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

Category: my garden

Summer Sky Pink (Very-Very Pink!) Asiatic Lilies (1 of 4)

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From “Pink” by George Crabbe in The RHS Book of Flower Poetry and Prose by the Royal Horticultural Society:

This, this! Is Beauty; cast, I pray, your eyes
On this my Glory! See the Grace, the Size!
Was ever Stem so tall, so stout, so strong,
Exact in breadth, in just proportion, long;
These brilliant Hues are all distinct and clean,
No kindred Tint, no blending Streaks between….

From Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding by Noel Kingsbury:

“[If] a pink flower crosses with a white one, the progeny may show a variety of shades of pink.”

Hello!

This supercalifragilisticexpialidocious lily is a newcomer to my garden this year, it having been adopted by The Gardener to replace one of last year’s Tiny Epic Asiatic Lilies that fell asleep during the winter and never woke up. “Summer Sky Pink” is a really good name for this variety: its pinkness is certainly reminiscent of that kind of pink-purple-magenta color that surrounds clouds at the horizon this time of year, especially before or after summertime thunderstorms.

Fresh from the garden center, it produced quite a few big blooms for about two weeks in early June. I learned it’s a cross between white Longliflorum (or Easter Lily) and pink or red asiatic lilies. It clearly retains the large, thick-to-the-touch blossom petals of the Easter Lily and, toward the center, yellow and orange highlights. You can see some Longliflorum in one of my earlier posts, Easter Sunday 2021: Yellow Daffodils and White Lilies.

Thanks for taking a look!

Lilies of the Epic Kind (2 of 2)

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From The Lilies by Henry Percival Spencer:

‘Tis passing strange this life of ours,
Nought in this world can we explain;
We are helpless as the flowers
Forced into life by April rain.

What reap we for our joy and pain
Except the hour in which it lives?
He who can fathom Loss and Gain
Can tell us what the Future gives.

The Lily comes, the Lily goes….

From Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden by Eleanor Perenyi:

“Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants, to suspect that they do it to annoy. One knows, after all, that they lead lives of their own: plant the lily bulb in the center of the bed and watch it come up under a brick near the edge; pull up a sick little bush and throw it on the compost heap, and ten to one, it will obstinately revive.”

Hello!

Here are a few more photos of my Tiny Epic Asiatic Lilies — some from the previous post along with a small handful of new ones (those whose backgrounds were very cluttered in the originals), all reprocessed on black.

Thanks for taking a look!

Lilies of the Epic Kind (1 of 2)

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From Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden by Eleanor Perenyi:

“Some lilies are more vigorous than others. The June-flowering Asiatics don’t care what you do to them. They can be cut quite close to the ground and still return in full force the following year. The others seem to know they are more beautiful and expensive… and to cut them severely is to court their oblivion.”

From The Garden Triumphant: Victorian Garden Taste by David Stuart:

“You would know by the scent of the lilies that summer was here.”

The lilies in the galleries below — a variation of Tiny Epic Asiatic Lilies — are not actually tiny but they’re definitely epic. The flower petals unfold to the size of the open hand of a small person (me!), and with their striking colors and textures, they make great subjects for close-up photography. The petals are quite thick and silky to the touch, and you can almost feel tiny bumps where it looks like they’ve been sprinkled with cinnamon radiating from the center.

Unlike some lilies, these blooms lasted nearly a week — which gave me plenty of time to aim a macro lens at them and try different combinations of light and different camera settings before I settled on these photos. I’ve featured them here before (see, from last year, Epic Lilies (1 of 3), Epic Lilies (2 of 3), Epic Lilies (3 of 3)), so this time I concentrated on photographing just one or two isolated blooms and getting the focus, color, and textures as accurate as they appeared to me in the garden.

Thanks for taking a look!

Bernadine Clematis, 2022 Version

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From Plant Families: A Guide for Gardeners and Botanists by Ross Bayton:

“[The Clematis] flower bud is enclosed by the sepals, which protect the inner workings of the flower. As it grows and expands, the sepals open up and become much more colorful, just like the petals within.”

From The Language of Flowers by Anne Pratt and Thomas Miller:

“Many plants, besides possessing tendrils, have a stem and leaf-stalks, which grow in a spiral slope, when the plant requires the support of another. Thus the traveler’s joy, or wild clematis, that beautiful ornament of our summer hedges, by its stems as well as tendrils, so clings to the bushes that it is impossible to sever a large portion without tearing it. The large clusters of flowers, and the numerous dark leaves, seeming to belong to the brambles among which they entwine, so closely are they interlaced by the convolutions of their stems.”

