From “Lilies in the Wild” in Lilies by Carl Feldmaier:
“Lilium formosanum (Wallace 1891): As the name indicates, this lily comes from Formosa, where it grows among grass and bamboos in the volcanic and sandstone soils of the northern parts of the island….
“Distributed from sea level up to 10,000 feet, the height of the plant varies according to the altitude at which it is growing: at sea level its stem is 6 feet 6 inches long, decreasing to only 1 foot at an altitude of 10,000 feet…. In the subtropical lowlands, flowering follows unfailingly six to eight months after sowing, irrespective of season. But when it is grown in Europe the blooms do not appear until late October and the rather small, exhausted bulbs rarely overwinter and are often destroyed by frost.
“The very small bulbs, about 1/4 – 1/2 inches thick, are either white or pale-yellow; grass-like, leaf-covered stems of dark-purple grow to a height of 4 – 5 feet, although selection makes it possible to produce plants up to 10 feet tall. Nodding, white, funnel-shaped flowers, 4 1/2 – 6 inches long, narrow throat, wide-open mouth, tinged with pink along outside-centre rib, yellow pollen. Mostly only one or two flowers, long, cylindrical seed capsules, thin seeds with membrane around margins. Immediate germination. Easily recognized by its small bulb, which continually produces fresh shoots enabling the plant to flower throughout the year — unless damaged by frost….
“Because of its high susceptibility to virus infections, it is often used as a test plant. For this purpose it is inoculated with the sap of a lily which is suspected to have virus but shows no visible symptoms. Results are judged by whether the inoculated L. formosanum survives or dies.”
Hello!
This is the second of three posts with photographs of a lily with the scientific name Lilium formosanum, also known by the common names Formosa Lily, Taiwan Lily, or Taiwanese Lily. The first post — where I describe my discovery of this new planting at Oakland Cemetery and discuss some of its unique botanical characteristics — is Discovering the Formosa Lily (1 of 3).
The first two photographs below show something I found to be quite rare on my Formosa photoshoot: a pair of plants producing about ten blossoms simultaneously. Most of the other photographs in this series show only one or two flowers per plant — which may reflect differing soil conditions, their response to excess rain and thunderstorms damaging the plants, or other environmental factors affecting their growth cycle. Given this pair’s more protected space — it’s surrounded by trees and shrubs — it may have been safer from weather damage and reacted accordingly. This does suggest, though, that if I capture the Formosa’s at a different time in their lifecycle next year, I may find more large groupings of flowers like this. The exuberant display is likely designed to attract pollinators from greater visual distances, as part of the plant’s overall reproductive strategy.
Toward the end of these galleries, you can also see how the flowers are sometimes “tinged with pink along [the] outside-centre rib” as described in the excerpt from Lilies by Carl Feldmaier at the top of this post. You’ll see more flowers with pink tinge in the third post in this series — something the plant appears to produce when it receives less sunlight or is growing in richer, more nutrient-dense soil (as opposed to sandy soil). The presence of this additional color is a normal variation among Formosa Lilies, one that — if it is a response to less light — may be produced to encourage pollinator visits by showing them color contrasts.
From “The Species and Varieties of Lilies: Lilium formosanum” in Lilies for American Gardens by George L. Slate:
“The flowers are narrow funnel-shape, with the tips of the segments gracefully recurved, pure white within, suffused with wine-purple without, or occasionally white, fragrant, and from one to ten in number. The purple-brown stem is slender, variable in height from two to six feet, and clothed with numerous, narrow, grasslike, dark lustrous green leaves which are crowded near the base of the stem, but few in number and short below the flowers. The bulb is white, tinged with rose-purple, and nearly round. This lily is a native of Formosa from sea-level to 10,000 feet altitude, where it grows in the sun among coarse grasses in a light, well-drained, somewhat acid soil….
“L. formosanum was discovered in 1858 and in 1880 the firm of Veitch in England received bulbs which they flowered. It passed out of cultivation, but was reintroduced in 1918 by E. H. Wilson. Seeds and bulbs are now generally available from American, Oriental, and European sources in quantity at reasonable prices and the lily is rapidly increasing in popularity.
