“Dipladenia is one of the modern favorites in the list of conservatory climbers. The Gardener’s Record [pdf] thinks too much prominence cannot be given to it; for, ‘like many climbing plants, it blooms best when grown prominently forward near to the glass, and perhaps to perfection near to the roof of an intermediate house, with general temperature not below about 55 degrees.’
“Dipladenias are natives of Central America, and belong to the order of Dogbanes, a name given by Dr. Lindley to a certain class of plants, which I believe Linnaeus described as having contorted or twisted-like flowers, with corollas resembling a catherine-wheel firework in motion. To this family belong the Periwinkle, the Oleander, etc….
“With twining habit, and large graceful flowers nearly five inches in diameter, in form like a Convolvulus, and with color varying from pale pink or French white, to clear delicate rosy pink, I know not any more lovely climbing plant for summer, and what is commonly called early autumn. It may be grown from layers, from cuttings, and from seed.”
Hello!
This is the second of two posts with photographs of Dipladenia Rio White from my garden. The first post is Dipladenia Rio White (1 of 2). Moreso than in the previous post, you can see “pale pink” or “rosy pink” (described above) that appears in the blooms during their unfolding, color swatches that tend to be more apparent in the second or third blooming cycle — though this is one of my completely unscientific observations.
Did you know “moreso” isn’t a word? Allegedly, I say! When I typed the previous sentence, the computer ensquiggled “moreso” at me as a misspelling, and I of course just assumed the computer was wrong. It turns out that “moreso” should be written as “more so” or “more-so” — but I don’t like either of those so I’m sticking with “moreso.” I’ve already used it in five previous posts, which makes it a word as far as I’m concerned. And, like everything else in our modern era, it’s controversial — see More So Vs. Moreso: Which is the Correct Spelling? — so I think I can follow my own path.
“The large, convolvulus-like, and exquisitely-colored blossoms of this plant are hardly matched by those of any twiner with which I am acquainted, and, under proper management, its charming flowers are produced very abundantly for some two or three months in succession. Notwithstanding that, it is, perhaps, the finest of all twiners which we possess, it is by no means universally cultivated; for in the hands of many it is found to bloom very shyly, or not at all, consequently it has never received the attention which it deserves.
“To insure success in its culture, a light, warm, moist situation and a brisk bottom-heat are indispensable, and where such accommodation cannot be commanded, it is useless to attempt to grow it; with proper convenience, however, it grows very rapidly and blooms abundantly. Cuttings, made of short-jointed, half-ripe shoots, root freely if inserted in sandy, peaty soil, covered with a bell-glass, and afforded a sharp bottom heat….
“In autumn, gradually reduce the supply of water, expose the plants to a circulation of warm, dry air, in order to ripen the wood, and, when this is effected, remove them to a house where the temperature may average from [50 to 60 degrees], and allow them a period of rest, giving no water to the soil during that season. Towards the end of January, or as soon afterwards as circumstances will admit, turn the plants out of their pots, shaking away a portion of the old soil, so as to be able to repot them in fresh materials without using larger pots, at the same time cutting back the shoot to a strong bud near the base. Be careful to have the fresh soil in a moist, healthy state, so as to prevent the necessity of giving much water until growth shall have commenced, and the roots taken to the soil.”
White petals unfurl like delicate fans, Yellow centers aglow in fading light, Dipladenia blooms on weathered back steps, A graceful display as day turns to night.
Autumn whispers through waning warmth, These flowers defy the season’s chill, Their brightness a lingering memory of summer, On steps where time stands still.
Hello!
Every spring for the past bunch of years, I’ve gone to one of the nearby garden centers to buy six dipladenia plants. I come home and dig out the previous year’s spent roots from six pots, replace them with the new plants, then set three pots on each side of my back steps. I’ll sometimes choose red dipladenia or sometimes pink — but I especially like these white ones with the yellow centers (officially known as “Dipladenia Rio White”), pictured below. Once they start blooming, they make a nice bright visual pathway from my back door to the courtyard, producing vines that are just robust enough to be attractive and shapely, but only require a trimming or two all season to keep the human or the dog from tripping on them.
I had tried other plants in these same six pots in the past, but have kept returning to dipladenia since — it seems to me — squirrels will leave these plants alone. Any stems or vines they chew or slice with their Freddy Krueger fingernails will exude a sticky white substance they probably don’t like. I don’t like it, for sure; so I’m guessing squirrels don’t like it either and so tend to stay away.
