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Category: photography

Red and Yellow Daylilies (2 of 3)

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From “The Botanical Characteristics of Daylilies” in Daylilies: The Wild Species and Garden Clones, Both Old and New, of the Genus Hemerocallis by Arlow B. Stout:

“In appearance, habits of growth, and botanical characteristics, the daylilies form a rather sharply defined group of plants known as the genus Hemerocallis….

“The daylilies are all herbaceous perennials. The parts which appear above ground and are conspicuous as the plants grow in gardens are the leaves, the flower stalks or scapes, and the flowers.

“The stems are in the soil or extending slightly above its surface. In temperate regions the foliage of most daylilies dies to the ground in autumn or is killed during early winter and the plant is dormant until spring arrives. In the tropics many daylilies are evergreen.

“The leaves of daylilies are linear, strongly ribbed, and arranged in two ranks that are closely compacted and equitant at the base and that spread gracefully above to form a symmetrical ‘fan.’ In the disposition, height, and color of the leaves there is considerable diversity among species and garden clones.

“The flower stalks or scapes arise directly from the crown in the midst of a cluster of leaves. They are naked except for leaf-like bracts at the few nodes and subtending the branches and the flowers. The scapes are slender, erect or ascending, and branched or unbranched at the top according to the character of the species.

“The flowers of daylilies are large and colorful. In the general appearance of the perianth, six stamens, and single pistil they resemble the flowers of the genus Lilium; but they are shorter lived, in some types lasting for one day only, and the six segments of the showy perianth are united at the base to form a well-defined tube. The flower colors for the different species range from pale yellow through shades of yellow and orange to combinations with fulvous red. In the newer hybrids the colors have been extended especially into rosy pink, red, and purplish shades.”

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

“Sculpted daylilies are… defined by several forms. Relief sculpting is characterized by vertically raised ridges that extend from the throat and project from the petal surface. The ridges may grow parallel to the veins, or they may radiate outwards from each side of the midrib. Pleated sculpting occurs when petals have a deep longitudinal crease on each side of the midrib. These creases cause folding of the petal upon itself creating a raised platform extending from the top of the perianth and ending between the throat and the petal tip. Cristate defines a form of sculpting that refers to appendages of extra petal tissue growing from the midrib or elsewhere on the surface of the petals. When the extra tissue grows from the midrib, the form is called midrib cristate.

“Edges, or the outer periphery of the petals and sepals of daylilies, can possess structural distinction as well, such as knobs, braids, tentacles, fringe, and teeth. Some structural edges reach out onto the surface of the flower giving a sculpted three-dimensional effect.”

Hello!

This is the second of three posts with photos of some red and yellow daylilies that I took during two June trips to Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Red and Yellow Daylilies (1 of 3).

In the previous post, I included this photograph showing where these daylilies hang out and mentioned that I took this photo on my first visit, when only one of the flowers was in bloom. I’ve also included it in this post, so we can speculate on how this arrangement of plants affects both our visual perception of their forms and colors, as well as the growth patterns of the plants and their individual blossoms.

We tend to experience scenes like this holistically, as a single small garden constrained by stone and concrete boundaries. But even this limited space contains a large number of environmental variables, all of which have an impact on the growth and blooming patterns of its plants. If we think of this scene as a micro-environment or micro-climate instead, we can then imagine that factors like water absorption and retention, protection from adverse weather conditions, or sun exposure might vary significantly for some plants over others. We can see, for example, that the plants in the lower left corner receive the most sunlight throughout the day, exposing those plants to the sun for the longest continuous periods. The plants at the right and toward the back left get more shade as the sun passes behind the trees and shrubs surrounding the monument. The back-left plants get very little sun much of the day; and, unsurprisingly, have far fewer blooms than the rest of the plants.

Here are three representative photos from the galleries below.

I took the first two at the sunny left corner, the first one when the sun was out and the second one when it slipped behind clouds for a few minutes. This diminished sunlight shifts several colors from warmer (with more yellow light) to cooler, where yellow light is filtered out by the clouds and blue light wavelengths become more prominent. This is why we see the second photo’s yellow as more like orange, and its red/magenta as more like purple or burgundy — an effect not unlike taking cans of paint with those colors and mixing in a bit of blue. Even the bricks in the background of that second photo take on a cooler, more blue appearance, and some of that blue is reflected back into the camera, contributing to the shift from warm to cool colors. And — as I mentioned several times in my iris project posts — shaded or filtered sunlight lets us crank up color saturation in photos taken in those conditions without distorting their appearance or relationships, so we can reveal an intensity and variability in the flower colors that isn’t as apparent among those taken in the sun.

