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

Category: photography and imagery

Discovering Regal Lilies (1 of 2)

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From “A Plethora of Plants” in The Origin of Plants by Maggie-Campbell Culver:

“In 1899 Ernest Henry Wilson (1876-1930) travelled to China on behalf of the Veitch Nursery…. 

“It took the young Wilson six months to journey from England to China via the United States; here he took the opportunity to visit the Arnold Arboretum to learn about the latest techniques in plant collection, packaging and transportation….

“Wilson’s first journey was such a success and he returned with so many excellent garden-worthy plants that in 1903 he was engaged a second time by the Veitch Nursery for a further two years. In 1907 and again in 1910 he returned to China, collecting this time on behalf of the Arnold Arboretum. He became so identified with the area and was such a successful plant collector that he was often referred to as ‘Chinese’ Wilson, but his last journey to China nearly cost him his life and left him with a permanent limp….

“It has been estimated that Wilson introduced into Britain between 2,000 and 3,000 different species of seed, and many more herbarium specimens; from the seeds, at least 1,000 new plants have been introduced into cultivation….

“Possibly the most gorgeous is the Regal Lily, Lilium regale, the plant which was the indirect cause of Wilson’s ‘lily limp’. This amiable and accommodating lily, as the writer Alice Coats called his introduction, was first grown in 1905 under the name L. myriophyllum (meaning ‘many leaves’), but even though it was easy to cultivate and sweetly scented, it did not become as popular as Wilson thought it should.

“He was so keen for people to share his enthusiasm for this splendid lily that on his fourth expedition to China, in 1910, he travelled yet again from Shanghai to the borders of Tibet, where he had first found the flower, a trek of over 3,200 km (2,000 miles). The site was a remote mountain valley, and the journey to it was through some of the most difficult and desolate country….

“As Wilson himself said of the route undertaken, it was ‘absolute terra-incognita’. It is a mark of his enthusiasm that he braved this arduous journey again just so that the western world could share in the delights of the Regal Lily. Its gentle beauty and graceful habit absolutely defy its natural home; Wilson recorded in his diary that ‘no more barren and repelling country could be imagined’, but when the lovely lily burst into flower, the landscape was transformed, as he then noted, from ‘a lonely semi-desert region into a veritable fairyland’….

“It was on the return journey that, in trying to escape one of the frequent landslides, Wilson broke his leg. The remaining rigours of the journey, the delay in treatment and the subsequent infection setting in resulted in his almost having to have his leg amputated; in fact, he nearly died. In due course, he returned to America where the infection was finally cured and the leg saved, but Wilson was left, for the rest of his life, with his ‘lily limp’.”

From “Songs of Flowers” by Gwen Funston in I Hear the Song and It Wells in Me by The Poetry Society of Michigan: 

Eighty-seven and ninety-two
    sat together
    listening to old songs
    songs from youth
       memories of dancing
       with long lost mates.

Eighty-seven
    tall and stately
    dark hair turning gray
    crinkled laughter lines
       dressed in muted orchid
       amethysts and diamonds
singing the words
to every remembered melody.

Ninety-two
    tiny and erect
    white hair closely waved
    complexion lightly etched
       neatly dressed in gray
       enhanced by white
singing softly
cheeks slightly flushed.

Eighty-seven and ninety-two
an original bouquet
not seniors, not aged,
    a royal, regal lily
    and delicate, dainty rose.

Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photographs of Regal Lilies (Lilium regale) from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. As you might be able to tell from the first three photos below, these lilies displayed an exuberant mass of flowers, stems, and leaves, so much so that it was a challenge to isolate a few individual flowers for close-up photography.

I had photographed these Regals a couple of times before (see, for example, Summer 2020: Lily Variations (1 of 10) and Lilies on Black Backgrounds (8 of 10)) — where I took the photos from some distance, since these lilies are in a terraced section of the garden, on a grassy stretch above a four-foot stone wall and set back about twenty feet from the public walkway. I hadn’t previously thought about climbing up to get a closer look — one is sometimes unsure about stomping too close to the flowers — but this time I made myself invisible (as Photographers sometimes do) and sneaked up onto the terrace to push my camera into the lilies.

With so many opened flowers, their perfume filled the air and was intoxicating, almost dizzying… and I spent about an hour photographing these beauties, until I saw one of the garden caretakers coming into view and thought I should maybe scram. I felt a wee bit like Ernest Henry Wilson — whose dangerous explorations, excerpted above, led to the introduction of Lilium regale to Britain — but I didn’t get stuck in a landslide or come home with a limp.

Thanks for taking a look!

Long-Legged Lilies (2 of 2)

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From “The Lily Family and its Relatives” in The World of Plant Life by Clarence J. Hylander: 

“The true Lilies… include some hundred north temperate species of large and beautifully flowered plants, of which the United States has a generous share. Few plants are so delicately and strikingly colored….

“The numerous western species of Lilium include the Washington Lily, Lemon Lily, Tiger Lily, Redwood Lily, Oregon Lily and the Little Leopard Lily. The Washington Lily, found in the pine forests of California and Oregon, has pure white, large, fragrant blossoms similar to those of the Easter Lily….

