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

Category: exploring place

Hydrangea serrata ‘Bluebird’ (1 of 2)

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From “Hydrangea serrata” in Hydrangeas: Beautiful Varieties for Home and Garden by Naomi Slade:

“A near neighbour and relative of H. macrophylla, H. serrata hails from the wooded mountains of Japan and Korea, where it is sometimes called ‘tree of heaven’. In the uplands, well away from the sea, temperatures often dip below freezing so, for garden purposes, it is noticeably hardier than its cousin….

“While the vulnerability of H. macrophylla comes from the length of its growing season, starting too early and going on too late, H. serrata has a much shorter growth period so it is hardier in the face of cold — although it is no fan of blazing sun.

“Like H. macrophylla, H. serrata likes partial or dappled shade so it can be used in a similar way in the garden. It is less tolerant of exposed, windy or very warm locations and it doesn’t thrive in wet soils, which makes it less suited to coastal and boggy sites. On the other hand, the plants tend to be smaller, at around 100cm (40in) tall, so are suitable for compact modern gardens.

“The species has lacecap flowers and serrated leaves — hence the name — and does well under trees. A number of cultivars, specifically Grayswood, Preziosa and Glyn Church will go through several colour changes throughout the season — but since they are not susceptible to pH, these are consistent in their inconsistency. The white cultivars will remain white regardless of soil pH, but the other pink and blue cultivars are moderately susceptible, so situations arise where, for example, Bluebird, grown on alkaline soil, will produce flowers that are noticeably pink.”

From The Windbreak Pine: New and Uncollected Haiku by Wally Swist, edited by John Barlow:

the deepening blush
of hydrangea flowers
late August chill

Hello!

Here we have the first of two posts featuring Hydrangea serrata ‘Bluebird’ — most commonly referred to as the Bluebird Hydrangea — from my garden. I have about six of these plants at a boundary between shade and sun in my back yard, where most of the time, they seem pretty happy. They bloomed well for several years running, then they got frozen and failed to bloom for one season, then this year returned once again. I always like to see them in early summer, and they look especially nice in late afternoon and early evening, when their white florets glow and the cluster of blue and pink flowers look more saturated as the sun goes down.

The part of this lacecap-style hydrangea that usually catches the eye includes both the cluster of tiny flowers at the center and the white florets that seem to float around them. Technically, only the lacecap portion contains flowers; the white florets are produced (the hydrangea tells me) to demand the attention of pollinators by providing some white-on-dark contrast.

These baby Bluebirds can be hard to photograph, and when I look at their photos from previous years, I see that I’ve often struggled to get the colors and focus right. Focusing at close range is difficult because the cluster of flowers may extend five inches or more from front to back, and the flowers in the cluster are extra-tiny, entangled with each other, and hard to differentiate in the camera’s viewfinder. And they move easily in the wind, making my eyes wobble.

Examine, if you like, the first two photographs, and you’ll see what I mean: the foreground white floret is in focus as are some of the blue flowers, but as the distance from the camera increases, the cluster of flowers becomes blurrier as do the two background florets. If I use a narrower aperture, I can get more of the flower cluster in focus — but then too much of the background also ends out in focus and it becomes difficult to separate the flowers from the background.

As you move through the galleries below, you can see how I handled that: by either moving in closer and eliminating many of the wee flowers from the image; or by moving back and taking a wider shot, where the fact that some of the flowers are out of focus becomes less apparent. I have sometimes tried adding LED light or using a flash, but then they look like they’re studio portraits rather than nature photos. So while I wasn’t entirely satisfied with these images, I decided to post them despite being unable to achieve perfection — whatever that is!

Thanks for taking a look!

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!