“[The Tiger Lily] is, when well grown, one of the most noble and showy of all the species, and well worthy a place in every collection. The type grows about four feet high, and, in good soil, will produce from ten to fifteen bright scarlet flowers, with numerous small black spots. Notwithstanding its stately form and gorgeous display, it is classed with weedy plants, because of its rapid increase and ease of cultivation; whereas, in gardens of any considerable extent, it should have a prominent place and be confined to it.”
Blazing in gold and quenching in purple, Leaping like leopards to the sky, Then at the feet of the old horizon Laying her spotted face, to die; Stooping as low as the kitchen window, Touching the roof and tinting the barn, Kissing her bonnet to the meadow, — And the juggler of day is gone!
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It was an exceptionally breezy day when I took these photos of tiger lilies (Lilium lancifolium) at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens, but I did manage to freeze-frame enough of them to create two small batches of photos, for this post and the next one. As determined as they were to evade my camera, they were not successful.
It’s almost hard to believe that the unopened buds shown in the first two photos unfold to reveal the tiger lily’s large and complicated structure. The tiny spots throughout the flower petals — which, surprisingly, create some challenges when masking the images in Lightroom to remove the backgrounds — register to our eyes as black dots, but in the photo editor they are read as combinations of purple and magenta. By increasing the saturation on purple and magenta, you can get the dots to appear as if they have some bumpy texture — something that probably wouldn’t have been apparent to you, if I hadn’t just pointed it out.
“The modern daylily is a highly evolved plant, the ancestors of which were species native to the temperate parts of central and northern Asia. According to the American Botanical Society, the genus consists of some 13-15 species of evergreen, semi-evergreen, and dormant herbaceous perennials found growing along the margins of forests, in mountainous areas, marshy river valleys, and meadowlands in China, Korea, and Japan, and occasionally into Manchuria and eastern Siberia….
“The ancient Chinese, in particular, used the species for food and medicine. The flower buds were palatable and nutritious, and the root and crown often served as an effective pain reliever…. Because its flowers were bright and cheerful, the daylily also came to symbolize for the ancients an outlet for grief, its primary effect an emotional one….
“Two species brought to America were the orange H. fulva, commonly known as the ‘roadside’ or ‘homestead’ lily, and H. flava, the ‘Lemon Lily’ of early twentieth century gardens.”
“Among the most lovely and useful of yellow flowers are the Day Lilies (Hemerocallis). Their colour is very pure and fine, and runs the scale from mild lemon colour to strong fuscous orange. The flowering season of the different varieties covers a period of nearly three months, and few plants grow with such hearty good will in all sorts of positions….
“Yet I seldom see any save the common Lemon Lily (Hemerocallis flava) made any great use of in gardens, and this, though truly lovely, is usually relegated to out-of-the-way places where more capricious things have scorned to grow. The Orange Day Lily (Hemerocallis fulva) we commonly see decorating the roadside near to some old garden, but its colour is magnificent and it is well worth a place within the garden.”
The orange daylilies below are the “single” variation of the double Hemerocallis fulvathat I showed in the second of these three posts.
“Fuscous” — from the second quotation above — is a fun new word, don’t you think? I’d never heard it before, though perhaps it’s commonly used in Victorian-era botanical culture (or not). It means “dark” or “dark-hued” so let’s use it in a sentence. Here’s the Atlanta weather for today, which prompted me to increase the brightness on all these photos before posting them:
“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….”
“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.”
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 fulvaas you can also see if you do an image search for “double hemerocallis fulva” on Google.
“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.”
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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.
“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.”
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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.
