it was introduced into Britain it was considered a great rarity and it was some time before anyone understood how to cultivate it. The plant feels most comfortable growing on forest margins in moist open forest areas, but seems to be domestically quite adaptable. The word Canna comes from the Greek for ‘reed’, and indica is because of its connection with the West Indies. All the species, and now the hybrids, carry the most spectacularly coloured flowers and give a zing to any garden….

“A number of the Canna species were introduced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but they were always considered specialist plants, until the idea was developed in France of using subtropical and tropical plants for summer splendour. This was pounced upon by gardeners in Britain and is a style of summer bedding still used in much municipal planting today. A mass of them blooming together looks rather like a flock of exotic parrots, and their exuberance at least cheers up what may be an otherwise dull summer.”

From “Houston Heights” by Janet Lowery in Texas in Poetry 2, edited by Billy Bob Hill:

I have decided not to forget these little houses,
these tiny cottages, these small frames of brick
and clapboard and stone, these roofs of silvery
shingle and green tile. I have decided not to forget
the pastel colors of the jaunty homes: mauve
and peach, sage and lavender, pale pink
and bleached periwinkle blue. Nor the smooth
scallops of gingerbread peaks, the fresh white
trim of picket fences, nor the spiked tips
of black iron gates, the neatly groomed lawns
and beds of bright flowers: pink candy impatiens
and frothy azaleas, velvet-mouthed pansies, lace
periwinkle, crepe canna lilies, the ragged lips
of scarlet hibiscus, pots of pink begonias, pots
of marigolds, pots of geraniums and portulaca….

I have decided not to forget these tiny side streets
tunneling toward the tracks, the wide boulevards,
the neat avenues and cracked sidewalks. Here,
on the notebook page, I will remember everything….

Hello!

This is the first of two posts featuring Canna Lilies from my garden, photos of three giant-leafed beauties called “Cannova Yellow.” These Cannas are in large pots in my courtyard, where they’re happy to be the center of attention and get just the right amount of sunlight and shade. I usually swap them out for new varieties each year, though I did recently learn that you can dig them up, store them indoors, and repot them after winter’s end. Here in the Southeast, those in the ground tend to return on their own; but those in pots — like mine — often get frozen out, so maybe I’ll try this over-wintering trick just to see what happens.

I went looking for Cannas with red or orange flowers early in the spring, but came across these yellow ones, whose colors I really liked. They bloomed in two distinct cycles — one around the middle of May and one around the middle of June — each bloom lasting a couple of weeks. July’s growth seemed to hint at a third set of blooms; but as is often the case with Cannas, what looked like emerging flower shoots turned out to be new leaves. Leaves are cool though too!

This post shows the blooms from May, and the photos progress from first buds through larger blossoms, followed by tall columns of overlapping flowers at the end. I especially like the swatches of orange you can see on some of the biggest flower petals, that look like someone took a brush and dabbed them with orange paint to create some alternating color and texture.

The Canna’s flower structure tends to be very complex, usually asymmetrical — and that combined with their large size can make them challenging to photograph well. These yellows, though, seemed to present more compact, balanced proportions than varieties I’ve previously owned. See, for example, my post from last year — Canna Lily ‘Cannova Orange Shades’ — which shows how even at the earliest blooming state, those Orange Shades were more asymmetrical than these, with large flowers popping at the end of longer stems, stems that then curved and randomly folded away from the flower’s center as they aged. The individual petals on these yellow ones remained mostly upright, by contrast, until they lost their grips and flew away.

Thanks for taking a look!

Turk’s Cap Lilies (2 of 2) / Notes on Spots

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From “Lily” in Flowers in History by Peter Coats:

“In [John] Gerard’s time (1545-1612) lilies were certainly widely cultivated in many gardens; the most popular variety being the Madonna, L. candidum (its descriptive name was given it by Virgil), a native plant of southern Europe. This is said to have been first grown in England in 1596, though it must have been known by sight from Italian paintings many years before that. In 1596, William Shakespeare would have been thirty-two, at the height of his powers. In that year he was engaged in writing Romeo and Juliet, and the first sight of a Madonna lily must have been inspiration indeed to someone who loved and felt for plants as Shakespeare did….

“Or it may have been the martagon — the Turk’s Cap lily — which Shakespeare saw when he was a boy in Warwickshire, as there is a theory that the martagon, alone among lilies, is indigenous to England, as it is to northern Spain, Italy and Asia Minor.

“Until the last century, there were only a few types of lily cultivated in Western gardens and it is remarkable in the annals of the flower that the appearance of new varieties in Western gardens always coincides with the discovery and development of distant and little-known parts of the world.”

From “The Lady of the Flowers” in Acadian Ballads and Lyrics in Many Moods by Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton:

Up and down the garden walks
Every day I watch her go,
Past great clumps of nodding stalks
Crowned with blushing crimson roses,
Or with lilies, white as snow.