In terms of flower forms, the first two are more alike than they might initially appear, simply because they’re at different stages in their lifecycle, with the first flower in an earlier stage than the second. A day or two after I took these photos, the two would have looked more alike, with their petals dropping into a similar horizontal position. The flower in the third photo, however, looks quite a bit different, almost as if it was a different variety with a more downward, convex form — one that’s similar to a recurved daylily where the flowers present as more circular and its petals bend downward toward the flower’s base.

While it’s not impossible that these daylilies have propagated their own variants — the number of plants has, after all, expanded over the years I’ve photographed them — it’s more likely that we’re seeing an environmental effect. The flower in the third photo receives far less sunlight than those in the first two photos, leading it to adapt to those conditions by producing downward-facing petals that can capture light coming from different directions. It’s not simply forming an alternate flower shape for observers to wonder about; it’s responding to its environment by creating a form that will optimize its ability to take advantage of its less optimal position in the garden.

It also demonstrates variations in the shapes of knobs, braids, or fringes along the edges of the petals that are different from the first two sun-bathed photos. The production of that fringing requires a significant amount of plant energy, so those that capture less light are consequently less capable of producing petals that incorporate extensive corkscrew-like shapes along the flower’s edges. While the fringing does exist, it’s less pronounced and less likely to appear along all the petal edges, but more likely to occur only where individual petals get the most light.

With this information in mind, you could now examine the photos and make educated guesses about which ones receive full sunlight, which ones receive sunlight filtered by nearby trees, and which ones live mostly in the shade — regardless of whether I photographed them when the sun was out or was behind the clouds.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Red and Yellow Daylilies (1 of 3)

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From Daylilies: The Wild Species and Garden Clones, Both Old and New, of the Genus Hemerocallis by Arlow B. Stout:

“There is no doubt that from the dawn of civilization, in the Far East and in the West, flowers have been sought and treasured, at first for their practical value — imaginary or real — but later for their beauty. It seems to me that those of us who continue to search for the beauty of flowers bestow a blessing not only on ourselves but on others by influence. We have so ransacked the world for flowers that in the more temperate climates of north and south there is not a week of the year passes — except when frost holds all in its iron grip — when there is nothing in flower. Every year the pageantry of flowers starts with the snowdrop and aconite; before they are finished the earliest daffodils and hyacinths appear, to be quickly followed by the tulips and irises. As the air warms so the scene becomes even more enriched, working up to the magnificence of peonies, roses, and lilies.

“We never tire of the progression. The flowers greet us afresh in their season yearly…. Each flower exerts a spell upon us, each has its season, and the season of each is elongated by early and late varieties….

“But what have we in daylilies? Hemerocallis flava, the Lemon Daylily, is not only the first to flower but it is also the first lily of any size to produce its blooms, which open in early June in England. We are then poised in anticipation of the opening of the lily season, and there is no doubt that this gracious, easily grown plant has considerable influence upon us. Moreover this lily is easy of culture and it produces a dense group of graceful leaves which remain in fresh green until their demise in a brief flash of yellow in autumn….

“The flowers are borne for about three or four weeks and have a pronounced and delicious fragrance. Through hybridization, daylilies now come upon us in a great variety of colors and sizes. These variations are not created by the ardent hybridists; rather do they select seedlings which please them, knowing full well that all colors are inherent in the different species and only await cross-pollination in order to be released. It is as well, when contemplating a great range of seedlings, to decide in advance what are the criteria that make a good daylily….

“Apart from saying that the light colors are most telling in the garden landscape I should not presume to dictate the choice. But it is interesting that the vast range of peach, pink, red, maroon, and mauve colorings derive from only one species, H. fulva and its variety rosea. All the others are of some tone of yellow or orange. As the eye sweeps round the garden, it is these yellows and also the orange, apricot, and pale peach tints that are at once picked out….”

Hello!

I found another favorite daylily! Of those I’ve photographed at Oakland Cemetery, this one possesses some unique characteristics that we’ll explore in this post, and display in this post and the next two.

