“The name of this medium-sized, horticulturally important family is derived from the South African genus Amaryllis (Belladonna Lily). The family is widely distributed, especially diverse in the Mediterranean, South Africa and South America (particularly the Andes). Three genera are native in Australia: Crinum (Murray Lily), Calostemma (Garland Lily) and Proiphys (Brisbane Lily)….
“Many members of the family are sold as cut flowers, and numerous genera are common in cultivation. These include Agapanthus, Clivia, Galanthus (Snowdrop), Hippeastrum, Ipheion, Nerine, Amaryllis, Leucojum (Snowflake), and Narcissus (Daffodil and Jonquil), and the last three are recorded as naturalised in Australia. The genus Allium includes cultivated onions, leeks and garlic as well as A. vineale (Wild Garlic) and A. triquetrum (Three-cornered Garlic), which are significant weeds. White-flowered Nothoscordum borbonicum (Onion Weed) is almost cosmopolitan, and commonly troublesome in gardens.
“Most members of the family grow from a perennial bulb, which produces a cluster of basal leaves each season. Others, such as the robust herbaceous perennial Agapanthus grow from a rhizome. Leaves are often linear, and often distichous. In some species, such as Amaryllis belladonna (Belladonna Lily) the flowering stem appears before the leaves.”
“Gardeners account the amaryllis, of which there are numerous varieties, a proud plant, because even after the greatest care it refuses to blossom…. The number of flowers is commonly from eight to twelve, and the circumference of each about seven inches. The corolla in its prime has the colour of a fine gold tissue wrought on a rose-coloured ground, and when it begins to fade it is pink….
“In full sunshine it seems to be studded with diamonds; but, by candle-light, the specks or spangles appear more like fine gold-dust: when the petals are somewhat withered, they assume a deep crimson colour. The name of these beautiful plants is derived from a Greek word signifying to shine, sparkle, flash.”
Waken, thou fair one! up, Amaryllis! Morning so still is; Cool is the gale; The rainbow of heaven, With its hues seven, Brightness hath given To wood and dale: Sweet Amaryllis, let me convey thee; In Neptune’s arms naught shall affray thee; Sleep’s god no longer power has to stay thee, Over thy eyes and speech to prevail.
Hello!
This is the first of three posts featuring a couple of Amaryllis variants, whose appearance during my hunts through the haunted gardens is typically a sign of late summer or early fall — though I found most of these a bit earlier this year, perhaps owing to a warm and very wet summer season. As you can see from some of the photos below, they’re all noteworthy for producing flowers at the top of tall, thick stems, with the flowers bending in a graceful curve — often turning toward the source of light, even when they’re growing in the shade.
“Swamp Lily” is a common name for these plants as they’re often found in the wild at the edges of wetlands, and they may also be called Belladona Lily, Jersey Lily, Barbados Lily, or even Easter Lily — which is fun because none of them are actually lilies. And today I learned that a similar looking plant often called Amaryllis — popular to buy or give as gifts as we approach the winter holidays because their forced bulbs will bloom indoors — is actually Hippeastrum, though both Amaryllis and Hippeastrum are in the same plant family, Amaryllidaceae. This may or may not seem confusing.
“In [John] Gerard’s time (1545-1612) lilies were certainly widely cultivated in many gardens; the most popular variety being the Madonna, L. candidum (its descriptive name was given it by Virgil), a native plant of southern Europe. This is said to have been first grown in England in 1596, though it must have been known by sight from Italian paintings many years before that. In 1596, William Shakespeare would have been thirty-two, at the height of his powers. In that year he was engaged in writing Romeo and Juliet, and the first sight of a Madonna lily must have been inspiration indeed to someone who loved and felt for plants as Shakespeare did….
“Or it may have been the martagon — the Turk’s Cap lily — which Shakespeare saw when he was a boy in Warwickshire, as there is a theory that the martagon, alone among lilies, is indigenous to England, as it is to northern Spain, Italy and Asia Minor.