“Many of the native species are cultivated for their showy flowers, but in addition there have been introduced many familiar varieties. The common Easter Lily, grown to such an extent in Bermuda, is a native of China and Japan; its waxy-white blooms hardly need description. The Madonna Lily, a white-flowered species from southern Europe and Asia, is thought to be the lily so frequently referred to in the Bible; its flowers are smaller than those of the Easter Lily….”

From “Lily” in Flowers in History by Peter Coats:

“L. longiflorum comes originally from the Ryukyu Islands, and until the entire lily crop was wiped out by disease, was much grown in Bermuda. In the author’s youth, Easter or Bermudan lilies, as they were then called, were used by the thousand for party decoration, and in the ‘thirties, white lilies, with blue Echinops Ritro, the Globe thistle, arranged in square glass accumulator jars, were as popular as floral decoration as hosta leaves and Alchemilla mollis are today. L. longiflorum, as classic a lily as the Madonna, with its perfectly proportioned flowers with delicious scent, is still an appropriate flower for any occasion.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring summer-blooming Easter Lilies (Lilium longiflorum) from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post is Long-Legged Lilies (1 of 2). As with the previous post, I found these lilies growing in odd places throughout the gardens, mostly on single stems, except for those toward the center below — where their very tall stems sported a cluster of three blossoms rivaling the height of tree branches nearby.

Thanks for taking a look!

Long-Legged Lilies (1 of 2)

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From “Easter Lilies” in Lilies: Beautiful Varieties for Home and Garden by Naomi Slade:

“Native to a slender slice of East Asia, stretching from Japan to the Philippines, Lilium longiflorum is charming, fragrant and decorative. What’s more, it punches way above its weight on the floral world stage due to its adoption as the ‘Easter’ lily, a symbol of hope, purity and resurrection in the Christian faith….

“The large flowers are delightful, with perhaps half a dozen carried atop a stem clad in glossy, dark green leaves. Each long, white trumpet is palest green at the base, fading to white, while the central stigma, stamens and anthers are a faded, buttery hue.

“Left to its own devices, L. longiflorum and its cultivars would bloom in summer — usually between June and August in much of the northern hemisphere. But to perform at its best at Easter, the bulbs are forced. This is done by keeping the potted bulbs in cool temperatures – they need a period of chill in order to flower — and once they are in growth, the amount of light and warmth they receive is moderated to control bloom time….

“When potted Easter lilies have finished flowering, you can plant them out into the garden. Acclimatize the plants gradually before removing the pot, loosening the roots and settling them into the soil. The stem-rooting bulbs may take a couple of years to recover, but should flower at the normal time when they are ready.”

From “It Took Me a Moment to See” by Michael Moss in Minnesota Writes: Poetry, edited by Jim Moore and Cary Waterman:

North on Minnesota 59,
hungry for the company of strangers,
I drive past the barren golf course,
the airport deserted at dusk,
the abandoned missile silos,
Oak Lake and Lower Badger Creek
to the Third Base Supper Club;
concrete deer grazing the dead lawn,
pink Styrofoam flamingoes
framing the Mediterranean door…

On the juke box Johnny Cash sings I’m a Hero,
then Jerry Lee Lewis rocks Great Balls of Fire.
Two migrant workers, a man and a woman,
get drunk on Gallo, forget their food,
their shack, the sound of their truck,
forget their children’s voices,
the reason they crossed the border.
Wheat farmers in starched white shirts
break bread with their huge hands.
A late Easter lily blooms on the bar….

Hello!

I came across a single white lily flower at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens in early June, the blossom sitting all by itself at the top of a very long stem, much of it hidden from view until I walked around the headstones. There were no other flowers right nearby, so it commanded attention — and got me wondering if I could find others hiding out all by themselves around the property. This post — and the next one — feature variations of Lilium longiflorum that I found in odd places, all with a single flower or small cluster of flowers that had stems so long they appeared to be hanging from trees or emerging from shrubs nearby. In one of the photos, I got photobombed by a lily sneaking a peak; if you find that one and enlarge it, you might think the lily is smiling at you.

I’ve often been hesitant to call these “Easter Lilies” — their common name — because it seemed to me that “Easter Lily” ought to refer to a flower that bloomed much earlier in the season… you know, around Easter. So I was glad to learn about the blooming difference between those we see in early spring — typically in pots or vases — and those we see in gardens later during the summer, as described in the quotation at the top of this post. I guess the right approach would be to call them Easter Lilies when we see them around Easter, but use their full name Lilium longiflorum when we see them during the summer. Maybe we could call the summer versions “Lily Longlegs” since their stems are so long, or follow the origins of their scientific name (where longi means “long” and florum means “flower”) and dub them “Lily Longflower” instead!

(P.S. It’s possible that some of these are Madonna Lilies (Lilium candidum) rather than Lilium longiflorum, but it’s hard to differentiate between the two given the angles of some of my shots.)

Thanks for taking a look!