When I went looking for this variant during the first week of June, I found only one flower in bloom, so I guess I was a little early — obviously! Here’s where the plants live, at the base of a large monument, where I’ve seen them blooming nearly every year for the past five years, and where they’ve expanded to surround the statue.

Among the leaves were hints of many more flowers to come, but I went ahead and took a couple dozen photos of the single blooming flower from different angles, so that if I didn’t get back to them a few weeks later, I’d at least have images of the one flower. This post contains photos of that single flower; the next two posts, from a second visit toward the end of June, will show off the later bloomers.

Let’s talk about one of the images, which will inform how we see all of them.

The daylily below this paragraph displays a distinct ruffle around the edges of its petals, placing it in the sculpted category of daylily forms. That ruffle, however, isn’t an isolated element: it actually emanates from the midrib (the line that bisects each petal from the throat of the flower to the edges of a petal) that is raised slightly above the rest of the petal, then curves into a concave depression. This downward pressure on the petal causes the edges of the petals to twist like a partially formed corkscrew, the extent of that twisting more pronounced on petals with higher raised midsections. Note how the top three petals show much more ruffle than the petals underneath, which, by comparison, are nearly flat. The colors in the ruffle reflect those throughout the flower, including the lighter tones that would be visible underneath the flower if you turned it over. In this image, you are seeing the first bloom from this plant; behind it are about a dozen buds at various stages of growth, which the daylily will not open at once but on consecutive days — as its intention is to extend its blooming period (and provide pollination opportunities) for several weeks.

The late morning sun was ablaze during most of this first photo session, except when I took the five photos about halfway through the galleries where the brick walkway provided the background. That amount of light had both advantages and disadvantages. Since the sun’s yellow color aligns with the throat of the flower and its stamens, those flower sections got a nice yellow and orange glow that contrasts well with the rest of the flower. The petals, on the other hand, were flooded with too much yellow light, leading to both yellow color cast across the entire image and shifting the petal colors too far in the yellow (or warm) direction. In other words, they initially appeared to be too red, though it took a bit of color detective work to determine how to represent their colors realistically.

Here’s how the camera and Lightroom interpreted the scene, with only a white balance adjustment to remove some of the excess yellow light from the sun.

The flowers appear to be red, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to present this image as having red flowers (after all, I did call this post “Red and Yellow Daylilies”). But what we’re actually seeing here is a shade of red — which we might even call reddish-orange — that doesn’t reveal the color variations that are present in the flower, because the scene is overpowered by yellow light from the sun. We can determine that, counterintuitively, by looking at parts of the image other than the flower itself: the leaves to the left of the bloom and the stone on the right side behind the flower buds. Even after correcting the image’s white balance, the leaves are still too yellow; and the stone on the right side should be a shade of gray to blue-gray, as represented in the image at the top of this post where I showed where these daylilies were growing.

With this evidence that the colors aren’t quite right, then, we can see what closer examination of the flower colors tells us — and whether it’s consistent with or contradicts our observations about the image’s colors overall. Passing Lightroom’s color picker over the flower petals shows us that they are primarily blends of two colors: magenta and red, and that these two colors are present in roughly equal proportions. This is a much different color presentation than in one of my previous posts — Pink Daylilies and Magenta Colors — where the magenta to red relationship was perhaps 80% magenta and 20% red, so those flowers appear pink to the eye rather than red.

Now that we know the colors need to be corrected — our mental shorthand for this is that the image is too yellow — correcting it is pretty straightforward: reducing yellow and green saturation, and adding a bit of bounce to magenta by shifting it toward red, this shift supported by the fact that the shades of magenta we find are those which are darker or redder than the base (somewhat pinkish) magenta color. These changes affect three sections of the photo I mentioned above: the green leaves come to demonstrate a more natural, consistent green color; the stone behind the buds turns gray or blue-gray; and the flower now shows a proper range of colors between magenta and red, instead of mostly red:

As you might conclude if you read the excerpt up-top from Stout’s 1934 book Daylilies: The Wild Species and Garden Clones, Both Old and New, of the Genus Hemerocallis, the potential for a daylily to produce this stunning combination of red, magenta, yellow, and orange colors is derived from its genetic heritage. While I don’t know the genetic background of this specific flower, most of our daylily color combinations are derived in part from the yellows produced by native or naturalized versions of Hemerocallis flava, and shades of orange provided by native or naturalized versions of Hemerocallis fulva. To that, Stout adds the probable contribution of a variant called Hemerocallis fulva var. rosea — rosea, in this case, encompassing a range of color tones that enabled breeders to essentially mix primary yellow and secondary orange with colors such as peach, pink, maroon, mauve, and apricot — or to produce complex combinations like the red and magenta present in the daylilies I photographed for these posts.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Orange Double Daylilies (2 of 2)

