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

Category: oakland cemetery

Photographing Pink Daylilies

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From A Passion for Daylilies: The Flowers and the People by Sydney Eddison:

“In 1938, Elizabeth Nesmith, a pioneer breeder from Massachusetts, created an exciting new ‘pink’ daylily which she named ‘Sweetbriar‘. This early pink along with ‘Hyperion‘ weaves a soft rosy orange and pale yellow theme among the Aurelian hybrid lilies, sunflowers, and exclamation marks of lythrum at the back of my border….

“Over the years, these and other vigorous cultivars that once consisted of a modest fan of leaves and a single scape bearing only a few blossoms have developed into great clumps of graceful foliage surmounted by bushel basket loads of flowers. Most clumps have subsequently been divided innumerable times, with the result that I have more daylilies than I know what to do with. But no matter how crowded the perennial border becomes, I can never resist adding more. Nor do I discard the old ones. I could never bring myself to abandon ‘Norwegian Lass‘, which has large, open blossoms the color of clotted cream, or give up ‘Melody Lane‘, a vigorous yellow airbrushed with paprika — both products of the fifties….”

From “Photographing Daylilies” in The Illustrated Guide to Daylilies by Oliver Billingslea:

“[As] photographers we must have an eye for [color] and for rendering it accurately…. [It] is best to photograph most daylilies on a cloudy day. Nothing is more wonderful for photography than the soft light available during an early morning fog or mist. Although bright yellows, melons, and orange daylilies may benefit from some sunlight, as a general rule never shoot pinks, lavenders, or purples in direct sunlight, since its yellow wave length will tend to render these colors as salmons, pinkish lavenders, or muddy purples….

“With some digital cameras, the cool tones may be so strong that lavenders and purples will be overly enhanced, particularly in early morning light, and some further reduction of the blue in the purple may be necessary…. Shooting photos in mid-afternoon is always a problem, because the colors of the daylilies, particularly the darker ones, may have undergone a muddying effect that the camera will detect….

“When there’s bright sunlight and no clouds, people may seek to shade blooms with their bodies or to use some such object as an umbrella to provide requisite shade. Neither is generally successful. The shadow, even that from a white umbrella, tends to gray or dull the bloom…. Though some may want their prints to ‘pop off the page,’ be sure they don’t pop inaccurately.”

Hello!

While I have quite a few books about botany, gardening, plants, and flowers (and access to many more), it’s uncommon to encounter photography advice in any of those books, even those focused on a single flower family like lilies or daylilies. The excerpt above from The Illustrated Guide to Daylilies is then a welcome exception, as the author diverges from his writing about all-other-things daylily to spend some time explaining how to accurately capture daylily colors and how to manage lighting when photographing these flowers.

As the author notes, and as I’ve often written about here before, cloudy days provide some of the best lighting for outdoor flower photography: harsh shadows produced by intense sunlight are reduced, and color is not over-saturated since less of it is reflected back into the camera’s sensor. But, of course, you can’t necessarily wait around for cloudy days (we had hardly any in June, so I wouldn’t have taken many pictures if I’d waited for clouds), so it’s good to experiment with different lighting conditions and see what you can do to optimize them. Finding ways to balance sunny-day lighting by composing for backlighting, side-lighting, or sun filtered through trees can work well — and that’s what I tried to do with these photos of pink daylilies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens.

Here’s an example where the scene has a lot of backlighting. From the camera’s perspective, this was the “correct” exposure, as it attempted to balance lighting between the foreground and background. I use my camera in manual mode, but I think this is similar to what the camera would render if automatic exposure settings were used since there’s so much bright light behind the flower. I could have zoomed in and filled the frame with the flower and avoided this dull rendering, but I liked the sense of summer sun splashing around behind the flower and wanted to keep the scene composed that way.

Because Lightroom lets you select subjects and backgrounds and adjust their settings independently, it’s possible to do a lot more with this image than simply increase its exposure or brightness (which would apply to the whole scene, including the backlighting). Here’s what I see in Lightroom, where the first screenshot shows the subject selected (in fluorescent green), and the second shows the background selected.

With these selections completed, I can switch between the foreground and background, and work on all their exposure and color settings as if each part was an individual photo — with the goal, ultimately, of recreating the scene as I saw it (and not how the camera interpreted it), with a bright pink daylily in the foreground and soft swatches of green and yellow from the grass and shrubs in the background.

