From “Yellow and Orange Daffodils” in The Spring Garden by Michael Jefferson-Brown:
“‘Red’ in daffodil terminology means orange or deep orange….
“The colour is derived from the same pigment as the yellow, the more concentrated the pigment the richer the shade. It has been one of the major concerns of breeders from the early years of the century to produce richer orange colouring. A most important success fifty years ago was ‘Fortune.’ This early blooming kind is still an important commercial cut flower. It was a big jump ahead when introduced. Its pale tangerine orange has now long been surpassed, but its earliness still makes it important. Almost as early is the newer and richer ‘Armada‘ with broad sails as petals and with a bold crown of glowing orange. For earliness ‘Sacajawea,’ a ‘Fortune’ seedling, is perhaps the most promising.
“Many of the most attractive yellow and orange flowers failed as garden plants because the orange burnt or faded in the sun, but now very few kinds offered for sale have this defect. In fact the reverse happens with many new kinds. The blooms open gold and a not very exciting orange. ‘Ceylon‘ is an example, but as each day passes the orange of the crown grows in strength and brilliance till the flower is mature. Now we grow ‘Ceylon’ progeny and such early kinds as ‘Straight Flush‘, and deep coloured ‘Falstaff‘ and Vulcan.'”
Now carol the birds at dawn, and some new lay Announceth a homecome voyager every day. Beneath the tufted sallows the streamlet thrills With the leaping trout and the gleam of the daffodils.
Hello!
This is the first of two posts featuring photos of early March daffodils that all have something in common: their flower petals are yellow, and the trumpets (also known as coronas) are in shades of orange.
Or not orange, but “red” as I have just learned, and you can read about that in the quotation at the top of this post. Botanically speaking, the deep orange that appears in some daffodils is usually referred to as the color red — and the author of The Spring Garden describes how that came about. It’s not entirely clear if all occurrences of orange in daffodil trumpets should be called “red” — but I did wonder if shades of red might actually be present in some of these photos, because they look orange to the eyes (or at least to my eyes).
Using a color picker from ColorSlurp to select colors from the ruffled edge of the trumpet in the first three daffodil photos below yielded some interesting results. Here’s a screenshot of some of the colors ColorSlurp uncovered…
… whose names are as delightful as the range of red colors they describe:
Nevertheless, the red is quite subtle among daffodils with this deep orange color, and only exists at the saturated edges of the trumpets. I may have to take a trip back to see if these daffodils are still in bloom, and if I can find red with my eyes if I push my face close enough to the trumpet. I suppose it’s a bit nerdy to analyze colors in flowers to this level of detail — or so I thought until I realized that the presence of red that is not obvious to the eye means I could have accentuated the color and texture of the trumpet ruffles by adding some additional red color; and that at least one entire book (The Color Dictionary of Garden Flowers) analyzes colors among parts of flowers (including daffodils) with this kind of detail. So there is still much color-fun to be had!
The rest of the trumpets in these photographs read as different shades of yellow or orange but no red. Personally I’ve never seen any daffodils with trumpets that strike the eye or the camera as pure red, but apparently they do exist — as you can see here. Notable, perhaps, is that the distribution of color through selective breeding leads the petals to move closer to white as the trumpet moves closer to red. Absolutely fascinating!
“There is probably no more daffodil-like daffodil than the Division 1a cracker called ‘King Alfred’, a plant so robust it has dwelt in my mother’s garden for at least the better part of a century…. As American Daffodil Society founding member George S. Lee Jr. pointed out in the Society’s 1966 Daffodil Handbook, sixty-seven years after this daffodil’s debut, it remained the most widely grown variety.
“‘Without question, the creation of King Alfred . . . was the greatest single advance ever made in the progress of daffodils,’ Lee wrote. ‘Those who think there is only one daffodil — the yellow trumpet seen in florists’ windows — have King Alfred in mind.’
“Upon its debut in 1899 this radiant flower immediately won over the Royal Horticultural Society’s Narcissus committee with its charisma, size, regal bearing and richly uniform gold tone. That year happened to be the millennial anniversary of the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred the Great’s death, hence its name. Percy Kendall, a grower from Devon, brought the flower to the committee, but Percy had not bred this flower; his father, John Kendall, a daffodil enthusiast and former solicitor who died nine years earlier, had. John was well known in the daffodil world and for the committee members, seeing ‘King Alfred’ must have been like meeting a ghost….”