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From A Passion for Daylilies: The Flowers and the People by Sydney Eddison:

“Daylilies are native to China, Japan, Korea, and Eastern Siberia. Long before the birth of Christ, they were mentioned as an anodyne for grief in the religious writings of Confucius, China’s greatest philosopher. By the fourth century A.D., they were being used to relieve physical as well as mental pain. A Chinese herbal of the period makes extravagant claims for juice extracted from their roots: ‘It quiets the five viscera [the heart, lung, liver, kidney, and stomach], benefits the mind and strengthens the will power, gives happiness, reduces worry, lightens the body weight and brightens the eye…. Now people often collect the young shoots and serve as a pot green. It gives a pleasant feeling in the chest.’ In addition, the thick roots were boiled and eaten like potatoes.

“It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that daylilies became cherished ornamentals for the pleasure garden. In a Chinese gardening treatise published in 1688, author Chen Hao-tzu describes a plant with leafless flower stalks (scapes in daylily parlance) and arching foliage: ‘The flower when it first appears, resembles the beak of a crane, then it opens with six radiant segments, yellow dusted red, opening in the morning and withering by night.’ This description still fits some of the old-fashioned daylilies.

“No one knows by what circuitous path these plants came to Europe in time to be recorded and described in medieval herbals…. However they traveled, the ubiquitous orange daylily (Hemerocallis fulva) and its yellow companion, the lemon lily (H. Lilioaspbodelus) had arrived in Europe by the sixteenth century. A hundred years later, this same pair crossed the Atlantic with pilgrims and took root in American soil. From the eastern seaboard, the tougher, more adaptable tawny orange daylily moved west with the settlers, earning itself the name of homestead lily. And during the late nineteenth century, a root or two of this hardy species wound up alongside the porch of a midwestern farmhouse. Here, it became an object of interest to young Arlow Burdette Stout, whose mother had planted it….

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a handful of breeders using half a dozen wild species were producing yellow and orange hybrids. Today, hundreds of hybridizers working with an enormous gene pool are producing a thousand new cultivars a year. (Cultivar combines the words cultivated and variety to distinguish garden plants from naturally occurring species.) Previously unknown colors and designs are now emerging from nurseries and backyards all around the country, thanks to Dr. Stout and Hemerocallis fulva.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of a double form of the daylily Hemerocallis fulva from Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Orange Double Daylilies (1 of 2).

Unlike those in the previous post, where they were planted as part of a precisely designed garden memorial…

… I found the daylilies in these photos in one of the “wild” sections of the property, where several different kinds of plants and flowers live together in a transitional space, arranged and layered for visual appeal. Their presence among densely planted variegated grasses produced interesting contrasts between the bright orange flowers and the green and white or gray stripes in the background, while that grass hid most of the daylily stems and leaves. I took about half of these photos using the gray/green grass as a backdrop, then changed positions so I could focus more closely on individual blooms.

The impressive height of these daylilies meant that they were easy to photograph not far below eye level, so zooming in reveals more of the structure and detail than I could capture from a distance in the previous post. Here we get a better look at not only the blended shades of orange, yellow, and red present in each flower, but also get a closer look at their structure. The layered petals appear to unfold like ribbons, with lower petals terminating in flat or rectangular shapes, and upper petals drawn to a point that is common to many daylilies, including the single form of Hemerocallis fulva itself. In early stages of blooming, each flower has a few upright petals surrounding and protecting its young stamens and pistils, which fold down to the lower layers as these reproductive segments strengthen and mature.

The shades of orange in these daylilies are remarkably stable; you can increase or decrease saturation substantially in Lightroom and still end up with an image that contains adequate contrast, detail, and color variation. That’s actually very common among orange flowers, whose colors — spectrally wide-ranging between yellow and red — are densely packed into the flower petals’ cells. Imagine, if you will, how these colors don’t just exist at the surface level, but at multiple microscopic levels stacked on top of each other. Luckily, our eyes (and our cameras) detect and perceive all these layers, even if they don’t actually register to our vision as multi-layered or multi-dimensional.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Orange Double Daylilies (1 of 2)

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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!