Here’s where we end out… can you feel the summer breeze?

Here are the two images side-by-side; select either image if you would like to view them full-screen for comparison.

Most of the photos in this post got a similar treatment; it’s my normal workflow at this point to adjust foreground and background elements separately to help me recreate what I saw. This capability also means that I can manage well with a wide variety of lighting conditions — so I don’t have to stay home and wait for clouds to come in!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Red and Yellow Daylilies

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From “Daylilies” in Gather Ye Wild Things: A Forager’s Year by Susan Tyler Hitchcock:

“The sun approaches its zenith. Hot rays coax daylilies abloom….

“[Blossoms] slowly explode for a single day of bliss, then fold forever. A summer day sees the daylily open, rejoice in the sunshine, share its pollen with the insects, sense the day’s end, and close. The same abundance of activity fills a daylily’s yearly cycle.

“Even in the deep of winter, a cluster of nubby tubers multiplies underground. Small nut-shaped root parts, each with plant potential, spread from the growing center. The wild daylily never reproduces by seed. But to see the abundance of summer blossoms, one knows that the tubers have been active year round. Bright sprigs of foliage appear early, some of the first green to sprout in fields and streamsides. By late spring flower stalks have shot straight up, three or four feet high. Tender buds emerge, often twelve to a stalk; they blossom one by one, one a day. Spent blooms wither and fade and finally fall away. Stalks recede; tubers take over for another winter of underground hibernation.”

From “Daylilies” in Coming to Treeline: Adirondack Poems by Pamela Cranston:

Clusters of daylilies
float like green islands
on the broad sea
of our scrubby front lawn —
like barges filled with flocks
of swaying golden swans.

Each morning, these tangles
of yellow trumpets lift
the shafts of their long throats
and blow their brassy horns….

Come evening, they twist
their mouths shut, tight
as a dancer’s pirouette,
and sink into silence….

Hello!

Switching from my garden back to Oakland Cemetery’s botanical treasures once again, here is a series of photos of one of their most stunning daylily collections.

I first discovered these a couple of years ago — in a section of the cemetery where there are few flowering plants — and I first photographed them in 2022 (see Summer Daylilies (1 of 3): Burgundy and Yellow). I suppose I’m quibbling with myself in describing their color once as burgundy and now as red; but having two years more experience in flower photography, I think these renderings more accurately represent the actual colors of the flowers. Red and burgundy are of course close relatives; and many of the flower petals in this series could be described as shades of burgundy, even if red dominates according to my eyes.

I chose the two quotations above for this post because the book excerpt and the poem describe one of the daylily’s unique features, as they are known for producing flowers that last only one day. Their scientific name Hemerocallis comes from combining Greek words for “day” and “beauty” (sometimes more loosely cast as “beauty for a day”) — so even their name reflects the way they operate. I’m sure you’re wondering how and why they do what they do. I was too!

With the help of my imaginary assistant ClaudeAI and a book called Botany: Principles and Applications by Roy H. Saigo, I learned that daylilies are strategic. They’ve evolved a complex pollination strategy whereby they produce clusters of individual flower buds on each stalk, then — instead of opening them all at once — typically open one, two, or just a few a day for successive days, until they run out of flowers.

This one-day flowering can enable several weeks of pollination opportunities for your average daylily, and it’s a complex chemical and biological process covered by the botanical term senescence. Plant senescence generally refers the the aging process of whole plants (including longer term aging like autumn color changes), and flower senescence separately explains the aging process of flower blossoms. While the one-day flower senescence is not necessarily specific to just daylilies, daylilies may be the only one for which it’s a defining characteristic of the plant.

My own Witch’s Hand Daylilies — which consisted of two plants in a large pot — never opened more than two flowers on any day. Though The Photographer might have preferred a nice half-dozen bunch that looked like flowers in a vase, it was not up to him — though he did appreciate the fact that the blooming went on for about three weeks, as, presumably did many bug, bee, and butterfly pollinators. Daylilies like those I photographed at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens did the same thing: these photos are from two separate trips, about a week apart, and in any of them you can see that the plant will have many more days of blooming and pollination offerings, given how many unopened buds there were when I snapped the pictures.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

White and Purple Irises

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From “Dalmatica and English Nurserymen” in Classic Irises and the Men and Women Who Created Them by Clarence Mahan:

“[Peter] Barr and his sons Peter Rudolph and William were leading breeders of irises. Beginning with the introduction of a reddish-violet iris named Garibaldi in 1873, the Barrs produced scores of new irises. These Barr irises were highly regarded in their day. Mention has already been made of the Pallida Dalmatica look-alike Princess Beatrice. A few of the other popular Barr varieties were brownish-yellow Bronze Beauty, light blue-violet Alice Barr, blue-violet Khedive, and yellow and red-violet ‘Robert Burns’….