“L. formosanum… is a beautiful lily well worthy of a place in any garden. The pure white trumpets come in mid-September at Geneva, N. Y., the species remaining in flower until the first frost….
“Seeds of selected pure white strains are now available from various commercial sources. Seedlings, if started early in the year, may be expected to flower the first season and field-grown seedlings will flower the second fall…. In warmer climates the bulbs grow continuously, sending up new shoots which keep the colony in flower over a long period…. The Award of Merit of the Royal Horticultural Society was given to this species in 1921.”
Hello!
This is the first of three posts with photographs of an astonishing lily whose formal name is Lilium formosanum, also known by the common names Formosa Lily, Taiwan Lily, or Taiwanese Lily.
“Formosanum” in the plant’s species name reflects its discovery and its native location: the country of Taiwan was primarily known in the West as Formosa until the post-World War II era, after which “Formosa” declined in use in favor of “Taiwan.” As is often the case with the scientific names of plants, though, the designated species name Lilium formosanum wasn’t changed; but botanical literature would evolve to reflect the political realities by treating Formosa Lily, Taiwan Lily, or Taiwanese Lily all as informal synonyms for the same plant.
On July 17, I was at Oakland Cemetery photographing a variety of midsummer bloomers — including anemone, amaryllis, crinum, early zinnias, and many of the Japanese Show Lilies for my last three posts (see, for example, Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (3 of 3)) when I came upon these new plantings. Here’s the first photograph I took:
This is not a particularly good photograph simply because the sun was too bright to properly separate the foreground from the background and clearly show one of these plants’ most distinctive features: their height. Lucky for me, though, all I had to do was turn around to find additional plantings, where the plants were growing against a shaded background provided by numerous trees. Here their height is even more apparent and now you can see their incoming flower buds, each one a long, bright yellow oval glowing in the filtered light:
Given how much of my photography takes place at Oakland, it might seem surprising that I keep discovering new species. But the cemetery is in year seven of a 20-year, $43.5 million renovation plan, which is so comprehensive that it includes architectural and structural changes, as well as the rejuvenation of and often addition to its existing landscaping. Click the first image below if you’d like to see the entire timeline; this project started in 2018 and extends through 2037.
So for this rather obsessive botanical photographer, the ongoing renovations mean that — in addition to natural changes that occur in dynamic gardens like those at Oakland — I can often encounter newly established plantings of species I’ve never seen before from one season to the next. I can even pretend to be one of those intrepid Victorian naturalists, don my floppy hat and sport my camera, slink and shoot among the flora, then return home to scour various sites and libraries to identify and learn more about the plants.
That, of course, is exactly what I did with these Formosas, and how I learned about its unique capabilities (like those I excerpted from George Slate’s book at the top): its adaptability to multiple soil and lighting conditions; its ability to reach and maintain substantial heights and even weather thunderstorms; and — importantly for my discovery — the fact that it can achieve this growth in the same year it’s planted. I can hardly wait to see how it expands its territory in the next year or two of its lifecycle.
I wasn’t sure how long it took these lilies to bloom, though, so I had planned to go back in about two weeks from July 17th and check on their growth. Summer thunderstorms intervened, keeping me away for longer than that; but I got a second look at them about three weeks later, on August 9. On that date, some of the plants had indeed been damaged by the storms, but most showed the strength and resilience that’s typical of these lilies, many now standing nearly six feet tall, with long, nodding blooms spread across their tops. The first two photos in the galleries below provide a wide-angle view of about 15 plants at the intersection I show above; the rest (and those in my second post) are from both locations I show above, from various angles and distances to adequately represent all this lily plant’s characteristics.
In the third post in this series, I’ll show these same lilies in a different location, where they’re tucked near an Oakland pond and surrounded by ferns. The three posts together demonstrate yet another characteristic of this lily: its ability to thrive in a variety of conditions that other lilies would find intimidating. These three locations show the lily capable of excelling in: full-day sun with sandy soil; part-day sun with more compact soil it shares with smaller plants like amaryllis; and towering above thick ferns, where the sunlight is diminished and the soil — supporting the ferns — is more like that of a shade garden or even a bog. These characteristics help account for the excitement about this lily in the quotation at the top of this post, especially given that the lily achieves this level of growth in the very same year its bulbs are planted or its seeds are sown.
