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

Category: oakland cemetery

Summer Daylilies (2 of 3): Double-Double Orange-Orange

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From “Daylilies by the Bouquetful” in One Man’s Garden by Henry Mitchell:

“Often I wonder how gardeners fared before the great surge of modern daylilies, as these are a mainstay of the summer garden. Most varieties last three weeks in bloom; that is, a well-grown clump with many flowering stems will show flowers for that long. And there are early and late kinds, so that the season is a good two months or even longer if very early and very late kinds are chosen. Daylily flowers range in size from one and a half to eight inches, on stems one to six feet high.

“Still, it is a mistake to think the daylily will take care of itself like a weed, as the wild Hemerocallis fulva does. That is the burnt-orange kind you see along alleys and at abandoned sites, where it persists along with chicory or dandelions….”

From Colour in My Garden (1918) by Louise Beebe Wilder:

“In Nature, broadly speaking, we find that red and scarlet and yellow are rare, given to us as stimulants, as vivid experiences. They are confined to sunset and sunrise skies, to autumn foliage and to flowers; while the ‘restful and reparative’ colours — blue, green, and violet, as revealed in the sky, the sea, the distance, and the great green setting of grass and trees — make up the beautiful commonplace of our daily seeing….

“Surely there is a lesson here. The constant perception of broad masses of emphatic, exciting colour would prove severely taxing, yet do we most surely need them here and there to bring out the quality of neutral colour, and to arouse the immobile beauty of the garden to glowing life.

“Yellow, orange, and scarlet flowers show to greatest advantage in full sunshine.”

Hello!

This is the second of three posts featuring photos I took of daylilies at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens earlier this summer. The first post is Summer Daylilies (1 of 3): Burgundy and Yellow.

I’ve always referred to this particular daylily as “double orange” (or sometimes “double-double orange-orange” because it’s so large) — but discovered today that it is actually a variation of one called Hemerocallis fulva as you can also see if you do an image search for “double hemerocallis fulva” on Google.

I took a few pictures of similar daylilies last year when I hadn’t yet learned that daylilies are not actually lilies, so those older photos are mixed in with true lilies on this post: Lilies on Black Backgrounds (3 of 10). Ah, well, at any given time you only know what you know; and, as Bart Simpson would say: “Mistakes were made!”

Thanks for taking a look!

Summer Daylilies (1 of 3): Burgundy and Yellow

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From “Hemerocallis” in Garden Flora: The Natural and Cultural History of the Plants In Your Garden by Noel Kingsbury:

“The name is from the Greek for ‘day’ and ‘beauty’ — a distinguishing mark of the genus is that the flowers open for only a day (hence, daylilies). The 18 species are found across Eurasia, with most in the Far East. The relationship of the Hemerocallidaceae to other formerly ‘lily family’ plants has been much disputed; current thinking puts Hemerocallis in its own family….

“Hemerocallis species can be found in a wide range of habitats, including mountain meadow and coastal situations; the common factor is sun or light shade, with moderately high levels of moisture and fertility. These are clonal perennials, forming dense, competitive, persistent clumps and often surviving in abandoned gardens…. Although they are cold hardy, daylilies thrive particularly well in climates with hot, humid summers. They are listed as potentially invasive in some U.S. states. Hybridisation has resulted in a plethora of cultivars, which are divided into a variety of sections, based largely on flower form — trumpet, flat, flaring, star, spider, ruffled, etc.”

Hello!

This is the first of three posts featuring photos I took of daylilies at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens earlier this summer.

These are the same daylilies as those in one of my posts from last year (see Lilies on Black Backgrounds (4 of 10)), but this year’s colors were really intense — with burgundy, especially, much more saturated than it was in the earlier photos. Coincidentally, burgundy and yellow are two of the trim colors on my house; the third color — you may have guessed it — is green! Scroll toward the bottom if you’d like to read about how I created these images.

With this series of daylily photos (as well as some other daylily and lily-lily photos I’m still working on) I decided in advance of my shoots that I’d likely remove the backgrounds behind the flowers in post-processing. With that in mind, I knew I’d want to get as close-in as possible but also capture as much front-to-back flower detail as I could. So I used narrow apertures — that is, high aperture numbers like f/19 and f/27 — along with a high ISO (ISO 1600!) to get the results I wanted for the original image.