“One of Peter Barr’s lasting contributions to the world of garden irises was the gift of a special vocabulary. Garden writer and iris hybridizer Sydney B. Mitchell explained how this came about in his book Iris for Every Garden:

“‘About 1873 Barr issued a descriptive list of his extensive collection [of irises], arranging the varieties in groups: aphylla (including forms of germanica), amoena (white standards and purple falls), neglecta (lavender standards and dark falls), pallida (lavender, light and dark blue, and rosy-toned purple selfs), squalens (forms with blended, often rather dull, combinations of smoky blue and gray or yellow and red), and variegata (clear yellow standards and falls either veined a dark red or nearly solid ox-blood color). Barr’s classification was adopted and continued in English and American lists into the nineteen-twenties. Even to this day such terms as ‘amoena’ and ‘variegata’ are applied to modern hybrids of these old color patterns.’

“The terms ‘amoena,’ ‘neglecta,’ and ‘variegata’ continue to be used by those who write and talk about irises in the 21st century. These words refer to the color patterns described by Barr and form an enduring element of iris argot. It is, after all, easier to say than an iris cultivar is a ‘neglecta’ than to say that it is a ‘violet or purple iris with standards that are lighter in color than its falls.”

Hello!

This is the last of my iris posts for 2024 — unless I come across some of the very late bloomers, like the Leopard Lily (Iris domestica), which I can often find in July. The galleries below show those I photographed with white or nearly white standards and contrasting shades of purple in their falls. Toward the middle, you will also see some that have a thin white border around the edges of the purple petals, providing an extra touch of pizazz.

Separate from any scientific or botanical names, descriptions of iris color schemes have their own names — such as amoena and neglecta — which are explained in the quotation at the top of the post. The term “amoena” refers to an iris with white standards and colored (in this case, purple) falls, and “neglecta” is more ambiguously used to describe an iris where the standards and falls show distinct variations (light and dark, typically) of the same color, such as blue, purple, or violet. If you would like to read about some of the other terms used to describe iris colors, see (with pictures!) Iris Flower Patterns from the National Gardening Association.

While I’d heard some of these terms before, I don’t think I realized that they were an important part of understanding iris colors and talking or writing about them. Perhaps they fill the gap I’ve run into frequently, that it’s quite difficult to identify individual iris variants when you come across them in a garden or from photographs (unless you bought them at a garden center and kept their “my name is” tag). Assuming I photograph them again next year (and hunt down some new ones), I think I may try to separate them by these “official” color categories, just for the sake of learning how to apply them to my discoveries.

Thanks for taking a look!

Gold Standards and Purple Falls

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From “Iris” in The English Flower Garden by William Robinson:

“The Iris is one of the oldest of our garden flowers, in many forms too, but… it has come to us in greater novelty and beauty in recent years….

“The old Irises of our gardens are usually of the Germanica class; there is much variety among these groups, and they are very hardy and precious, and excellent for the adornment of gardens and even walls and thatched roofs, as we see in France, the Iris of this great group having a valuable power of thriving on such surfaces as well as on good soil.

“There is a group of waterside and water-loving Iris, much less seen in our gardens than the above, and some of them not yet come to us, but of great value. They are allied to the common yellow Iris of our watercourses, but are taller and richer in colour, the golden Iris (aurea), Monnieri, and ochroleuca being the best known so far, and very free, hardy, and beautiful plants they are, thriving, too, almost anywhere, but best in rich, moist soil….

“Then there are the brilliant purple and gold Iris reticulata and its allies, little bulbous Irises, for the spring garden, early and charming things, many beautiful; Irises that flower in winter and early spring, like the Algerian Iris; others happy in Britain on warm soils and warm corners, and some for the rock garden, like the crested Iris; and the many pretty forms of Iris pumila, of some of which edgings were made in old gardens….”

