From “Amaryllis Through the Centuries” in Amaryllis by Starr Ockenga:
“Victorian volumes devoted to decoding the language of flowers attribute to the amaryllis characteristics ranging from haughtiness, pride, and determination to timidity and shyness. In her Flora’s Dictionary (1829) Mrs. Elizabeth W. Wirt, credited with assembling the first floral dictionary in America, gave the meaning as ‘Splendid Beauty.’ A name with such romantic connotations, even contradictions, seems fitting for the queen of all bulbs.”
When Heaven’s high vault condensing clouds deform, Fair Amaryllis flies the incumbent storm; Seeks, with unsteady step, the shelter’d vale, And turns her blushing beauties from the gale.
Hello!
This is the second of three posts showing black-and-white conversions of the color photos I uploaded to:
“When a garden is ablaze with flowers it is, with some justification, the gardener who receives the praise. But few of us give much, if any, thought to how those wonderful shrubs and trees, annuals and climbers, have come to be flourishing in cultivation, and still less to the people who discovered the parents of the species and hybrids which give us so much pleasure….
“However, if it had not been for the daring and endurance of a small band of dedicated men, these plants would probably be unknown to gardeners today, still a secret from the world in the fastnesses of mountain or jungle….
“[Francis Masson’s] contribution to gardens and botany was enormous. Nearly half of all known pelargoniums were introduced by him, and of the 786 plates in the first twenty volumes of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, almost a third are devoted to Cape plants, the majority of which were collected for Kew by Masson. His skilful drawings and watercolours of South African plants are now in the British Museum. The weird stapelias, or carrion flowers, the popular greenhouse ericas, scores of bulbous plants, and many annuals which are now familiar bedding plants can all be credited to Britain’s first official plant collector. Even though they are familiar today, it is not hard to imagine the sensation caused by such discoveries as Zantedeschia acthiopica (the arum lily), Amaryllis belladonna (the pale-pink belladonna lily) and Strelitzia reginae (the bird of paradise flower), which headed the list of exotic plants sent from Kew in 1795 as a gift to the Empress Catherine of Russia.”
… to black and white. Each of the 33 photos in this color series got (approximately) the same treatment: conversion to flat black and white, adjustments to the red and green color channels to create additional contrast, and a bit of blue color added to the highlights, midtones, and shadows to create some silvery-looking tints.
At the top of this post is a quotation from The Plant Hunters by Charles Lyte, published in 1983. Lyte’s book contains biographical and historical sketches of about a dozen plant-hunting explorers from the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. After reading about the book in one of my others (Flower Hunters by Mary and John Gribbin), I tried to find Lyte’s work in e-book form. There was no Amazon Kindle version and the usual place where I often find older texts — Google Books — didn’t have it either. But I did find it on the Internet Archive — specifically, among their Books to Borrow catalog — which got me learning more about this surprising resource of several million e-books that anyone can borrow, for free, by simply creating an account.
I had used the Internet Archive before, for a couple of days several years ago when I moved my blog from one hosting service to another and lost some images. Their Wayback Machine had a record of all the old pages, and had all the small- to medium-sized images I was missing, enabling me to download them and fill in the gaps in some broken blog posts. Yet I’d never explored their lending library before, but now know it holds about 3.7 million books published since the early 1900s (and through the 2000s) as well as several million older books I was usually accessing with Google. If you are a reader and love books (omg, who doesn’t LOVE BOOKS?!?), you might enjoy a little book-hunting there. Books to Borrow would be a good place to start, with a search by title or author name.
Admittedly, the user experience isn’t exactly whiz-bang, since most of the books are scanned copies of their original tree-based counterparts and the amount of available content makes searching a minor exercise of your patience. There is no app like you might be accustomed to with devices such as a Kindle or iPad: the site uses its own reader for viewing book pages. So you’ll be reading with a browser on a computer or mobile device, but both work quite well. The site’s reader has an option for viewing a book as a continuous, scrollable page — called “One-page view” on the toolbar at the bottom of the viewer — where you can read and navigate the book with your keyboard or touch-screen the same way you would a PDF file. See Books and Texts – A Basic Guide for an overview of the reader.
Most of the books can be borrowed for 14 days, and those 14-day loans come with additional options (which vary by book) for downloading a copy, as described on Borrow a Book from the Lending Library. As far as I can tell, there are no limits to extending your borrowing period (though it looks like some books may have a waiting list, which might inhibit your extension). When you find books of interest that you may want to return to later, you can mark them as favorites, then access your favorites any time from your account page. I was thrilled to find Robert Hirsch’s excellent history of photography — Seizing the Light — available to borrow, since the Kindle version is very expensive and the paperback book is so large it takes two hands and one foot to handle. And as Halloween approaches, here’s a link to one of the scariest (though not for the squeamish) books I’ve read by Joyce Carol Oates: Zombie — an “autobiography” of Quentin P., an especially spooky serial killer.
“I have found at least ninety modern American and British songs that describe flowers in their titles and lyrics. Roses are a dominant song element, whether as plastic, wild, red, tattooed ones from Tokyo, or those found in everyday rose gardens. Other common garden blooms finding their way into contemporary songs include amaryllis, apple and cherry blossoms, buttercups, columbines, daisies, edelweiss, hyacinth, lilies, lotus, magnolias, marigolds, morning glories, orchids, sunflowers, and tulips.”