“Until the last century, there were only a few types of lily cultivated in Western gardens and it is remarkable in the annals of the flower that the appearance of new varieties in Western gardens always coincides with the discovery and development of distant and little-known parts of the world.”
Up and down the garden walks Every day I watch her go, Past great clumps of nodding stalks Crowned with blushing crimson roses, Or with lilies, white as snow.
Lilacs dashing on the air Persian odors, in delight Bend and almost touch her hair; On the bough where he reposes Sings the oriole with his might….
Easter lilies crave the touch Of her carmine-tinted lips — Finer flowers by far than such As bedeck the fields immortal, Whose soft fragrance Juno sips.
Down a pink-plumed peony row Into purple iris lanes, Onward still I see her go, To a Turk’s-cap-lilied portal, Where perpetual coolness reigns….
It’s been a little over six years (six years!) since I published one of my earliest posts about learning to use Lightroom’s features, covering the software’s spot removal tool. In that post — Before and After: Red Brick with Ivy — I described using the tool to remove white spots from a simple photograph of a red brick wall framed with ivy. Then, after gaining more experience, I posted another example — Before and After: Bernadine Clematis, An Illusion — where I explained how I had learned to use it to not only remove spots, but repair damaged sections of flower petals and accurately blend their colors and textures. In both posts, I noted how time-consuming it could be to remove spots and heal blemishes, but that the work was often worth it because it noticeably improved the photos.
This kind of image cleanup has remained part of my workflow for all my images. Most of my photographs are closeups or macros of flowers and plants, taken out in the wild, where all manner of smudgies attach themselves to my subjects. Clumps of pollen, dust and debris, cobwebs, and photobombing spiders, ants, and other bugs are the most common distractors — so I use my first post-processing pass through every batch of photos to eliminate them.
These spot removal tools work like this: you use the mouse to select or brush over a spot, then release the mouse button, and Lightroom attempts to replace the spot you selected with something else from the image. What you selected is called the target, and the replacement Lightroom chose is called the source. Its choice of source, however, has always been hit-or-miss. With photos of flowers where even the smallest sections contain many different textures and colors, it would often fail to choose a source that matched in color or blended textures properly. This meant that I often had to manually reposition the source, or go over it multiple times until Lightroom provided a satisfactory match. Imagine — using some of these photographs as an example — that the raised parallel lines running down the center of individual flower petals were broken at several points after removing bugs from them — and you can visualize what happens when Lightroom selects a source improperly.
Then, in May of this year, Adobe released an enhancement to the spot removal tools called Generative Remove, which uses the AI capabilities from Adobe Firefly (see Irises on Black / Notes On Experiences (1 of 2) and Irises on Black / Notes On Experiences (2 of 2) where I wrote about Firefly) to help with the removal of unwanted objects from photographs. With this enhancement, the target-source approach I just described (and the frustration of using it) no longer applies. Instead — when you select something to remove from the image — Lightroom blends elements of your photo with what it interprets would have been behind or would have surrounded the spot you selected, if the spot hadn’t been there to begin with. Amazing, yes? Let’s look at a couple of examples!
Here are two photographs from this Turk’s Cap series, as they looked when I took them…
… where I didn’t like the mass of stems and leaves on the left side of each photo. Very distracting! In the olden days of six months ago, I would have probably just cropped them out and been content with a larger view of the flower. In neither case would I have been successful changing the image with the original spot removal tools — since for each element you try to remove, you have to manually choose something from the photo to replace it with.
With Generative Remove, however, a new kind of sorcery presents itself. Imagine now using the mouse to brush over the entire left quarter of each of these images and letting the Remove tool do its work. When I did that, here’s where I ended up…
… and here’s what’s happened. In the first photo, Lightroom has removed the stems, leaves, and flowers from the image — and filled the space by extending the stone behind the plants (which was actually there, in real life, how did it know?), and matched the stone’s textures and colors. In the second one, it has done something similar: it has removed the mass of stems and leaves behind the flower, and has created a blended background that matches the area nearby. It also adjusted the stems and leaves of the (now single-stemmed) flower, with new leaves.