Beyond the church whose pitted spire Seems balanced on a strand Of swaying stone and tottering brick Two roofless ruins stand, And here behind the wreckage where the back wall should have been We found a garden green.
The grass was never trodden on, The little path of gravel Was overgrown with celandine, No other folk did travel Along its weedy surface, but the nimble-footed mouse Running from house to house.
So all among the vivid blades Of soft and tender grass We lay, nor heard the limber wheels That pass and ever pass In noisy continuity until their very rattle Seems in itself a battle.
At length we rose up from this ease Of tranquil happy mind, And searched the garden’s little length A fresh pleasaunce to find; And there some yellow daffodils And jasmine hanging high Did rest the tired eye….
About half of the photos in this post were taken here…
… where the plants seemed perfectly happy to cling to a damp, steep, leaf-filled hill.
I took this group of photos from the sidewalk at the bottom of the hill — which you can see in the lower right corner — having discovered that I couldn’t stand on the hill and lean in to take close-up photos without tipping over. It’s steeper than it looks in the photo and was still soggy from the previous day’s thunderstorms. That I couldn’t get physically closer to the flowers (praise be the zoom lens!) got me thinking about something: after long, drenching rains, why didn’t the plants just let loose and tumble down the hill? Of course they have roots, but I puzzled on the possibility that there was something about daffodils that might make them resilient enough to stick-put despite relentless assaults from the clouds.
So — as one does! — I approached my research assistant with a tentative question: “I recently took some photographs of daffodils growing on the side of a steep hill…. I couldn’t help but wonder how they manage to stay in place there, especially since we’d had a lot of recent rain. What keeps them from just detaching from the soil and falling down the hill?”
To wit (or “to which”), Claude responded with a nice overview of the daffodil’s special skills:
Daffodils have an impressive ability to anchor themselves on steep slopes through several adaptations:
Their bulb and root system is their primary anchor. Daffodil bulbs are surrounded by fibrous roots that spread outward and downward, creating a network that grips the soil effectively. The bulb itself can work its way deeper into the soil over time through contractile roots — specialized roots that can contract and literally pull the bulb deeper into the ground.
The bulb shape is also advantageous on slopes. Rather than being perfectly round, daffodil bulbs are somewhat elongated and pointed at the top, which helps them wedge into soil crevices. This teardrop shape provides stability against downward forces.
Over time, daffodils naturalize by producing offsets (daughter bulbs) that grow adjacent to the parent bulb. These create dense clumps with intertwined root systems that significantly increase their collective anchoring power — essentially forming natural retaining structures within the soil…. Their strong, fibrous stems can flex without breaking during wind or rain.
The ability to grow successfully on steep terrain is actually one reason daffodils have been so successful both in the wild and in garden settings. Their effective anchoring system allows them to colonize areas that many other plants cannot, giving them an ecological advantage.
So the next time you plant or transplant some daffodils (or look at some pictures of daffodil roots), you will now know that their root system is “designed” to cling to soil on a hill, and that little cluster of bulbs that look a bit like radishes have their own job to do, acting as anchors to protect the plant by holding it in place.
This variety produces smaller flowers than those in my first post — though as you can see from these daffodils of the future, they’re still in their early stages of growing and blooming…
… and I’m sure I’ll make another trip back to the gardens to see how they’re progressing.
The rest of the daffodils are from the side of this walkway, where they’re being used as border plants so pollinators (and photographers) can get to them easily by ambling down the brick path.
“All wild daffodil species have now been used by daffodil breeders to produce the approximately twenty-seven thousand registered varieties, although the vast majority of garden and florist varieties are derived from genes from a limited number of species…. “The average garden daffodil has a big yellow flower with a big trumpet. ‘King Alfred’ (John Kendall, UK, 1899) is the best known and is everybody’s idea of a typical daffodil. It is derived from an Iberian species, Narcissus hispanicus, and if anything deserves the title of “ur-daffodil,” it is this. Narcissus hispanicus is a splendid plant, sturdy, richly coloured, early, and free-flowering. Only its distinctive perianth segments mark it out, as they are narrow and twisted — elegant but unlike the solid background for the trumpet we are used to. ‘King Alfred’ is a good example of [a Trumpet Daffodil], where each stem has a single flower where the length of the cup (i.e., the trumpet) is greater than or equal to the length of the perianth segments.
