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

Category: photography

Chrysanthemum Pastels

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From “History of the Chrysanthemum” in The Chrysanthemum: Its History, Culture, Classification, and Nomenclature (1885) by F. W. Burbidge:

“The first chrysanthemum that ever flowered in England bloomed in Colville’s nursery, in the King’s Road, Chelsea, in 1795, the plant having been obtained originally from M. Cels, the celebrated nurseryman, of Paris. At this time, and for some little time afterwards, botanists had a contest as to its botanical position; some of them contended that it was one of the Camomiles (Anthemis), whilst others declared that it was unmistakably a Pyrethrum or Feverfew, but at last it was decided that it should be called Chrysanthemum, from chrysos, gold or golden, and anthos, a flower….

“Sabine, who was secretary to Horticultural Society at the beginning of the present century, says, however, that Chrysanthemums had been grown in Holland nearly as far back as the year 1688; but, singular to say, in 1821 no gardener in Holland knew anything of them….

“In 1808 their cultivation had increased to some nine or ten varieties, and it went on increasing, many varieties being collected for the Royal Horticultural Society in China and Bengal in 1821 by Mr. Parks. At the end of 1825 the number of varieties seems to have been increased to 48, and in 1826 Sabine writes most cheerily concerning their rapid progress, and of an astounding large exhibition of them being held in the society’s gardens at Chiswick, in which were shown over 700 plants in pots….

“The first sport from the original variety was noted in 1802, in which year Mr. Colville, of Chelsea, sent to Chiswick a pale pink variety, which had sprung from a sort called Changeable Buff. It is curious to note names given to some of the varieties about this time. Let one or two be given for curiosity’s sake: Early Blush, Park’s Small Yellow, Blush Ranunculus, Curled Blush, Tasselled Lilac, Two Coloured Red, Double White Indian, Yellow Indian, Waratah, Quilled Pink, Pale Purple. These names, which in a sense give the characteristic of some of them, seem to indicate that in what are now called the show varieties, which are largely of the strain of Chrysanthemum sinense, there was the same special singularities as are to be seen now….”

From “American History of the Chrysanthemum” in The Chrysanthemum: Its Culture for Professional Growers and Amateurs (1905) by Arthur Herrington: 

“There is no authentic record, in fact, not even a tradition as to whom we are indebted for the first introduction of the Chrysanthemum to America, yet it must have been brought, or sent, to this country quite early in the last century.

“The New England Farmer of November 20, 1830, reports on some Chrysanthemums exhibited before the Massachusetts Horticultural Society by its recording secretary, R. L. Emmons, on November 20, and gives a list of varieties, as for example: Tasseled White, Park’s Small Yellow, Quilled Lilac, Quilled White, Golden Lotus and others, and from the similarity of the names to those already mentioned in the English collections, their origin is clearly indicated.

“The late Peter Henderson was the first to introduce into this country, direct from Japan, some of the best varieties known at that time, 1803, which were on exhibition in New York and Philadelphia in 1864…. By those introductions, Peter Henderson kindled the flame which… gave the first impetus to Chrysanthemum culture in America….”

Hello!

The chrysanthemums in this post (taken at Oakland Cemetery in December 2025) remind me of the plant’s ancient origins: with lighter colors that were originally yellow or white, the typical yellow/orange center structures, and their long, thin petals, they mirror the garden or florist’s chrysanthemums that have been known for centuries, and have proliferated in gardens and flower arrangements throughout that entire time. These plants are most likely hybrids based on Chrysanthemum × morifolium and Chrysanthemum indicum, with colors tweaked over generations so that each flower reveals softly blended yellow, pink, peach, and orange colors. My favorites of this series are the first three — where I managed to capture a hoverfly fully in focus, and where (if you enlarge the image) you can see its exceptionally big bug-eyes, its distinct mimicry of wasp-like striping, and even that it is fetching nectar from the flowers.

We were supposed to get several inches of snow today, so I expected to be out making snow-people or photographing snow on trees — but we only got spittle flakes and “feels like” temperatures in the lowest possible teens. So instead of venturing outside, I went hunting for some “origin stories” about chrysanthemums — and was thrilled to discover and reproduce excerpts at the top of this post from books published in 1885 and 1905 that describe the plant’s introduction to both England and the United States. More fun than snow! 🙂

Thanks for taking a look!