Some Perfect Roses (2 of 2)

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From “Rose Family (Rosaceae)” in Look at a Flower  by Anne Ophelia Dowden:

“This large family is found in all parts of the world, but especially in the northern temperate regions. It varies so much that some botanists think it should be split up into several
families.

“Roses are probably the best known and best loved of all garden flowers. But, though they have given their name to the family, they form only a very small part of it. Much more important to man are the fruit-bearing trees: apple, pear, cherry, plum, peach; and the berry-covered vines: strawberry, black-berry, raspberry. Almond fruits look much like apricots, but their seed is the nut we eat. Rose fruits (hips) are edible and were used in England during World War II as a valuable source of vitamin C.

“Medicines are derived from a number of the plants in this family: almond, wild-cherry, peach, blackberry. The leaves of burnet are a delicate addition to salads. And the wood of some trees — cherry, apple — is valuable for furniture and engraving.

“Our gardens and countrysides are full of beautiful members of the family…”

From “The Round” by Stanley Kunitz in Heart of the Flower: Poems for the Sensuous Gardener by Sondra Zeidenstein:

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees…

this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me….

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring a variety of early summer roses from Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens. The first post is Some Perfect Roses (1 of 2). For the photos in this post, I zoomed in for a close look at some of the details of individual flowers, filling the frames with rose petals and buds.

I was recently amused to learn that what we call rose “thorns” are technically not thorns at all, but the botanically correct term is “prickles” — because there is a scientific difference between thorns, spines, and prickles, described in some detail in the article How Did a Rose Get Its Prickles? Well, maybe so, but rewriting the famous Poison song to Every Rose Has Its Prickles doesn’t quite work, does it?

🙂

Thanks for taking a look!

Some Perfect Roses (1 of 2)

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From Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding by Noel Kingsbury:

“Roses are the favorite flower of the Christian and the Muslim worlds: varying hugely in color (but famously never blue), shape, and scent, and are loaded with cultural significance and symbolism. The ancestral rose, Rosa gallica, may have been pink, but it threw up genetic combinations for red forms early and was stable enough to be still very important in rose breeding. It dominated the gene pool of the rose until the nineteenth century….

“‘Old’ roses flower only once every year, in early summer. The Chinese R. chinensis, however, carries genes for repeat flowering, so its introduction brought about a revolution in rose breeding. However, the repeat flowering habit was recessive, which limited the breeding possibilities in the early nineteenth century, in addition to which hybrids between this species and others were usually sterile….

“[A] fertile cross was achieved in France in the 1830s and gave rise to the hybrid perpetual group. As well as flowering only once, ‘old’ roses were also only available on a spectrum from crimson to white. It was not until the 1820s that the first yellow rose species were introduced to Europe and the United States, but it took many decades before successful hybrids were created….

“The French Joseph Pernet-Ducher (1859- 1928), regarded by many as the greatest rose breeder of all time, created the first yellow roses; his hybrid tea class ‘Soleil d’Or’ of 1900 was the first ‘real’ yellow, as opposed to the wishy-washy yellows of previous attempts….

“Importations of roses from China were frequent during the nineteenth century; often they arrived on cargo ships bearing tea, which led to the roses which were bred from them to be dubbed ‘tea’ roses. Many had a touch of yellow, were well scented, and, unlike the flat blooms of traditional European roses, had a slight point in the center of the flower. This point gave each flower a very different character to what people were used to — and made the flower look particularly attractive just as it was about to burst out — a bud that spoke of promise as well as beauty. “

From “One Perfect Rose” by Dorothy Parker in The RHS Book of Garden Verse by the Royal Horticultural Society:

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
     All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet —
     One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
     ‘My fragile leaves’, it said, ‘his heart enclose.’
Love long has taken for his amulet
     One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
     One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
     One perfect rose.

Hello!

The roses featured in this post (and the next one) played a supporting role in one of my previous posts (see Orange and White Irises — and Creamsicles!), where I got them to pose as background color for the irises. You can see one of those irises in the first three images below, and get a sense of how many many-colored roses formed a border around them.

But with their long and complex cultural history, the roses deserved some attention of their own — so after finishing up my iris photography, I took their pictures too. They all may have been new plantings in this section of Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens, or I may have just passed them by or missed their blooming season in previous years — but they were a delight to see and the combinations of yellow, red, white, and orange colors were fun to photograph. Plantnet identified the roses in these photos with several possible variant names, including Austrian Copper Rose, Wichura’s Rose, Tea Rose, and French Rose — which probably reflects the color varieties as well as the varying flower structures you can see in the photos.

The quotation from Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding at the top of this post provides a widget of early rose breeding history, including mention of an “ancestral rose” called Rosa gallica from which most of our modern roses were hybridized and developed. Rosa gallica presents a simpler form than the roses in this post — typically with a single row of flower petals similar to a dog rose or even anemone flower — but its genetic characteristics made it possible to create variants with other colors, flower forms, and blooming frequencies. In The Rose: A True History, author Jennifer Potter describes this rose as “the foundation species from which most of our garden roses have evolved.”

Now you know a little about the origin story of roses!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!