Dipladenia also has a strong root system, even in medium-sized pots, and isn’t bothered by the torrential waterfalls that flow from the double-peaks of my roof during thunderstorms. And here in the southeast, they’ll bloom from April until right about now (or longer, in warmer autumns) so are especially fetching at dusk when receding sunlight catches the contrasting white, yellow, and dark green colors. Late summer and early autumn — when many other flowering plants have passed their blooming stages but fall color hasn’t yet appeared — are my favorite times to photograph them.
If you read the quotation at the top, from the very old book The Floral World, Garden Guide, and Country Companion (sometimes shortened to “The Floral World and Garden Guide”), you know now how to propagate dipladenia in a greenhouse, 1879-style. I don’t actually have a greenhouse — though I’ve often wondered if I could ensqueeze one on my property somehow — but was impressed by how concisely (though somewhat old-Englishly) the author Shirley Hibberd described the process. It would be fun to try it, so if you do, let me know.
If you’ve been here before, you know I often hunt down poems about what I photograph and post them along with one or two non-fiction selections about each kind of flower or plant. I’ve written before — see here and here — about discovering all sorts of excellent books and poetry on the Internet Archive, and how much I’ve learned by doing that. But the Internet Archive (including my favorite part, “Books to Borrow”) has been offline since October 9, after suffering a data breach and a cyberattack — one so significant that it’s gotten its own Wikipedia page: Internet Archive Cyberattack. The organization is still recovering from the attack over a week later, and remains offline until… well, until it’s not offline any more.
Having used it for several years now, I can honestly say that I’ve found it indispensable, and I’m really missing my fingertip access to thousands and thousands of poems. So for today’s poem — “Autumn Dipladenia” — I instead asked my imaginary friend (and amateur poet) ClaudeAI to produce some poetry by prompting it to “write about the Dipladenia variant with white flowers and yellow centers, in pots on someone’s back steps, as they appear in late afternoon autumn light.” After a bit of back and forth with me, it developed that two-stanza poem, which surprisingly placed the plants on “weathered back steps” — which is how my steps look in real life, though I didn’t mention it when asking for the poem. Apparently ClaudeAI has (somehow!) sneaked a peek at my back yard; and I’ll leave you to decide if the poem is any good or not (it does have some pretty good imagery).
From “Question Drawer: Treatment of Lantanas” in The Canadian Horticulturist (1899), Volume XXII by Fruit Growers Association of Ontario:
“Question: Sir, how should four-year-old lantana be treated?
“Answer: The lantana is a shrubby little plant, which after a long period of blooming should be rested by witholding water any more than may be necessary to keep them alive. When beginning to make new growth after resting, they should be repotted firmly into good rich soil, and the top should be severely pruned back. More water will be required as the plants begin to grow freely. Syringe the foliage frequently to keep the plants free from the red spider.”
So tiny, your thin, colored wings, painted pale-tan with blue spots, entire body no bigger than the lantana bloom you perch upon….
Small wings fluttering. you drink all the nectar you can find buried deep inside each flower, long, thin, tubular tongue mining the last drop. Then you wobbly-bobbly fly to the next blossom, silent as a rainbow, seeking more sugared, life-sustaining juice, desire pangs never completely sated, always hungry….
As easily entertained as I can be, I thought calling lantana a “shrubby little plant” (in the quotation up-top) was quite funny. It is indeed shrubby, but whether it’s little or not depends on your experience. Those whose photographs I show here are little because they’re restricted to the pots I scrunched them into, but if you move lantanas from pots to the ground for a year or so, they’ll succeed at filling the available space.
I have a pair of previously-potted Mary Ann Lantana plants in my front yard, which I’ve allowed to grow a bit wild for two seasons since they got frozen nearly to death a couple of years ago — and they’ve gone pretty quickly from being little shrubbies to taking over an 8-foot by 4-foot section of the yard. When or whether or not one should drastically cut back lantana can be controversial in Gardening World, but I’m only about a week away from heading out front and dramatically hacking them close to the ground — sort of like Joan Crawford did with her roses, but without the hysterical psychosis.
“Lantana provides a profusion of bright, cheerful blooms that last from planting time in spring all the way through a hard frost in autumn. Lantana is a favorite of hummingbirds, butterflies, and honeybees, and in warmer parts of the South it may be perennial….
“Lantana likes it hot and sunny and even a few hours of shade will reduce flower production significantly. It is perfect for planters and container gardens but will need consistent watering since it’s a rampant grower….