While I would normally try to avoid composing pictures so changes like this would be necessary — by shifting my shooting position or zooming in closer — I framed these two like this just to see what I could do with Generative Remove. Here you can compare the images before and after I used Generative Remove by clicking on the first image and paging through.
But wait! There’s more! And this may be my favorite discovery….
Consider again this image of the spotty brick wall, that I mentioned above. With Generative Remove, I no longer have to select each individual spot and double-check that Lightroom chose an acceptable replacement before moving to the next one. Instead I can select all of the white spots one after the other (fastly!), press a single “Apply” button and go play ball with The Dog for a couple of minutes. When I return, Lightroom will have removed all the spots (I’ve tried as many as sixty) in one pass — and, in most cases, without making any mistakes matching colors and textures.
“‘Lily’ is one of the most confusing flower names, since a vast number of unrelated plants are landed with it. There are about 100 species of true Lilium, although the boundaries are much disputed by botanists….
“L. candidum, is the Madonna lily of Christianity, although it is known from the frescoes of the Minoan civilization, some 1,700 years bc. Its origins are obscure, since it was widely traded by the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions. The purity of the white of its flowers made it a great favourite for religious symbolism, and the association with the Virgin Mary became particularly strong.
“The other lily of pre-modern Europe, L. martagon, is a very different plant, its dark pink, spotted petals reflexing in a way that flowers very rarely do. Dubbed the ‘Turk’s cap’ lily after the turbans worn by the Ottomans, it was extensively cultivated in the gardens of the wealthy after its introduction in the late sixteenth century.”
I have planted lilies, but will they all grow well with me? Will they like the glitter of this north-looking hillside? Will they like the rude winds, the stir, the quick changes? Would they not have shadowy stillnesses, and peace?
All these lovely lilies, I wish that they would grow with me, No other flowers have the texture of the lilies, The heart-piercing fragrance, the newly alighted angel’s Lineal poise, and purity, and peace….
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of Turk’s Cap Lilies (Lilium martagon) from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. These lilies all grow in the same place — and have expanded their presence in the past few years — in front of a fifteen-foot tall monument marking the grave of Patrick Connely (1791-1851), about whom I could learn very little. I did, however, find a reference to his grave site with some photographs of the monument and a short bio. This page shows the monument in a nine-year-old picture — and you can see a few stems of these lilies, which now surround the monument on all sides.
“Turk’s Cap” is one of my favorite flower names, even as its use may include several different kinds of lilies and a few other flowers. It fits these flowers well, with the Turk’s Cap “feature” mirroring the shape of a turban or similar head-covering made of fabric that winds from a circle at the bottom toward the top, often giving the impression of being a spiral built from multiple layers of cloth. And the Turk’s Cap Lilies are apparently very smart — because in addition to imitating human fashion, their flower petals contain sets of dark spots or dots that (though they may appear randomly placed) are believed to guide insects toward the juicy, pollinatory parts of the flower.
The Regal Lilies in my antique bowl Reveal a song, I see them etched upon an ancient scroll With leaf and prong. A simple altar and a sculptured tomb Display their grace… I find them stitched upon an old heirloom Of fragile lace, They crown the Virgin, babe, and fireside shrine With halos bright, And in each human heart they are divine Symbols of light.
And peace they bring into an aching breast Sweet as the lilies are, so sweet the rest.
Regal lilies in a bowl Whose fragrance feeds my soul, Blend with two waxen candles Tipped with gold. And I compare The ivory pages of an open book That lay serenely there. Close by, A Buddha calmly sits With desire in his mystic eyes, He gazes at the waxen candles Because no light flames From their golden tips. All this is light to me! Born of earthly fire…
As you proceed through these photos, you may notice how I varied the lighting — from backlighting, to sunlight from above, to mostly shade, to bright sun with shady backgrounds, and finally to light filtered through nearby trees. Pause for a moment and consider how different kinds of lighting alter your perception of the flowers’ colors and shadows, but also how the texture of the flower petals looks different in each of these conditions.