Lilacs dashing on the air
Persian odors, in delight
Bend and almost touch her hair;
On the bough where he reposes
Sings the oriole with his might….

Easter lilies crave the touch
Of her carmine-tinted lips —
Finer flowers by far than such
As bedeck the fields immortal,
Whose soft fragrance Juno sips.

Down a pink-plumed peony row
Into purple iris lanes,
Onward still I see her go,
To a Turk’s-cap-lilied portal,
Where perpetual coolness reigns….

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photographs of Turk’s Cap Lilies (Lilium martagon) from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post is Turk’s Cap Lilies (1 of 2), where I described the physical location in the gardens where these lilies grow.

It’s been a little over six years (six years!) since I published one of my earliest posts about learning to use Lightroom’s features, covering the software’s spot removal tool. In that post — Before and After: Red Brick with Ivy — I described using the tool to remove white spots from a simple photograph of a red brick wall framed with ivy. Then, after gaining more experience, I posted another example — Before and After: Bernadine Clematis, An Illusion — where I explained how I had learned to use it to not only remove spots, but repair damaged sections of flower petals and accurately blend their colors and textures. In both posts, I noted how time-consuming it could be to remove spots and heal blemishes, but that the work was often worth it because it noticeably improved the photos.

This kind of image cleanup has remained part of my workflow for all my images. Most of my photographs are closeups or macros of flowers and plants, taken out in the wild, where all manner of smudgies attach themselves to my subjects. Clumps of pollen, dust and debris, cobwebs, and photobombing spiders, ants, and other bugs are the most common distractors — so I use my first post-processing pass through every batch of photos to eliminate them.

These spot removal tools work like this: you use the mouse to select or brush over a spot, then release the mouse button, and Lightroom attempts to replace the spot you selected with something else from the image. What you selected is called the target, and the replacement Lightroom chose is called the source. Its choice of source, however, has always been hit-or-miss. With photos of flowers where even the smallest sections contain many different textures and colors, it would often fail to choose a source that matched in color or blended textures properly. This meant that I often had to manually reposition the source, or go over it multiple times until Lightroom provided a satisfactory match. Imagine — using some of these photographs as an example — that the raised parallel lines running down the center of individual flower petals were broken at several points after removing bugs from them — and you can visualize what happens when Lightroom selects a source improperly.

Then, in May of this year, Adobe released an enhancement to the spot removal tools called Generative Remove, which uses the AI capabilities from Adobe Firefly (see Irises on Black / Notes On Experiences (1 of 2) and Irises on Black / Notes On Experiences (2 of 2) where I wrote about Firefly) to help with the removal of unwanted objects from photographs. With this enhancement, the target-source approach I just described (and the frustration of using it) no longer applies. Instead — when you select something to remove from the image — Lightroom blends elements of your photo with what it interprets would have been behind or would have surrounded the spot you selected, if the spot hadn’t been there to begin with. Amazing, yes? Let’s look at a couple of examples!

Here are two photographs from this Turk’s Cap series, as they looked when I took them…

… where I didn’t like the mass of stems and leaves on the left side of each photo. Very distracting! In the olden days of six months ago, I would have probably just cropped them out and been content with a larger view of the flower. In neither case would I have been successful changing the image with the original spot removal tools — since for each element you try to remove, you have to manually choose something from the photo to replace it with.

With Generative Remove, however, a new kind of sorcery presents itself. Imagine now using the mouse to brush over the entire left quarter of each of these images and letting the Remove tool do its work. When I did that, here’s where I ended up…

… and here’s what’s happened. In the first photo, Lightroom has removed the stems, leaves, and flowers from the image — and filled the space by extending the stone behind the plants (which was actually there, in real life, how did it know?), and matched the stone’s textures and colors. In the second one, it has done something similar: it has removed the mass of stems and leaves behind the flower, and has created a blended background that matches the area nearby. It also adjusted the stems and leaves of the (now single-stemmed) flower, with new leaves.

While I would normally try to avoid composing pictures so changes like this would be necessary — by shifting my shooting position or zooming in closer — I framed these two like this just to see what I could do with Generative Remove. Here you can compare the images before and after I used Generative Remove by clicking on the first image and paging through.

But wait! There’s more! And this may be my favorite discovery….

Consider again this image of the spotty brick wall, that I mentioned above. With Generative Remove, I no longer have to select each individual spot and double-check that Lightroom chose an acceptable replacement before moving to the next one. Instead I can select all of the white spots one after the other (fastly!), press a single “Apply” button and go play ball with The Dog for a couple of minutes. When I return, Lightroom will have removed all the spots (I’ve tried as many as sixty) in one pass — and, in most cases, without making any mistakes matching colors and textures.

How sweet is that!?!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!