“Lantana have been long in cultivation, and it is difficult to refer the garden forms to botanical species. The species themselves are confusing. Most of the garden kinds are of the L. Camara type….
“In recent years, a strain of very dwarf varieties has become popular as border plants. The lantanas are free-flowering in winter and summer, but an odor of foliage and flowers that is disagreeable to many persons prevents them from popular use as cut flowers. They are very useful in window-gardens and the dwarf kinds make good subjects for hanging baskets….
“From the window they may be transferred to the open in summer, where they bloom profusely.”
The botanical confusion allusion in my quotation from the Cyclopedia above made its way into my researching around the web for quotes about lantana. The short version of the story, which I finally got a handle on, is this: the plant’s colloquial name as lantana was co-opted from the name of an unrelated plant — viburnum lantana — and older books will sometimes refer to garden or wildwood lantana as viburnum instead of lantana. And, to stumble my brain even a bit more, garden lantana is a member of the verbena family of plants — and some references in historical sources simply refer to lantana as verbena, especially references to wilder variations as opposed to varieties cultivated for gardens.
Make sense? haha! If it’s in someone’s garden, and it looks like my photos, it’s lantana camara. If not, it’s not!
“Lantana is the saving grace of the fall borders. The dark leaves keep their color until frost, and the flowers bloom on and on. I noticed that butterflies return to them again and again, after short trips to other flowers.”
“For late summer I depend on lantana to fill in the gaps left by the earlier perennials that have finished blooming. It blooms best when the nights are cool, and comes into its own when its fresh foliage and gay flowers are most needed. Some years it blooms until Thanksgiving….
“Some people dislike the gaudy orange and pink that is the characteristic color of the flowers, but by choosing among plants already in bloom, you can get a creamy white, a clear cool yellow, and a very good pink….
“Lantana grows very fast and needs plenty of room to spread for it takes up at least three or four feet by the end of the season. If it is grown from seed, they should be sown under glass in February.”
Hello!
This is the first of four posts featuring photos of several lantana plants in my garden, taken in August through mid-September. Mine don’t usually bloom through November, but may — if October isn’t too cold — push out a few new blooms until Halloween, after which I cut it back to nearly ground level then patiently wait until spring for the first appearance of tiny leaves on its very stiff and woody stems. Cutting it back is probably optional — and some gardeners don’t even recommend that — but I always prune mine to control its rapid and potentially explosive spread… and it doesn’t seem to mind!
Of the photos that will appear in this series, those in the galleries below show the smallest of the blooms, wee pinwheel shapes about an inch in diameter, demonstrating the flowers’ unique symmetry.
“Study a book on wild flowers… or for that matter walk out into the woods and fields, and you wonder why you go to the trouble of sowing seed, ordering plants, when the countryside is alive with flowers that are identical with or sometimes superior to their domesticated cousins.
“Wild flowers are never vulgar. [They] have an elegance and restraint to their design that ought to give the hybridists pause as they go about their work….”
Hello!
So I went exploring for a little fall color yesterday, but unsurprisingly found that it’s way too early for any of the trees to have started that transition here. Yet I was just as happy to come across a nice big batch of late-summer/early-fall blooming wildflowers … all busy attending to bees and butterflies going about their pollinating business. The galleries below include the images I took, a variety of different colored blooms followed by pictures of a particular butterfly that seemed to like posing (though not sitting still!) for the camera.
“The hydrangea, with good reason, has always been a favorite inmate of the garden. It is true, that in the old days we had only Hydrangea Hortensia; but it had several places in the garden and a big one in the heart….
“On Long Island it was seldom winter-killed, and it may now be considered a hardy plant in the latitude of New York City, except in an unusually cold winter. The plant itself is rarely winter-killed. The buds on last season’s grown, however, are sometimes either killed or badly injured as to destroy the bloom; for it is on this growth that we depend for flowers. It was a more or less common practice, therefore, to drive stakes around the plant on the approach of winter, and cover the plants loosely with dead leaves when the ground began to freeze hard, but not before….
“With a simple protection of this kind, all the Japanese hydrangeas might be grown considerably north of New York.”
“The garden hydrangea was named Hortensia by Philibert Commerson, who accompanied Louis Antoine de Bougainville on his voyage around the world in 1766 (see ‘Bougainvillea‘). It is usually supposed that the name “hortensia” was after Mlle. Hortense, daughter of the prince of Nassau; the latter had joined Bougainville’s expedition in order to escape his creditors. But it is worth noting that the woman named Jeanne Baret, who had sailed on the voyage disguised as a boy (called Jean), changed her name to Hortense when she settled in France. We will never really know why. Anyway, in 1830 the name was changed to Hydrangea macrophylla (large leaved), by which it is now known.”
Here are the last of the summer 2021 hydrangeas, at least from me. I took a few of my favorite images from the previous three posts and painted the backgrounds black.
With the first day of autumn already in the past and the onset (perhaps temporarily) of some cooler temperatures here, I have only a few more summer flower photos (of lantana) to work on, then will go I-spying-with-my-little-eyes on some fall color hunting expeditions. I haven’t decided yet where that will take me, though I’m sure Oakland Cemetery and the nearby Grant Park will make the list, but I’ll also probably add the Atlanta History Center (which has a large woodland area surrounding the property); Fernbank Forest, an old growth urban wildwood not far from my home behind Fernbank Museum; and the humongous, recently opened, 280-acre Westside Park (whose Bellwood Quarry was used as a filming location for several episodes of The Walking Dead).
I selected the quotes at the top of this post after poking around on Google Books for references to hydrangeas in 19th-century publications. The first one (from a long-running gardening journal published in the mid- to-late-1800s) interested me by being situated in New York City and New York State, which — even in the far northern and short-summer part of the state I’m originally from — has gardens with giant hydrangeas blooming from late spring to early fall. A testament, I think, to the hydrangea’s hardiness and its ability to adapt to and tolerate a wide range of weather and soil conditions that it does so well in a region where summer lasts about twenty minutes.
That quote also mentioned “Hydrangea Hortensia” — which I knew to be an early hydrangea name, one that’s still not uncommonly used to describe hydrangeas, especially the large mophead varieties. As I have written about before, our gardens are populated with plants and flowers discovered and named during the 1800s and early 1900s, and hydrangeas are no exception. I started digging into the source of the “Hortensia” name variation and quickly fell into a Tiny History Rabbit Hole (should I trademark that phrase?) and found that while the story had similar characteristics wherever I read about it, it was not exactly clear which “Hortense” (referred to in the second quote above as “Mlle. Hortense, daughter of the prince of Nassau”) was the actual Hortensia Hortense.
Several hours and many Hortenses later, I landed on Hortense van Nassau from 1771, asked Google to translate that web page from Dutch to English, and had something I’d already expected more-or-less confirmed: the typical reference to “Hortensia” as named after Hortense de Beauharnais — she of Napoleon-adjacent breeding and briefly a Dutch queen — was unlikely since she wasn’t born until 15-20 years after Commerson dubbed hydrangeas with their early European name. Commerson’s Hortense was more likely the daughter of Karl Heinrich von Nassau-Siegen, who did join the Bougainville-Commerson expedition and was the dude “escaping his creditors” by spiriting himself away with the plant explorers. That dear Karl was a fortune-teller apparently didn’t include actually earning (or, I suppose, inheriting) a fortune. (Note to self: if you disappear into the woods for a few weeks, you’ll still have to pay your mortgage.)
Haha! I spent most of my Friday on this research … and of Hortenses and Hortensias you now know everything I know, which may or may not be enough.