Pink Daylilies and Magenta Colors

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From “Color in the Daylily Flower” in The Illustrated Guide to Daylilies by Oliver Billingslea:

“Color is evaluated by the visual sense of light reflected or transmitted by the flower. The term hue is the specific or family name of a color; value is the lightness or darkness of a color; and intensity refers to the brightness or dullness of a color.

“Modern hybrid daylilies have a remarkably diverse color range, especially considering that the wild types from which they have been bred were found only in shades of yellow, orange, fulvous (dull reddish-yellow), and rosy-fulvous. Today, the only colors notably lacking are pure white and pure blue — colors which hybridizers are avidly pursuing.

“The outer portion of the segments, excluding any contrasting edging, is considered the basic color of the flower. The present color range of daylilies includes yellow in all shades from palest lemon, through bright yellow and gold, to orange; red in diverse shades of scarlet, carmine, tomato red, maroon, wine reds, and blackish reds; pink from pale pink through rose pink to rose red; purple from pale lavender and lilac to deep grape or violet; and melon, from palest cream shades to peach to deep cantaloupe.

“Some colors appear to require the presence of genes for two basic colors; for examples, shades of buff, brown, apricot, and peach are thought to be variations of pink + yellow. Near-whites are found among the palest tints of yellow, pink, lavender, or melon. The actual pigments which produce the colors still need research, as does color inheritance.

“The center area of the flower is called the throat. In most daylilies the throat area differs in color from the rest of the flower. Usually it is a shade of green, yellow, gold, orange, apricot, or melon. It can be very small and narrow or it can reach far up on the segments. The very center of the throat is sometimes referred to as the heart and may be a different color; for example, a yellow-throated daylily may have a green heart.”

Hello!

This is one of my favorite daylilies to photograph at Oakland Cemetery, and I’ve gone back every late May or early June for several years to hunt down this particular variety just to take pictures of it again. “Hunt down” may be a slight exaggeration, since it’s easy to find — it’s one of the first flowers to be seen just inside the cemetery’s main gate.

This daylily contains one of the purest examples of the color magenta that I’ve found among those flowers I photograph, many of which appear to be magenta but are actually variations of light red (trending toward pink), or blends of orange and red. When editing photos of magenta flowers like this in Lightroom, you have very little magenta color saturation to work with, partly because it’s not a primary color (like red or blue) with a large number of varying shades or hues. If you try to decrease magenta saturation directly, the magenta will quickly turn nearly white; and if you try to increase its saturation, you’ll end up with a garish pink color that nobody wants to see. To effect accurate perceptual saturation of magenta, you instead alter the primary red and/or primary blue color channels, using Lightroom’s Color Calibration function. Similar (yet less subtle) results can be achieved by increasing contrast, increasing blacks, or decreasing whites — all of which make the image darker overall but also yield the illusion that magenta has become more saturated, with some loss of smooth transitions between shades of magenta, pink, and red.

It’s a fascinating flower to photograph and edit because of these special characteristics of magenta, given its petals are almost entirely magenta with some red tones, especially at each petal’s edges. This combination is one that our cameras and processing programs detect quite precisely, but we tend to interpret more simply, as the color pink. This shorthand approach serves us well, since magenta is a blend of equal parts blue and red, yet there’s no visible color wavelength called “magenta” in the physics of color. These two principles are observable in Lightroom: if you increase either the saturation of primary red or primary blue, the magenta color in these petals intensifies by about the same amount. And if you decrease primary red saturation and increase primary blue saturation by the same relative amounts (say -100% red and +100% blue), you arrive at exactly the same magenta color you started with.

Yet in natural light, even magenta’s limited saturation range responds quite differently to sunlight versus shade. Note how the left image below — taken when the sun was out — looks so different from the image on the right, taken when the sun went behind the clouds. The effect of additional sunlight actually mimics decreasing saturation in Lightroom: some of the magenta color shifts toward very light pink or even white because of the floodlighting effect of the sun, while the shaded version retains the saturation that was evident in the flowers in real life.