“Any cursory look at a collection of daffodils or at the pictures above the sale bins in a garden centre shows that there is a great deal of variation: there are white flowers and pale flowers, wide trumpets, narrow trumpets, trumpets which flare out a bit, and trumpets which veer towards orange, or even red-orange. There is often a difference in colour between the perianth segments and the cup… — these are referred to as bicolours, and it seems to be the general pattern that the cup is a richer yellow than the perianth segments. Except that there are some where the cup is paler than the perianth segments — these are known as reverse bicolours.”
Cast wide the folding doorways of the East, For now is light increased! And the wind-besomed chambers of the air, See they be garnished fair; And look the ways exhale some precious odours, And set ye all about wild-breathing spice, Most fit for Paradise! Now is no time for sober gravity, Season enough has Nature to be wise; But now discinct, with raiment glittering free, Shake she the ringing rafters of the skies With festal footing and bold joyance sweet, And let the earth be drunken and carouse! For lo, into her house Spring is come home with her world-wandering feet, And all things are made young with young desires; And all for her is light increased In yellow stars and yellow daffodils….
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photos of the earliest daffodils that pop out of the ground in late February and early March here in the Southeast — where one can find them in bunches adding pre-spring color to yards, along sidewalks, and at places like Oakland Cemetery. The photos in this first post were all taken here…
… at a gated memorial garden in one of the cemetery’s oldest sections, where it’s fun to try and photograph the daffodils from different angles outside the fence, while using the wrought-iron bench or the black steel fenceposts as elements of the backgrounds.
The photos in these two posts are of daffodils I like to call yellow-yellow, because both the flower petals and their trumpets are shades of the same yellow color. As the season progresses over the next couple of weeks, others with alternating combinations of white, yellow, and orange will make an appearance, even as the yellow-yellow ones continue their bloom cycle.
As you can see from the photos, it was an overcast day when I took them, yet the colors are still so luminous that each of the flowers treats our eyes to a nice glow. One effect of the filtered lighting, in this case, is to add a little saturation to the daffodil trumpets, giving them a slight yellow-orange color cast that contrasts with the more translucent yellow of the petals surrounding the trumpets. Overall, though, the bright color is an attraction signal for pollinators, especially at this time of year when much of the surrounding landscape is still covered in its flat winter shades of brown and gray. While the gardens still wear this winter coat, the daffodils and the flower clusters they create are highly visible from long distances to both humans with their cameras and those emerging pollinators that want to get a jump on their spring business.
“During his botanical studies near Concord, Massachusetts, in 1851, Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, discovered a rare, native climbing fern, Lygodium palmatum. ‘It is a most beautiful slender and delicate fern,’ he wrote, ‘twining like [a] vine about the meadow-sweet, panicled andromeda, golden-rods, etc., to the height of three feet or more and difficult to detach…. Our most beautiful fern, and most suitable for wreaths or garlands. It is rare.’
“In recent years, two exotic relatives of Thoreau’s fern have posed a serious ecological challenge in regions of the southern United States, particularly Florida. The climbing fern Lygodium microphyllum, native to parts of Southeast Asia and Australia, and the Japanese climbing fern Lygodium japonicum both entered the United States as horticultural plants for hanging baskets. They then escaped cultivation and became exotic pests. Like many introduced species, these Asian ferns thrive because they encounter few growth restrictions in their new geographical range. They grow rapidly and spread by wind-borne spores that may be carried 40 miles or more. These hardy ferns currently cover 40,000 acres in south Florida and have increased their range 100-fold over six years, surviving floods and droughts.
“Although beautiful, the ferns can be deadly to other plants, covering other vegetation in masses up to 0.6 meters (2 feet) thick. They kill other plants by cutting off the light or by sheer mass, even causing some trees to collapse under their weight. The vines, actually climbing leaves, may be up to 30.5 meters (100 feet) long, sometimes acting as fire ladders that rapidly carry flames into dry, dead trees. Masses of ferns readily break off during fires, carrying flames to new locations and resulting in the destruction of valuable forests.”
From “Fern Frond for John Wain” by Anthony Conran in Poetry Wales, edited by Meic Stephens:
Why don’t I send you A fern really old — Osmunda, with its massive Stump-like bole?