Technicolor Tanacetum (4 of 4)

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From “Pyrethrum” in A History of Entomology (1931) by E. O. Essig:

“The use of pyrethrum as an insecticide was early held as a secret in Transcaucasia where the plants, locally known as Persian camomile, flea-grass, or flea killer, grew wild in the Caucasus Mountains…. An Armenian merchant, Jumtikoff, who traveled through this region about 1807 or 1817, noted the value of the prepared powder and transmitted the information to his son who prepared the insecticide in sufficient quantities for export in 1828. The plant was soon afterwards introduced from the Russian Caucasus into Alexandropol and subsequently into Germany, where its value was quickly recognized. A powder was made from the dry flower heads and an infusion from the dry leaves. A volatile oil is the active principle as an insecticide….

“The Caucasian plant was generally known as Pyrethrum roseum and is now referred to as Chrysanthemum coccineum…. The material made from this plant was commercially called Persian insect powder. In Dalmatia, Jugoslavia, a similar insect powder was produced and as carefully guarded as a secret. It was known in the trade as Dalmatian insect powder and was produced from a plant, Pyrethrum cinerariaefolium, claimed to be a native of that region. It was many years before seeds could be procured to grow either of these plants elsewhere.

“The powder from the Caucasus of Persia and also from Dalmatia was introduced into France to destroy household insects about 1850. Some raw material was secured a few years later and it was definitely determined that the powder from the Caucasus was the best. Accordingly in 1856 seeds were procured from the latter place and sown on September 15, 1856, and the few plants raised produced enough seed to establish the industry in France in 1857…. The industry in France was carefully guarded to prevent the dissemination of seeds to other countries.

“G. N. Milco, a native of Dalmatia, a resident of Stockton, California, and afterwards a member of the State Board of Horticulture of California, secured a few seeds from Gravosa in 1876, which he tried out and found successful. The species grown by him was considered to be Pyrethrum cinerariaefolium… by most of the writers of that time…. Soon after its introduction, Milco organized the Buhach Producing and Manufacturing Company at Stockton….”

Hello!

This is the fourth of four posts with photos that I took in late November and the first two weeks of December, of Aster family members that I identified as Tanacetum coccineum. The first post is Technicolor Tanacetum (1 of 4); the second post is Technicolor Tanacetum (2 of 4); and the third post is Technicolor Tanacetum (3 of 4). The photos in this post continue to show the presence of multiple flowers on single stems with distinct colors — something that’s even more visually impressive when the plant blooms in cascading vertical or horizontal clusters.

When I photographed Tanacetum coccineum at Oakland Cemetery and started learning about its botanical history, I had no idea I was going to discover so much intense coverage of the plants’ adoption as an insecticide — which stretches from its Asian roots three thousand years ago, through our current century.

The development of pyrethrum-based insecticides occurred in Europe and the United States in alignment with growing scientific study of plant characteristics and how to botanically or genetically manipulate them. The excerpt from A History of Entomology by E. O. Essig is noteworthy in that regard: the book is considered a seminal study of the worlds of insects, and the author devotes a consequential chapter to the development of the insecticide from Tanacetum coccineum (previously called Chrysanthemum coccineum or Pyrethrum roseum), covering it from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century.

Essig’s account is one that includes elements of a good capitalist greed story, including secrecy, closely guarded manufacturing secrets, and intense competition to capture and flood markets with proven insect control capabilities that would extend from crop management to household use. These characteristics, of course, align with European and American industrialization, but the extension to household use meant that pyrethrum-based insecticides could hook into the burgeoning markets for consumer-oriented convenience products for which the period between the 1850s and 1950s is economically notable.

In his pyrethrum history, the author includes this 1881 Buhach Producing and Manufacturing Company advertisement…

… directed at property owners seeking to banish bugs from their homes. When I saw that advertisement — with its cloud of fanciful insects targeted by pyrethrum mist — I remembered those commercials common in the 1960s and 1970s that featured animated cartoon insects encountering a can of Raid insecticide, as they raced away from the spray screaming and slipping into comas, fading behind the commercial’s well-known branding: “Raid: Kills Bugs Dead!” If you’d like to see some of those commercials, there’s a collection of 125 of them on YouTube going back to 1948, at Raid History Commercials.