While it’s certainly true that such high ISOs introduce noise, it’s also true that tools like Adobe Lightroom do a decent job of removing that noise while retaining an acceptable level of detail. And, as a bit of a contrarian, every time I see and article describing some element of photography that you should avoid — like using high ISOs — I want to try it and see what happens. I’ve written about this previously: see Lilies on Black Backgrounds: A Photo Project (1 of 10), where I describe how I use this approach to manage color and detail when taking photographs in outdoor, natural light — especially when it’s overcast or I’m working in a tree-covered area (which both help minimize shadowy contrasts).

Below you can see the three photos from the last gallery above, and their transition from the original RAW image in the first column; to the second column where I’ve finished color, contrast, and tone adjustments; to the last column where I removed the background by “painting” it black.

Because I used such narrow aperture settings, the images initially contained a lot of extra behind-the-flower detail, most of which looks pretty messy but gave me the option, in this case, of including some of the better-looking daylily’s leaves in each final image. It took a good bit of patience — and a few hours of eyeball-straining mouse-poking — to reveal some of the leaves in these photos. Lightroom’s automatic subject-selection (see Lightroom’s Masking Tool for an overview) correctly treated the flowers as the primary subject, so the leaves require manual brushing to remove the black overlay. Despite the effort required, though, it was a lot of fun to figure out what parts of the background to include — and these leaves added some shapely flourishes to the images.

Select the first image below if you would like to slide through the transitions.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Leopard Flower Variations (On Black)

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From The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture (Vol. 1) by Liberty Hyde Bailey:

“Blackberry Lily. Leopard Flower. A hardy, herbaceous perennial, which is an old garden favorite. The first of the popular names comes from the clusters of shining black roundish seeds, and the second from the flower, which is orange, spotted red. It is more commonly sold as Pardanthus, which also means leopard flower. Perianth [segments] oblong, the [three] inner slightly shorter and spirally twisting as they fade: stamens in one group only at the base: [capsules] pear-shaped, the valves ultimately falling away…. Of easy culture in rich, sandy loam and in a sunny place….

“The seed-stalks are sometimes used with dried grasses for decoration. It is said that the birds sometimes mistake the seeds for blackberries.”

Hello!

For this post, I took a few of my Iris domestica photographs from the previous post (see Leopard Flower Variations — and used various Lightroom masks to paint the backgrounds black and isolate the blooms or, in some cases, isolate the blooms, stems, and leaves.

Thanks for taking a look!

Leopard Flower Variations

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From Bulbs and Tuberous-Rooted Plants: Their History, Description, Methods of Propagation and Complete Directions for their Successful Culture in the Garden, Dwelling and Greenhouse (1893) by C. L. Allen:

“Blackberry Lily or Leopard Flower: This handsome flower is not a lily, as its popular name implies, but belongs to the Iris family. Its [early] name, Pardanthus chinensis, is derived from pardos, leopard, and anthos, a flower — hence leopard flower; and chinensis means of China. The Chinese Leopard  Flower was formerly very common in gardens, but like many another deserving plant, has given way to the universal craze for novelties.…

“The stem grows three or four feet high, branches at the top, where it bears regular flowers of an orange color, and abundantly dotted with crimson or reddish-purple spots. One great merit of the Leopard flower is that it is late flowering, being in bloom from midsummer to September….

“After the pretty flowers have faded, the capsules grow on and enlarge, and when quite ripe the walls of the capsules break away and curl up, leaving a central column of shining, black-coated seed, looking so much like a well developed, ripe blackberry, that the fruit, if not so handsome as the flower, is quite as interesting, and shows that in this instance it does not require any effort of the imagination to see the applicability of perhaps its most common name — the Blackberry Lily….

“The plant is now botanically known as Belamcanda chinensis.”

From Iris domestica on Wikipedia:

“ Iris domestica, commonly known as leopard lily, blackberry lily, and leopard flower, is an ornamental plant in the family Iridaceae. In 2005, based on molecular DNA sequence evidence, Belamcanda chinensis, the sole species in the genus Belamcanda, was transferred to the genus Iris and renamed Iris domestica.”

Hello!