This is not to say that the version on the left is more accurate than the one on the right. Both are correct but reflect different lighting conditions, even if one version might be more appealing to some people than the other. I typically prefer images like the one on the right — taken in the shade — because I like the color rendition better, but, more importantly, limited sunlight reveals all the color and texture variations the flower presents. The flower’s minute details aren’t overpowered by the sun and color contrasts (like those of the yellow throat and the green heart) are much more precise. Especially with daylilies, though, you can’t wait too long for your favored lighting conditions, because the plant always lives up to its name, and its flowers disappear in a day!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (10 of 10)

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From “Bearded Irises, Act I” in A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris:

“The earliest varieties of irises grown and appreciated by gardeners in the 16th and 17th centuries were likely wild hybrids between Iris pallida, the source of lavender pigments, and I. variegata, the source of yellow pigments. Early collectors gave them various names, some pawned off onto botanists as species names like I. amoena, I. squalens, and I. neglecta. Each represented a relatively distinct color group, but the variation seen between clones was highly suggestive of their hybrid constitution. These seed-grown bearded irises were variously distributed across European gardens from the mid-17th century on. It wasn’t until the 1820s, when Parisian nurseryman Paul de Bure raised and named hundreds of seedlings, that the movement to popularize bearded irises gained a footing; ‘Buriensis’ (c. 1822) was his first introduction….

“By the 1870s the bearded iris fascination had crossed the English Channel, and early enthusiasts like Peter Barr were leading the production of new varieties in the British Isles. It was in the 1890s that many breeders, churning out dozens of new varieties each year, began to wonder if they’d reached the limit of the bearded iris’s potential. One of these was Sir Michael Foster, a professor of physiology at Cambridge and by all accounts among the most esteemed iris connoisseurs of his day. Foster grew and experimented with all irises, including oncocyclus irises from the Mideast and spurias….

“The American interest in bearded irises originated with diploids. Bertrand Farr, a music shop owner from Pennsylvania, imported Peter Barr’s entire collection (over 100 cultivars) and established a nursery near Wyomissing in the early 1900s….

“As America was catching the initial round of bearded iris fever, a schoolmaster from Godalming, U.K., was feverishly making crosses of his own. William Rickatson Dykes is the undisputed godfather of the genus, a position he earned partly through his association with Sir Michael Foster, a friendship begun at Cambridge while Dykes was a student there. Upon Foster’s death, Dykes inherited, by way of a mutual friend, copies of his predecessor’s notes and garden records, and like Foster, he bravely ventured into all sorts of deep and muddy waters with his experimental crosses between diploids and tetraploids and dwarf and tall species….

“Dykes traveled extensively to document species in the wild and collect them for horticultural evaluation; in his short breeding career, he introduced 34 cultivars, most in the early 1920s. Dykes died following a car accident in 1925. Two fitting tributes marked the next year: his wife, Katherine, introduced the yellow iris that bears his name, and in June 1926 the British Iris Society created the Dykes Medal honoring the most outstanding variety of the year — an award still coveted by breeders worldwide.”

From “Familiar Landscapes” by Lawrence Raab in The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Robert Pack, Sydney Lea, and Jay Parini: 

Morning’s sudden and extravagant
green seems to suggest the higher
whiter waves of the air, what moves
through the flurry of these
first leaves, floating and falling
beyond everything I am able to see.

Against that brightness, a flock of blue,
a single yellow iris
creaks on its shaft….

How persistently
the eye resists the familiar,
so easily finding itself content
among its accustomed walls,
the expected trees and avenues,
that it fails to see them
and will acknowledge
only what has been changed or lost
or taken away.

Hello!

This is the tenth of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The previous posts are:

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (2 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (3 of 10):
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (4 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (5 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (6 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (7 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (8 of 10);
Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (9 of 10).

In the ninth post in this series, I introduced a “self iris” whose standards and falls all demonstrated an intense, highly-saturated yellow color. As I described in that post, the ability of that iris to produce colors with such intensity originated in its genetic heritage (enhanced carotenoid production) as well as its growing environment (full day sunlight), which worked together to encourage the iris to produce more and more yellow-colored cells. In this post, we’ll look at some other yellow variations, so I’ve placed two representative samples to the right of the previous yellow self iris below to show their visual differences.