The fabulously oppressive heat and humidity that settled on large portions of the U.S. last week made outdoor activities — including photography! — possible only in short bursts, but it did give me some indoor time to work on a backlog of photos. This week is supposed to be even hotter, though much lower humidity may mean outdoor-things are more possible, especially in the mornings. Yesterday and today I heard the upcoming high temperatures referred to as a heatwave, heat blast, heat bomb, and heat dome — but I really think that if they’d just call it a “heat igloo” we’d all feel a lot cooler…. or not!

Earlier this year I posted photos of flowers from one of my clematis vines — see One Clematis, Two Clematis — but somehow I forgot about pictures I’d taken of another one: the Bernadine Clematis whose images appear below. My third clematis plant — a President Clematis (see President Clematis, from 2021) never bloomed this year: it started producing flower buds very early during a warm February, but they all got crinkled to death by a week of freezing temperatures shortly after. That’s a weird new weather pattern that This Gardener hasn’t quite figured out how to work with: early year temperatures in the 60s and 70s cause some plants (in my garden: clematis vines, hydrangeas, and ferns) to respond to the warmth by putting out delicate new growth too early, then they never quite recover from the freezing that follows.

I’ve posted photos of Bernadine here a few times; so this year I just took a double-handful of new photos, and focused on getting sharpness, color, and texture as correct and accurate as possible. This Bernadine blooms into a striking mix of blue, purple, violet, and magenta, in stripes that emanate from the center. The center structure features the deepest purple, so rich in color that it always reminds me of purple marzipan with a tiny yellow frosting cap. But I did not try to eat them, I promise; I only took their pictures.

Thanks for taking a look!

One Clematis, Two Clematis

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From The Clematis as a Garden Flower by George Jackman:

“The annals of Horticulture bear witness to the improvements which have resulted from the well-directed experiments of cultivars in the hybridizing or cross-breeding of the ornamental plants of other climes, after they have been introduced to our gardens. In fact, not a few of the finest plants we cultivate, owe their origins to this agency, or to the continued selection of the best seedlings. Some species in certain popular families have, indeed, been crossed and intercrossed until their fixity seems to have been completely broken up, and they now yield us seminal variations to an unlimited extent…. Considering what has already been done in this direction, as well as the rich stores of originals as yet untouched, and which is from year to year accumulating, intelligent cultivators, and clever painstaking experimentalists, should be encouraged to set themselves to work in good earnest at creating new forms of floral beauty….

“In this point of view, the Clematis may be looked on as a mine which has not yet become by any means worked out.”

From Beautiful at All Seasons: Southern Gardening and Beyond by Elizabeth Lawrence:

“It is wonderful to have such a variety of large-flowered clematis at hand.”

Spring is in full force here in the U.S. southeast, with plants and flowers emerging faster than a photographer (me!) can keep up with them. Having several hundred unprocessed photos — including daffodils, dogwoods, ferns fronds, plum blossoms, early irises, and a few to-be-identified species — means that our post-processing department (also me!) is pretty busy trying to catch up, while our gardener (still me!) starts working the landscape for this year’s planting extravaganza. But I took a break one morning this week and watched my Concord grapevine grow for a while; and even as I was watching the first Clematis flower growing in the same pot opened up; then a few hours later, a second one did the same.

Clematis flowers don’t last that long, and are only in prime condition for a few days. For several years, I had two varieties growing in four medium-sized pots on my back stairs, but last fall moved them all together into the grapevine’s giant planter (it’s about four feet tall and two feet wide) so they’d (hopefully) grow better and last longer living with the grapevine. Late southern summer heat (along the growth restriction imposed by the four smaller pots) always inhibited the Clematis vine’s exuberance and the vines fell apart mid-season — leaving only a tangle mess of dried-up leaves behind. I didn’t know for sure if the transplanting would work, but the Clematis vines started producing leaves a couple of weeks ago, then began making flower buds last week. The vines are thick with new leaves and seem pretty robust, so I’m expecting a good growing season for them all. it’s always fun to try a little gardening experiment and have it succeed. And as you can see from the last two photos below: there are still more Clematis flowers getting ready to bloom.

Thanks for taking a look!