From “Variegata” in A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris:

“Variegata: An iris with yellow or near-yellow standards and darker falls of brown, red, or purple…

“Named for Iris variegata, this distinctive bicolor pattern is well represented in all six classes. In tall beardeds, cultivars include ‘Jurassic Park’ (Lauer 1995), ‘Mine’ (Headrick 2004), ‘Kathy Chilton’ (Kerr 2006), and ‘Born to Please’ (Rogers 2006)….

“The original pattern of yellow and brown still colors many irises in the MTB class but has probably tired just as many gardeners because of its limitations. I mean really, how many ways can you do yellow-brown-red in variation before it becomes a little trite? But jaded eyes aside, the variegata pattern makes great art in the landscape. The pattern plays off the familiar colors of yellow and purple in other plants, while jazzing up the color display more than something white or pink might.”

Hello!

The irises in this series have some similarities to those I posted previously as Brown Iris Mix — but I separated these out because they have a more distinct variations between the colors of the standards and the falls. Shades of gold and yellow-gold (rather than brown) dominate the standards, with purple tones filling the falls. Admittedly the distinction is a little ambiguous, but you may also see more stippling through these flower petals, suggesting that they are different variants than those in the earlier batch. There is a reasonably good chance that some or all these irises would be correctly identified as Iris variegata L. — often referred to as a “Hungarian Iris” in some parts of the world — but (as we sometimes say here) nobody knows for sure….

🙂

Until I found the first quotation about irises that I posted above, I was unaware of the practice in France of growing irises on rooftops. If you would like to see some examples — which may also include other European countries where irises are grown up high — click here. And if you’d like to see some additional irises in color schemes like those I photographed, they are Jurassic Park, Mine, Kathy Chilton, and Born to Please, from the second quotation above.

Thanks for taking a look!

Tall Purple Irises

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From “Iris Germanica” in Classic Irises and the Men and Women Who Created Them by Clarence Mahan:

“What is Iris germanica? Trying to define Iris germanica is not easy….

“Mathematician George Spencer Brown in Laws of Form asserts there are certain things of which one cannot speak, and he cites music as an example. You can try to describe a sonata, but you will never convey to another person the experience of actually hearing it. The same is true of an iris. An attempt can be made to describe it, but words will never be able to convey the experience of seeing the iris. Fortunately, you have seen Iris germanica.

“Even if you have not seen Iris germanica in the garden you have seen it in paintings or at least in reproductions of famous paintings. The purple irises in Van Gogh’s masterpiece Irises, which sold for the record-breaking price of $53.9 million in 1987, are Iris germanica.

“The irises that fill half the canvas of Claude Monet’s painting … The Artist’s Garden at Giverny, are Iris germanica. Monet’s impressionist style makes the identity of the irises difficult to discern but there is a key in the painting. The key is that wisteria is in bloom. Tall bearded iris species and cultivars bloom after wisteria flowers have drifted to the ground, but intermediate bearded irises, of which Iris germanica is the prototype, bloom earlier when the wisteria opens its buds.

“The typical form of Iris germanica has a 2-foot stem with two branches, one long and one short. It usually has four flowers, two at the terminal and one on each of the branches…. The flowers of different forms of Iris germanica come in various shades of violet but there are also white forms. The most common form has blue-violet standards and red-violet falls…. It is one of the hardiest of all irises. “

From “The Maid’s Thought” in The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers by Robinson Jeffers:

Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something.
The west wind is dead, the waves
Forget to hate the cliff, in the upland canyons
Whole hillsides burst aglow
With golden broom. Dear how it rained last month,
And every pool was rimmed
With sulphury pollen dust of the wakening pines.
Now tall and slender suddenly
The stalks of purple iris blaze by the brooks….

Hello!

As you can tell from some of the photos below — especially the first five — these purple irises were among the tallest I photographed at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens this year, rivaling the height of some of the black irises I posted previously (see Black Iris Variations and Observations). They posed so I’d capture their height and could sweep in their background surroundings — and I liked the contrast between the purple irises and the fields of yellow flowers behind them. Those flowers — most likely a variety of spurge, probably Euphorbia polychroma, or Cushion spurge — were plentiful earlier this summer, and have since reverted to their more flowerless state, still providing a fine green blanket covering large areas of the gardens.

Thanks for taking a look!