Marattia or Angiopteris — Squat little trees That through the millennia Inched down by degrees —
Dowagers of the rain forests Left to their plight In the hundred yard high Struggle for light —
Or Lygodium, the last Climbing fern — Queens that hark back to a realm Of no return?….
Evolved, sophisticated, Able to hold Its own where it chooses to be, Withstanding the cold
Of our British winters Like any birch or oak. Red leaf burns on the hill. Red dreams turn to smoke.
This fern has no royal blood — Or if it has, Only as much as is green In a blade of grass.
Hello!
Here we have a series of photos of a fern calledLygodium japonicum — the Japanese Climbing Fern. When I took the photos, this fern — one of the members of the Lygodium genus, all of which love to climb and do so with energy and enthusiasm — had crept its way over a section of Oakland Cemetery’s gardens that was about thirty feet square. The amount of fern covering nearly everything in sight was stunning, and its abundance in very early spring surprised me. I had probably encountered the fern before, but it wasn’t until I saw this exuberant spread that I paid any attention to it, and I still wonder if it was intentionally planted there or it conquered the space on its own.
Plants in the Lygodium genus (especially Lygodium japonicum) are considered invasive in the U.S. Southeast — especially in Georgia and Florida — though I feel like there should be a separate category of such plants designated as “invasive but adorable.” Each leaf is no bigger than a dime or nickel, and as the plants unfurl and coil around whatever they encounter, they look like a soft green blanket. Before opening, the individual fronds produce a tiny version of the typical fern fiddlehead — appearing as points of yellow-green light in my photos — which take on the common triangular shape of a fern leaf as the plant matures. The vines have plenty of tensile strength; some of those I saw stood several feet high on their own accord, while waiting for the wind to toss them toward something they could latch onto.
In my imagination, all of this fern-ness was from one endless plant; though that was impossible to determine, which is the reason I’m just imagining it. In the plant’s name — Lygodium japonicum — “lygodium” is derived from a Greek word meaning “willowy” or “flexible” and “japonicum” reflects the plant’s native history in Japan. The excerpt from the poem “Fern Frond for John Wain” contrasts the Japanese Climbing Fern with several others that exhibit more common fern-style (click the links in the poem if you’d like to read more about them), and interprets the evolution of this viney fern within the context of British imperial explorations that brought plants from countries like Japan to Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In addition to giving me a new plant to learn about, these photos ended up being a fun study in differences between what we perceive with our eyes and what a camera sees. Here, for example, are three of the photos from this series as they came out of the camera:
Just to the left of center in these photos, you can see what I considered the subject of the image: the vines entwined on the black fencepost, where they had climbed about six feet above ground level, supported by the post. I took photos at several different zoom levels to get separation between the vine on the post and the rest of the scene. A challenge, of course, was to get the vine adequately focused so that I could make it the subject of the photo with some clever editing in Lightroom, since even the slightest breeze led the fern to try to wiggle out of focus.
As you can also see from the photos, it was an especially brighteous morning when I took them — which accounts for large swaths of intense highlighting throughout the background. When we look at a scene like this, we selectively exclude extraneous information (like all the bright light in the background) in favor of what we’ve chosen (if “chosen” is the right word) to focus on. This can be confusing to explain: while we use “focus” to describe both how our eyes work and how a camera works — it’s only our eyes (or brain) that selectively disregard elements of a scene based on what we think we want to see. The camera simply records the scene; our vision makes choices about what parts of the scene matter to us.
Memory and emotion come into play here also. I remember the scene as one about a vine climbing up a post — not as a vine climbing up a post amid overpowering backlighting — and as a feeling about the vine’s behavior and ability to enwrap itself so high above the ground around something without obvious points of attachment. So a lot of what goes on in post-processing is about narrowing the gap between what the camera has recorded and my memory of and reaction to a scene. One might say that’s the whole point of post-processing, to bring our images closer to how we attached significance to parts of them when the photographs were taken. It’s about what I saw, not necessarily what I photographed.