I went on a “safari” recently, hunting for tiger lilies at my favorite local nearby garden cemetery. I found several streaks of tiger lilies, many in full bloom and resting comfortably at the boundaries between sunny and shady sections of the garden. Those photos are currently being wrangled by my Post-Processing Department and will be out soon (though it’s hard to get a commitment from those people more precise than “soon”).

Whilst wandering around that hot and humid morning, I also stumpled across the delightful creatures featured in the galleries below: not tiger lilies, but leopard flowers. The leopard flower, as it turns out, is not a lily but is an iris officially known as Iris domestica — despite being also dubiously known as blackberry lily or leopard lily (and is distinct from a Lilium leopard lily, which looks a lot like a tiger lily). Ok, uh… no wonder it can be so difficult to keep plant names straight, when people do such things as randomly calling irises lilies. So substantial might be lily/iris confusion that Wikipedia has a separate page listing plants commonly called lilies that are, in real life, not lilies. See List of plants known as lily — where you might learn (at least, I did) that, among others, the plants and flowers colloquially referred to as “day lilies” are not even lilies… because they aren’t members of the Lilium genus. WTF!

Ah, well, I guess I got it sorted out: the plant originally known as “Pardanthus chinensis” was later given the botanical name “Belamcanda chinensis” — by which is was known for decades and decades — until its DNA was analyzed, its iris roots (haha!) confirmed, and it was slipped from its place as the single flower in a genus to being yet another Iridaceae. This is quite interesting, when you think about it, since — despite having leaves that resemble iris leaves once you know it’s an iris — it has a flower with few if any visible characteristics we would typically associate with irises. Plants are a hoot!

🙂

Thanks for taking a look!

Dogwoods, Red and White (3 of 3)

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From Self-Portrait with Dogwood by Christopher Merrill:

“A small deciduous tree, the flowering dogwood belongs to the understory in a hardwood forest, occupying the middle space between the ground and sky, providing nectar for pollinating insects, branches and foliage and fruit for perching and nesting songbirds, nutrients for the soil, ingredients for medicines, wood for bowls and shuttles and tools, and an open invitation for an aging man to reflect on his walk in the sun, to reconsider his relationship to nature, to pay attention to the worlds revolving in his memory, his imagination, and all around him.”

Hello!

This is the third post in a series featuring photos of dogwood blooms that I took a few weeks ago. The first two posts are:

Dogwoods, Red and White (1 of 3)

Dogwoods, Red and White (2 of 3)

For this post, I “rearranged” bracts and blooms in some of the images, then painted the backgrounds black — because that’s what I like to do!

I just bought Self-Portrait with Dogwood by Christopher Merrill (quoted above) last week. It’s now part of my collection of books about specific types of plants or flowers (see Bearded Irises in Purple and Blue (1 of 2)), and is a series of essays where the author explores the connections between his life and nature, as he researches the history and lifespan of dogwood trees.

His description of dogwoods as “understory in a hardwood forest, occupying the middle space between the ground and sky” caught my eye. It may be a literary flourish; but, also, it’s a fitting characterization of the way natural spaces develop (or redevelop) in layers, in a kind of hierarchy of shorter then taller and taller plants, with each layer serving its purpose in the creation of a woodland, forest, or even garden, as lower layers sometimes (and eventually) get supplanted. Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels is an excellent introduction to interpreting the history of such natural spaces, and — if the subject interests you — I definitely recommend it.

From the book — which focuses on New England in the United States as the author’s source for instruction — you can learn how to observe a natural space and understand decades of its development, based on the appearance of trees and tree trunks, layers of plant growth, the impact of past fires or storms (called “disturbance histories”), and man-made events and structures such as dividing land into pastures by plowing and creating boundaries with the upturned stones. You will also read about tiny plants called “basal rosettes” that are evidence of new beginnings for a wild area; how a tree develops a split or “coppiced” trunk; the meaning of “deadfall” and how broken trees will push up “stump sprouts” because they’re not as dead as they look; and what “pillows and cradles” mean in the appearance of landscapes. These are just a few of the delights contained in its 200 pages, which will teach you to see every natural space with brand new eyes.

(If you would like to view some photographs I took at the time I first read Wessels’ book, photos I took with what I’d learned from the book in mind, see Before and After: Fun with Big Rocks and Before and After: Swamp Things.)

Thanks for reading and taking a look!