This might seem like one of my blogging amusables, but there’s also a connection to the entire pyrethrum/pyrethrin historical thread: Raid, according to its Wikipedia article, initially used a chemical called allethrin, and allethrin — produced in 1949 — was the first synthetic version of the natural insecticide found in Tanacetum plants. This enabled subsequent development of a greater volume of more targeted and longer-lasting insecticides; though pyrethrum insecticides are still used and produced, and are often part of organic farming because they’re a natural (rather than chemically created) form of insect control.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Technicolor Tanacetum (3 of 4)

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From “Pyrethrum” in Flowers and Their Histories by Alice M. Coats:

“Pyrethrum roseum (syn. Chrysanthemum coccineum), parent of the hardy border pyrethrums so valuable for cutting, was introduced from the Caucasus at a date variously reported as 1804, 1818 or 1826. At first it was not very greatly esteemed, and indeed the flower as it was portrayed in Maund’s Botanic Garden in 1830 is not very attractive; its pink florets are short in relation to the disc and the whole flower rather overwhelmed by its abundant leafage. Some years later, however, a large rose form was raised by M. Themisterre, a Belgian florist, and was sent by him to Mr. John Salter of Hammersmith, under whose care the centre of the flower was gradually filled and the double form evolved. The varieties raised by this nurseryman were reported to be ‘very numerous, various and beautiful and to include shades of white, pink, red and crimson, singly or in combination’….

“From the early days of its cultivation it was known that this plant was a principal ingredient in the manufacture of Persian insect-powder; and its near relation, P. cinerariifolia, was used for the same purpose in Dalmatia. The powder is produced from the flower-heads, which are cut just as they are about to open, carefully dried, and pulverized; and ‘Pyrethrum-powder’ as an insecticide has become of increasing importance in the present century. Pyrethrums are grown for this purpose in Kenya, and were considered a crop of the first priority during the last war, for their value in the control of insect pests and the prevention of typhus and other insect-spread diseases….

“The Greek name comes from pyr, meaning fire, and was originally given to a plant with a hot, biting root, which the early botanists identified with another nearly-related plant, now called Anthemis pyrethrum or Pellitory of Spain. This is rather a tender species, grown here before 1570, but subsequently lost, and reintroduced by Philip Miller in 1732, when he raised some plants from seeds he found sticking to a bunch of Malaga raisins. The root of this plant was formerly used as a cure for toothache; but it is no longer in cultivation as a garden-flower.”

Hello!

This is the third of four posts with photos that I took in late November and the first two weeks of December, of Aster family members that I identified as Tanacetum coccineum. The first post is Technicolor Tanacetum (1 of 4), and the second post is Technicolor Tanacetum (2 of 4).

In the previous two posts for this series, I showed photos of these Painted Daisies where the flowers featured a single dominant color, or the flower petals showed shades or blends of single colors. To illustrate that more precisely, here’s a photo from the second post, next to one from this post.

Both photos show the plants producing more than one flower on a single stem, but those in the photo on the left are quite different from those on the right. On the left, we see the petals all contain shades of the same colors (purples through magenta); whereas the plant on the right produced flowers with distinct colors: one yellow, two orange, one pink, and even — barely visible behind the middle pink flower — one that has purple petals. This variation would not have been a natural accident; it would have been produced intentionally by breeders seeking to develop a variant with these color capabilities. Even those plants that have only produced two flowers (like the first three in my galleries below) show the same capability: they produce one orange and one yellow flower, rather than just varying shades of orange or yellow throughout their petals.

With a breeding history stretching back thousands of years, these color variations depart significantly from the colors present in historically native plants in the Tanacetum and Chrysanthemum genera — which would have been yellow, white, or red (like those in my first post), depending on whether they originated from Asia or the Caucasus region. Blending colors in single flowers, or creating plants capable of producing flowers each with two or three distinct colors, would have occurred through genetic manipulation of hundreds of plant generations where the presence of certain color traits was selectively emphasized.

The plant we now call Tanacetum coccineum (previously known as Chrysanthemum coccineum and as Pyrethrum roseum) has had a long botanical history through Asian and Western cultures, with Chinese chrysanthemum breeding known to have occurred as far back as 1500 BC.  As I noted in the first post in this series, there’s a separation reflecting how differently Tanacetum coccineum was represented in botanical history: it was likely not distinguished from chrysanthemums in ancient Chinese or Japanese culture, and wasn’t separated from the Chrysanthemum genus until the twentieth century, when the names Chrysanthemum coccineum and Pyrethrum roseum began to fade from botanical literature. The quotation at the top of this post — from Alice Coats’ Flowers and Their Histories, published in the mid-twentieth century while these name changes were in flux — partially addresses the name ambiguities (which we’re used to by now, right?). While its names vary, however, there is something common to every accounting of Tanacetum that I’ve seen so far: the use of its chemical components as insecticides, or as the basis for manufactured insecticides, embedded throughout the entire 3000-year period where humans have documented the plant’s history. We’ll take a look at the significance — and uniqueness — of those historical threads in the fourth post in this series.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!