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

Category: photography and imagery

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!

Witch’s Hand Daylily

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

“Modern daylilies exhibit a wide array of forms. The circular flower form appears round. Segments generally overlap, giving a full appearance. In the triangular form, sepals typically recurve to make three flat sides while long petals extend into modified points. In the star form, petals and sepals tend to be long and pointed, separated by spaces. Segments radiate to six points. Many older daylilies, those produced before the era of wide petals, fall into this category. Some flowers may be referred to as being flat, that is, completely open and spread out except for the concave throat; others may be referred to as recurved, that is, having segments which flare, the ends of which are rolled or tucked under. The trumpet form has segments which rise from the throat in an upward pattern with little flare. These are sometimes referred to as representative of a chalice or cup form. Many of the species are trumpet forms….

“A fifth form is that of the spider, the petals of which have a length to width ratio of at least 4:1, as measured with segments fully extended.”

From The Learned Arts of Witches and Wizards by Anton Adams:

“It was not until the 1640s that the American colonies experienced any hysteria concerning witchcraft, possibly influenced by the English situation at the same time. The first witch was hanged in Connecticut in 1647 and there were scattered accounts of witches tried in other colonies. However, the most important witch trial was that of the Salem ‘witches’ in Massachusetts from 1692 to 1693. Unrest in Massachusetts after the loss of its colonial charter in 1684, compounded by a number of social problems and repressions, led to a society ripe for accusations of witchcraft.

“Over 200 people were arrested and accused of witchcraft. Nineteen were actually hanged, all on the testimony of a group of eight girls, ranging in age from 12 to 20, who claimed to see spectral emanations from those they accused of witchcraft. The girls, including Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam, were alleged to fall into frenzied convulsions if a ‘witch’ came anywhere near them….

“Their convulsions would stop upon the touch of the witch’s hand….”

Hello!

Around the middle of May, I went hunting at a local garden center for some new flowers for my garden, to replace a few potted annuals from the previous year with perennials. That garden center had quite a few daylily varieties, any of which would have been nice additions, and (as one does) I spent a lot of time trying to decide which kind to buy. I had no specific criteria in mind, so I defaulted to the method I use to buy wine (which I know little about): I pick out something with a cool name — in this case a Witch’s Hand Daylily, or, officially, Hemerocallis x ‘Witch’s Hand.’

Plants like daylilies that require a lot of sun sometimes don’t work well in my courtyard, because it’s surrounded by towering pines and there’s a large Japanese Maple that shades about a third of it. But I don’t mind experimenting a little, having found that many flowering plants will do just fine with scattered sunlight and spans of full sun a few times a day. Unsurprisingly, my Witch’s Hand didn’t do much for a couple of weeks, then (I swear this is true!) overnight one night it produced a series of stems (or scapes and bracts) with a few tiny flower buds along their lengths. Within a few days, those stems grew three feet, showing off shapely forms that were quite compelling on their own. Some examples are featured in the first nine photos below, followed by the first bloom that appeared (in the next three photos) at just about the same time a Stargazer Lily opened up in another large pot nearby.

The rest of the photos show off the Witch’s Hand in full bloom, as it produced at least two new flowers every day until late June. As described in the first quotation above, the flower is a daylily spider form (how appropriate!) — with colors exhibiting dark red and burgundy variations, often with threads of purple or blue through their centers or along each petal’s edge. The only thing that would make it better is if it bloomed on Halloween!

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!