“Lantana is a flowering powerhouse and uses a lot of water and energy for this purpose. The more you feed and water, the higher your reward. Deadheading is not necessary, but occasional light pruning will help control the size of the plant. Some people find that the tiny hairs on the leaves irritate their skin, but this is nothing serious.”
From “Phantom Spring” by Bill Carnahan in Let Them Write Poetry, edited by Nina Willis Walter:
October came in lavender This year, it seems to me; In other years she wore burnt orange And scarlet on each tree.
She stole the colors of the spring, And put them in her hair; She stole the very scent of spring To April-ize the air!
She stole the freshness of spring rain, She brought the April green, She mixed it with the purple hues That thrive when April’s queen….
The lilacs, ever welcome, Upon their twisted bough, Purple framed in ashen grey, Are frailly lovely now!
The figs are ripening purple As they daily plumper grow, While twilight makes an autumn sky Seem mauve in sunset’s glow.
Lantana on her brittle stem, Beside the rain-bleached wall, Nodded like an April thing In the winds of fall….
Hello!
Here we have the first of two posts with photographs of lantana blooms from my garden. This variant is well-known in the southeast, and goes by the name “Chapel Hill Yellow Lantana.” Like most lantana, these baby yellows come and go from early summer through early fall — and I often post lantana photographs this time of year, as we begin moving into cooler autumn weather. We have finally dropped out of daytime temperatures in the 80s and low 90s, and even — like this morning — made it down to the low 60s. No fall color to speak of yet, but the autumn asters, daisies, and mums have started to bloom, so I’ll be out photographing them over the next couple of weeks and posting them as I do.
Lantana — including Chapel Hill Yellow — produces batches of blossoms that stay a few days, drop off then get replaced by subsequent batches. It’s always fun to see the new flowers come in: you look out the window at what was mostly green leaves one day, then, on the next day, see the dark green punctuated with dots of yellow, suggesting what’s to come.
The structure of lantana flowers always intrigued me, especially when viewed through a close-up or macro camera lens. In the early hours of blooming, the florets open at an irregular pace, so — as you can see in the first three photos — a few will look like they have little fists sticking out from the flower cluster. As the flower continues to age, the form looks more like a flat circle, then matures into a globe shape — one about the diameter of a quarter coin or comparable to a medium-sized marble. This transition is a good example of “Symmetry-breaking and patterning” as described in Philip Ball’s book Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does:
“All kinds of systems and processes, involving both living and non-living objects, can spontaneously find their way into more or less orderly and patterned states: they can self-organize. There is no longer any reason to appeal to some divine plan to explain this, and there is nothing mysterious about it — but that need not diminish our sense of wonder and appreciation when we see it happen. Without any blueprint or guidance, molecules, particles, grains, rocks, fluids, and living tissues can arrange themselves into regular, sometimes geometrical patterns….
“Symmetry is at the root of understanding how such patterns appear. Because in everyday terms we associate patterns with symmetry… we might be inclined to imagine that the spontaneous appearance of a pattern in nature involves the spontaneous generation of symmetry. In fact, the opposite is true. Pattern comes from the (partial) destruction of symmetry.
“The most symmetrical thing you can imagine is something that you can rotate, reflect, or translate any which way and yet it still looks the same. That’s true if the thing is perfectly uniform. So to get pattern from something that is initially unpatterned and uniform involves reducing the symmetry: it is what scientists call a process of symmetry-breaking, which is nature’s way of turning things that are initially the same into things that are different. The more symmetry that gets broken, the more subtle and elaborate the pattern….
“In the natural world, perfect uniformity or randomness are surprisingly hard to find, at least at the everyday scale…. All around there is shape and form: diverse, yes, but far from random, far from uniform. Symmetry is being broken, again and again.”
I arranged the photos in this post as a visualization of Ball’s explanation — from the initial pattern break (the tiny raised “fists”) through iterations that show nearly perfect symmetry, followed by a few last photos where symmetry is again broken because some of the florets have dropped off the flower. A transition like this is not unique to lantana, of course — we can see something similar by observing many flowers and plants over time — but is very easy to see here because our brains register these flowers as clusters of circles or globes, until we zoom in a little closer.
“There is a place near my house where a path leads down through a nut-walk to the further garden. It is crossed by a shorter path that ends at a Birch tree with a tall silvered trunk. It seemed desirable to accentuate the point where the paths cross; I therefore put down four square platforms of stone ‘pitching’ as a place for the standing of four Hydrangeas in tubs….