So do I remind you of Someone you never met A lonely silhouette And do I remind you of Somewhere you wanna be So far out of reach Oh, I wish you’d open up for me ‘Cause I wanna know you Amaryllis Bloom Amaryllis Bloom Amaryllis
The first quotation above prompted me to look around for songs that referenced amaryllis flowers, and I rather liked discovering the rock band Shinedown and watching some of their videos. If you’d like to view their video for the song “Amaryllis” (from the album by the same name), here’s a link: Amaryllis by Shinedown.
“Strictly speaking, Masson was not a botanist — at least, he did not have a formal botanical education. He rose through the ranks, starting out as a garden boy in Aberdeen, where he had been born (in 1741) and brought up, with only the most basic education. When he was in his early twenties, Masson moved south to London, where he obtained a job as under-gardener to his fellow Scot William Aiton in what was then still Princess Augusta’s Royal Garden. A forerunner of the hard-working ‘self-improvers’ that are often thought of as typical of the Victorian era, alongside his gardening duties Masson taught himself botany and became a skilled botanical artist while working at Kew….
“Gardeners and florists have much to remember Masson by. His introductions brighten gardens, houses, and parks today….
“The vibrant Amaryllis is named after Amaryllis, a beautiful shepherdess lauded in both classical and English pastoral poetry. Masson brought back Amaryllis disticha and Amaryllis belladonna.”
The third photo below is my favorite of this series. It was also the most difficult one to cast on a black background, because of the seven stems holding the flower petals up. But — imho! — it came out pretty good, I think.
“The Amaryllis belongs to the bulbous class of plants, and under that name is generally included, for commercial purposes at any rate, the numerous family of Hippeastrums, as well as the Vallota and other species closely allied to the amaryllis proper, all of them belonging to the natural order of amaryllis.
“The first record we have of the introduction of amaryllis to European gardens gives the date as being early in the eighteenth century, about 1712, it being indigenous to the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, where so many varieties of these beautiful plants have been introduced. These were herbaceous in their character, the foliage commencing to die down soon after the flowering season, followed by a period of rest…”
In the dead winter comes a thought to me Of Amaryllis in her maiden days, Threading her way along the winding Maze Of close-clipt yew and stunted myrtle tree — A leafy fortress where her heart was free.
Green was her dress, with billowy skirts that made A gentle rustle when the nights were still; The misty dawn of many a hidden frill Shot from the turnings of the puffed brocade And mossy velvet bound with twisted braid.
Hello!
As is often the case with my posts and their photographs, I went hunting for some new quotations about my subjects — in this case, I searched Google Books for title references to “amaryllis” to see what I could find. That’s where I discovered Viola Taylor’s book of poetry, The Story of Amaryllis and Other Verses, which includes nine poems (of 39 in the book) about amaryllis:
Amaryllis in the Maze Amaryllis and the Faun The Defence of Amaryllis Amaryllis in the Faith Amaryllis in the Shade A Memory of Amaryllis The Passing of Amaryllis The Last of Amaryllis Hic Jacet Amaryllis
After reading all nine, though, it wasn’t clear to me what (or who) “Amaryllis” in the poems referred to. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — poets do like to be obtuse, don’t they? — and most of the poems could be interpreted as metaphors for the life cycle of amaryllis plants and flowers, or maybe references to a person known to the author as Amaryllis, or even symbolic references to the Amaryllis of Greek mythology.
None of these possibilities satisfied me that much, so I tried some additional rabbit-hole digging on Taylor and her books — only to blonk my head against gated research sources (the scourge of the internet!) and very little else. While this may have suggested some (paywalled) academic interest in her, I then discovered that Viola Taylor also published using her married name from her first marriage (Viola Woods); her married name from her second marriage to British journalist and newspaper editor James Louis Garvin (so, Viola Garvin); that J. L. Garvin had a daughter also named Viola from his first marriage; and that that Viola Garvin wrote and published poetry too. All this of course made it very difficult to zero in on the correct “Viola” — even as I thought about paying for a couple of journal articles to learn more.
With the rabbit-hole having expanded into too many tributaries(!!), it seemed best to crawl back out and just enjoy the little book of poetry. It’s available for free, if you would like to take a look, here: The Story of Amaryllis and Other Verses.
This is the first of three posts featuring amaryllis from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens whose flowers were predominantly red, or — with a little extra light or by adding a bit of white — exhibited strong pink tones. I separated them from the mostly-magenta amaryllis (see Amaryllis, Mostly Magenta (1 of 2) and Amaryllis, Mostly Magenta (2 of 2)) for that reason, and it was quite a bit of fun to see how most of these could be rendered as deep red or intense pink by playing with Lightroom’s hue and saturation sliders for red and magenta. It was another kind of rabbit-hole I spent some time in, I suppose, before I settled on whether or not to finish these as red flowers or pink flowers, because any of them could be completely shifted from one color to the other, with no distortion.
Funny story (to me, anyway): as a tyke I dyslexically thought the word “magenta” was actually “magneta” (pronounced mag-KNEE-tah) — perhaps from some formative exposure to the Marvel comics Magneto character. It took me quite a few years to pronounce “magenta” correctly (luckily, it’s not a word you actually use a lot in daily conversation), and even now, half a century later, I still sometimes catch myself reading the word as “magneta” instead of “magenta.” Weird how things get stuck in your head and seem to stay there forever, eh?