To describe what should happen to these photos in Lightroom goes something like this: the background brightness needs to be decreased (a lot!) and the presence of the vine on the post needs to be increased. For that there are no shortcuts or automation: the vine needs to be carefully masked as the subject in Lightroom (with a combination of object selection and brushing), then that mask gets duplicated and inverted so that the image is split into two parts: the vine (in the foreground) and everything else (in the background). Once that’s (easier said than) done, the two segments can be treated separately: the brightness, color saturation, and sharpness of the background can all be reduced; the brightness, color saturation, and sharpness of the foreground can all be amplified. A semi-infinite amount of time and several cups of coffee later, we end up with photos that look like this…
… where (hopefully, The Photographer thinks) your eyes first alight on the vine while the background registers simply as location context for the photo, with three-dimensionality or depth improved over the camera’s flatter interpretation.
Here are side-by-side pairs, where you can compare what the camera saw to what the human saw by selecting the first image and paging through all six as before-and-after versions:
And here are three other examples — which got similar treatment — showing the difference between each scene as the camera interpreted it, and how I saw them at the time.
We have come to the end of the words…. Thanks for reading and taking a look!
“Pictures tell a story in their own inimitable way. If a thought or idea was totally understandable in words, we would not need pictures, but the truth is that we depend on our eyes to gather much information and to appreciate the world we live in and that artists imagine for us.
“We now greatly depend on still photographs and moving images (i.e. film) to fill us in on visual matters. As a result, we do not have the dependency on drawings and paintings to describe what we actually see, a function it performed for centuries. Portraiture, in particular, provided a record of what people actually looked like, and was not only prized, but was an almost essential service….
“A Dutch figurative artist, [Johannes] Vermeer’s world is a small and very meticulous one. His scenes are set in two of the rooms in his Delft house, and much has been speculated about optical devices he may have utilized in the creation of his amazingly masterful work.
“In addition to his careful drawing, he is known for his beautiful application of paint. He used an extensive and expensive palette of pigments including ultramarine blue, not common in the seventeenth century. He built the color with reflected tones from adjacent hues.
“[The] very well-known Girl with a Pearl Earring is an example of his extraordinary sensitivity, soft color, and expressive quality. No Impressionist would give you that black background, but it is so beautiful here as it sets off the sweet light on her face and costume.
“Only a small sampling of Vermeer’s exquisite paintings are known, but his attention to detail is esteemed worldwide. He was a unique voice in portrait painting, never imitated and probably never surpassed.”
How long it must have taken to arrange her knotted turban, the exact slope of her shoulder, her face adrift in a vacuum of black space; and that startled look, as if I’d just touched her lightly, teasingly, on the nape of her neck, and then, too late, realized my mistake. Her eyes round out like the red mound of her lower lip; her face circles toward me and away…
This morning I write to you about a face I’ve loved from afar too long, when all the time it’s the black background I care for and stare at, while she stares back, as if to bid me walk with her, into the dark, into whatever she grows out of and returns to; and isn’t this the way I look at you — no more than a yard of air between us, across the inevitable space between people learning to face what they want?
The poem “Head of a Young Girl: Vermeer” above is about the famous Johannes Vermeer painting Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665). This type of poem, I have learned, is called an ekphrastic poem — after ekphrasis, an act of engaging with one art form using another. This engagement is usually a vibrant, rhetorical dialogue between two art forms, a distinction made to differentiate ekphrasis from an ordinary text description of, say, a painting or a photograph.
The two stanzas I excerpted above are part of a much longer poem — seven stanzas about the same length as those above — and the poet, Steven Cramer, alternates seamlessly between describing the Vermeer painting and writing about the girl in the pearl earring as if she exists in his version of the real world. At one point, he “encounters” her in a bookstore, as an image on a card, staring at him — so he buys the card. I thought all this was an interesting way to observe a piece of art, about which we can create a complex description but can’t quite possess, even in its commercialized form as a copy of a famous painting on a postcard.
Vermeer’s painting The Music Lesson is among those featured on that page, and that painting is often included in analyses of Vermeer’s probable use of a camera obscura and mirrors to project scenes he was going to paint on a canvas. The Music Lesson shows several characteristics of the potential use of a camera, even an early one, such as the double shadows behind the painting hanging on the wall above the performer and those beneath the harpsichord, as well as how the ceiling and walls aren’t precisely perpendicular, exhibiting the barrel distortion (or slight bowing) that is common even with modern wide-angle lenses.
If these subjects interest you, Traces of Vermeer by Jane Jelley is a very fine book that explains the use of camera technology by Vermeer and other artists at the time, and includes images of nearly all of Vermeer’s paintings.