“Just before the tree is a solid wooden seat and a shallow wide step done with the same stone pitching. Tree and seat are surrounded on three sides by a rectangular planting of yews. The tender greys of the rugged lower bark of the Birch and the silvering of its upper stem tell finely against the dark velvet-like richness of the Yew and the leaf-mass of other trees beyond; the pink flowers and fresh green foliage of the Hydrangeas are also brilliant against the dusky green. It is just one simple picture that makes one glad for three months of the later summer and early autumn. The longer cross-path, which on the right leads in a few yards to steps up to the paved court on the north side of the house, on the left passes down the nut-walk… The Birch tree and seat are immediately to the right….
“Standing a little way down the shaded nut-walk and looking back, the Hydrangeas are seen in another aspect, with the steps and house behind them in shade, and the sun shining through their pale green leaves. Sitting on the seat, the eye, passing between the pink Hydrangea flowers, sees a short straight path bounded by a wall of Tree Box to right and left, and at the far end one tub of pale blue Hydrangea in shade, backed by a repetition of the screen of Yews such as enclose the Birch tree.”
Here, now, the days are long and the leaves of the hydrangea are supple and leathery, with raised veins like the back of a hand. A stick-woman in an old brown dress and floppy hat stands in the garden and frightens the birds. The sun dazzles away the early fog.
The quotation at the top — from Colour in the Flower Garden by Gertrude Jekyll — is one of Jekyll’s descriptions not only of hydrangeas in her garden, but of her own photographs of hydrangeas. Jekyll — well-known as a horticulturalist, gardener, and garden writer — was an early adopter of photography and energetically embraced this emerging technology. According to the biography Gertrude Jekyll: A Vision of Garden and Wood by Judith B. Tankard, Jekyll progressed from her initial interest in photography through photographing gardens for her books, like this:
“In 1885, she took up photography, which enabled her to bring together a number of interests. After she quickly mastered the cumbersome process and set up a dark room at Munstead House, she set out to record those elements indigenous to her native Surrey that were rapidly disappearing. She was fascinated by cottage gardens and their cottagers, and by the special construction trades that gave ordinary rural buildings their local character. In addition to these vernacular traditions, she also photographed her own garden as well as specific plants and tree forms, garden design elements, and the local landscape….
“Gertrude Jekyll’s favorite brother, Sir Herbert Jekyll (1846-1932), who shared many interests and friends with her, was an art patron and engineer as well as an amateur photographer. He assembled several carefully labeled family photograph albums and was interested in the preservation of rural buildings, so it is possible that he taught her the art of photography….
“Jekyll kept prints of most of her photographs in a series of personal photograph albums similar to her brother’s. Gertrude Jekyll’s earliest attempts at photographing and processing were closely supervised by her instructor, as the back of some of the earliest prints are critiqued in a handwriting different from her own. Some are marked ‘little over exposed,’ ‘bad light,’ ‘more pyro — more bromide,’ and ‘keep the camera level.’
“Starting in 1899, with the publication of Wood and Garden, Jekyll used her photographs to illustrate her books, probably using a stock of photographs she had already taken…. [As] Jekyll began to publish books on a regular basis, she now regarded each book that she illustrated as a photo assignment….”
If you would like to view the photographs Jekyll is describing up-top (and see how well she renders the words explaining the photographs), you can find three of them at these links from a Gutenberg edition of Colour in the Flower Garden:
If you page backward a bit from the last link (to the chapter title “Some Garden Pictures”), you’ll also encounter what could certainly be considered Jekyll’s artist statement, one which combines art, gardening, and the color, light, and compositional characteristics of photography:
“When the eye is trained to perceive pictorial effect, it is frequently struck by something — some combination of grouping, lighting and colour — that is seen to have that complete aspect of unity and beauty that to the artist’s eye forms a picture. Such are the impressions that the artist-gardener endeavours to produce in every portion of the garden…. [There] are some days during the summer when the quality of light seems to tend to an extraordinary beauty of effect. I have never been able to find out how the light on these occasions differs from that of ordinary fine summer days, but, when these days come, I know them and am filled with gladness.”
What a delightful way to describe how we see — and photograph — gardens, and I especially like how Jekyll blends sensory elements of art, botany, and photography in her writing. Now, imagine: if she’d been writing and taking garden photographs a hundred years later, she might have ended out with a blog, just like this!