The irises like those in the second and third image above are located in older sections of Oakland Cemetery, neither kind receiving the same level of full-day sunlight as the first one. The partial sunlight they receive varies because they’re all located at boundaries between sun and shade, where nearby shrubs or trees filter out some sunlight at different times during the day. Both kinds get most of their sun exposure during the morning hours — something that irises like these are usually very happy about — with those like the second image spending most of their afternoons in full shade.

At the time I took the photographs — around mid-day — those like the second one were already fully shaded. That actually puzzled me a little, as I didn’t realize there were any irises that could do well with so little light, until I came across this brief note in Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia by Claire Austin:

“In very hot climates, bearded irises will flower in shade. In Britain, the only bearded iris that managed to bloom in my garden in semi-shade was Iris flavescens, an old soft lemon variety.”

Though I couldn’t confirm it, I’d already concluded from my research on yellow irises that there was a good chance the shaded varieties were genetically related to Iris flavescens or its ancestors — because of their visual similarity to the yellows produced by William Rickatson Dykes and subsequent breeders. That such cultivars have been adapted to partial shade adds a bit of confirmation to that conclusion, especially since these shade-tolerant irises demonstrate another feature that enables them to adapt to lower levels of sunlight. Their falls — as you can see in the second image — don’t droop downward like the falls in the first and third images. Instead, they open to a horizontal or slightly upturned position and stay there while the flowers are in bloom. This enables them to capture additional sunlight (compared to the droopy falls), take advantage of fewer hours of sun shining on their petals, and still keep their photosynthesis humming along. Their ability to do so well with limited sunlight makes them ideal for their placement among the old memorial structures and stonework in the historical sections of the cemetery — where their heirloom quality fits perfectly with the garden design.

The final thirteen images below show different views of the blooms on a single iris plant, a very stately one positioned at the intersection of two walking paths in front of terraced walls, where it beckoned me to photograph it as well as its white and purple relatives in the background. This iris captures light midway between the well-sunned yellow self irises and the mostly-shaded heirloom irises, something that can be seen in its color production. The yellow saturation falls about midway between the other two cultivars; and its position in partial sun means that it doesn’t have to flood its petals with protective yellow carotenoids. It can, instead, retain and display one of its most significant features: carefully placed swatches of yellow near the throat of the falls, and similarly colored yellow striping edging those petals around an oval-shaped white foreground.

My camera, as it turns out, was somewhat mystified by this iris, and produced a RAW image that was mostly yellow — or at least appeared that way because there was enough yellow to create a color cast over the entire image. We end up with this color cast because there’s enough light (despite a cloudy sky) to over-saturate yellow and the color yellow fills so much of the frame in this close-up view.

A simple white balance adjustment — which removes yellow tint — gets us part way there; or, at least, starts to hint at the contrasting color combinations that are present in the falls. Now we can see that there’s pure white that was hidden by the camera’s interpretation.

This improved view of the colors in this iris’s falls influenced the adjustments I made next: I changed the color relationships to create greater separation between the flower’s yellow tones and its whites, then added some texture. The texture addition finishes the job, sharpening the contrast between yellow and white, and enhancing the fine vertical lines that run down the falls. Here are the three step changes showing the transition from the camera’s original interpretation, to the white balance adjustment, to the final version of this image.

Making these adjustments produces a cleaner and brighter image, but it also does something more important than that. It shows a flower that reflects the intentions of its breeders, who altered its genetics to produce the yellow and white contrasts, and the yellow edging, in the falls. The placement of this yellow edging reveals those intentions, because — as you can see in the final photograph — it’s so precise that it looks like it was drawn there, and appears not only on the tops of individual petals but is reflected or mirrored in the colors underneath the petals. Coloration like this is not likely an accident of nature for irises with decades of breeding history, so their photos should acknowledge the technological and scientific efforts, and examine that in the context of their use in formal or memorial gardens like those of Oakland Cemetery.

With that, we’ve come to the end of this project. Through ten posts, about 300 photographs, and around 10,000 words, we’ve done much more than just looked at pretty pictures of fine irises. We’ve traversed topics like how irises are classified scientifically and into color or pattern categories; how their appearance reveals their genetic history and breeding; and how they adapt to their environment by producing different colors and forms. We’ve positioned them across multiple cultural dimensions and explored how they fit into memorial or botanical gardens; how their presence relates to garden design; how photography, art, and poetry can help us see them better and learn more about them; and how they’ve been observed throughout history as symbols of life’s bounty, beauty, and endless complexity.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!