From “Hemerocallis Fulva” in The Heirloom Flower Garden: Rediscovering and Designing with Classic Ornamentals by Jo Ann Gardner:
“The Orange or Tawny Daylily is a vigorous species with large flowers about 5 inches across — orange with darker zones and stripes in shades of red and mahogany — giving the effect of a tawny color, preserved in the Latin epithet fulva….
“In Asia, where Daylilies have been cultivated for thousands of years, they are regarded as a source of food and medicine. The flowers are picked fresh and fried in batter or dried and used to thicken soups. Preparations from the plant are used to relieve jaundice and dropsy and to reduce fever and pain….
“In Europe and the New World, the Daylily has always been cultivated for its beauty alone.
The Lemon Yellow was a special favorite in English cottage gardens. Both the Orange and Yellow Daylily were brought to the New World during the 17th century and widely cultivated across the land. The more vigorous Orange Daylily remains a faithful signpost to many heirloom plant collectors, who know that where it grows, an old garden cannot be far away.
“Until the late 19th century, only these two species were grown in America. By 1860 a double form of the Orange — crowded with petals — was introduced from Japan, where it had been noticed by European travelers since about 1712…. In 1897 a new Orange, ‘Maculata’, was added to the pool of Daylilies, offering later bloom and larger flowers with a deep bronze patch on each petal….
“By the 1920s, America had become the leading center for hybridization, the goal being the creation of ever-new types with larger flowers of diverse forms — wavy, frilled petals, for instance — an expanded color range, and a longer blooming period. The old Orange, naturalized along roadsides across the country, was one of the leading contributors to the breeding process….”
Hello!
This is another one of my favorite daylilies to photograph at Oakland Cemetery — which is probably something I can say about all the daylilies that I’ve ever photographed as well as those I haven’t photographed yet, but will.
It’s been three years since I dwelled with this particular batch of flowers. The last time was in 2022 (see Summer Daylilies (2 of 3): Double-Double Orange-Orange), when I determined that they were a double form of a more common yellow/orange daylily called Hemerocallis fulva.
Here’s where they live:
This is an especially distinctive space among the many distinctive spaces throughout Oakland Cemetery, notable for much more than the orange double daylilies standing tall at the back. When I took this photograph, the steel chain was in place to discourage entry; but in the past, it’s been accessible (note how there’s a rust stain on the top step, where they chain often sets) so I’ve walked up the steps and sat on the stone bench at the right of the photo.
From that position, the space demonstrates how it’s so unique. The use of grass throughout the space is unusual; and that, along with the placement of shrubs and trees around the edges, creates a sense of visual and auditory isolation from the rest of the property. That your sight is contained within its boundaries, and external sounds are effectively muffled to near silence, actually mirrors the design of the entire cemetery, with its acreage surrounded by hefty brick walls that separate you from the busy streets outside. It’s like a microcosm of the rest of the cemetery, one with its own independent architecture. And that architecture includes the use of plants whose appearance will vary with the seasons, since much of the greenery you see here will exhibit rich fall color in October and November.
Many of the designed plots at Oakland Cemetery contain elaborate sculptured memorials — statues, mausoleums, or other structures representing the people memorialized there and aspects of their lives. Note, however, this one contains only a single memorial stone (right in front of the daylilies) — which doesn’t necessarily convert the square into a straightforward garden, but suggests that its designers favored the creation of a contemplative space rather than a simple (or even complex) memorial. From the bench, there’s a sense of peace that unfolds while you sit there — one that is still quite powerful even if you can only observe it from the outside.
Some of the irises I photographed for my iris project made an appearance here a few weeks earlier, their remnants visible among the green leaves surrounding the daylilies. This daylily cultivar may have been bred to increase its height (while doubling its petal production), as some of its stems extend nearly four feet above ground. This was convenient for The Photographer, who — unwilling to jump the chain and invade the space (this time anyway) — used a zoom lens from outside positions to get a closer look at the flowers.
With a zoom lens and limited sight lines, I had to take whatever lighting conditions I could get, which meant that some of the flowers had a lot of sunlight on them when I took their pictures. The effect — which I didn’t notice until I got home — was that the saturated orange from the flowers combined with the yellow that is natural to sunlight caused the flower petals to act like reflectors casting yellow and orange throughout the entire scene. The effect is similar to results you could intentionally achieve in a photography studio, using a yellow or gold reflector to bounce light from the reflector onto your subject.
This level of warmth in an image of orange flowers isn’t necessarily wrong, nor is it uncommon. See, for example, all these images of double orange daylilies that display similar colors throughout the subjects and backgrounds. But I knew — from what we like to call “real life” — that while the stone behind the flower could have been that sandy brown color, it wasn’t. Much of the stone near these flowers was typical of Oakland Cemetery’s stonework: it’s gray to very light blue, with textures that alternate between the two colors. The leaves, too, didn’t seem quite correct; they should have been a more unadulterated green than the yellow-green in this image.
So these two characteristics of the image told me that some color correction was appropriate, to more accurately represent the colors that I saw. In this case, only a simple white balance adjustment coupled with reducing orange and yellow saturation a smite or two was necessary to remove the color cast, clarify the colors, and create better contrast between the blue-gray stone, the green leaves, and the star of the scene: the daylily’s rich orange.
When I last photographed these daylilies in 2022, this was the only family of them on the property. This year, however, I subsequently stumbled across another colony whose flowers were close to eye level and weren’t visitor-inhibited. That enabled me to get some much closer shots of individual flower blossoms and a few photogenic groupings, which I’ll feature in the next post.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
