From “Lantana camara” in The Southern Gardener’s Handbook by Troy B. Marden:
“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.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