“In nineteenth-century New York, Boston, and Atlanta, the provision of burial places was another new municipal service that local governments were forced to provide as a result of their burgeoning populations. The dead became too numerous to be buried in the churchyards that had served colonial-era towns….
“Boston, whose population topped seventy thousand in 1830, created a model for addressing the burial needs of its citizens. The city government did not establish a city cemetery; rather, it delegated the task to the not-for-profit sector. Like most large urban centers, Boston had its share of voluntary associations dedicated to promoting the common good, one of which was the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The society decided to combine its interest in flora with the city’s need to bury the dead, so it created a ‘garden cemetery,’ a place where the dead would be surrounded with trees, shrubs, and flowers. The place envisioned by society members was to be not just a burial ground visited by the families of the dead, but also a destination for the living of Boston, a place where its residents could come to see a landscaped garden….
“In his 1831 address at the dedication of the cemetery, named Mount Auburn, Joseph Story explained that the crowded conditions in Boston, which is surrounded by a harbor and tidal waters, necessitated the location of the cemetery in the countryside, well beyond the city limits. Because of this, he called Mount Auburn a ‘rural’ cemetery, a descriptive that was applied to garden cemeteries in other cities….
“Other cities quickly adopted the Mount Auburn model, establishing private societies that purchased rural land, landscaped it, and sold the first lots to a wealthy elite. Philadelphia established Laurel Hill in 1836; Baltimore, Green Mount in 1838; and New York City, Greenwood in 1839. The multiple functions of the rural cemetery fit into an emerging consensus among progressive thinkers about the need for civic improvements in American cities….
“Established as a burial ground, the Atlanta City Cemetery acquired greater cultural and material significance because of its hilly location and the course of its development. Twenty-two years after its establishment, with expansions, the erection of monuments, and the growth of a cover of oak trees, the cemetery was renamed Oakland. It had become a garden cemetery with artistic monuments…. America’s larger urban centers incorporated the garden qualities of the cemetery, park, and suburb into their expanding perimeters from the 1820s to the 1870s. It was in the 1880s that Atlanta became large enough to support these developments, and Oakland Cemetery led the way…. “
In my last post, I introduced these three photos, which show where the Japanese Lilies are located:
The photos show the kind of integration — across history, culture, landscape design, botany, and historical memory — that was common during the rise of Victorian garden cemeteries in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century. The entire plot is bounded by a short concrete wall on all sides, one that separates the space from those surrounding it yet still provides visual and physical access to the family memorial from any direction. More than one structure is present within the plot’s boundaries, a common occurrence in spaces like this. In this case, though, the bell-shaped monument has a ragged break at the top — one that wasn’t caused by aging but was sculpted that way, probably to represent a life cut short. The presence of grass, ferns, shrubs, and flowers within the same space softens the appearance of the monument’s more harsh stone structures, creating calming shadows while adding contrasting colors to its other visual characteristics. These elements all come together as staging for a story and a history, one that is simultaneously a narrative containing family memory while potentially indicating a family tragedy.
This space actually memorializes members of two families related by marriage — that of Daniel Dougherty and Patrick Connely, who both died in 1851, so it’s likely that the tall monument was constructed and erected around that time. The Dougherty name is inscribed on one side of the monument; the Connely name on another. Connely died of natural causes but Dougherty was murdered by a perpetrator who was never identified — an event that lends credence to the idea that the broken monument represents a tragic circumstance. The inscriptions on the broken monument are no longer legible, so this may be speculation on my part; but even if I’m wrong, you can see how interpreting a historical space while recognizing the symbolism of something like a broken structure can lead to reasonable conclusions about its original intended meaning.
You can read a bit more about Dougherty here, and Connely here; and read about the family relationship on Oakland’s Irish Resident’s page. The square building to the right of the monument is not part of the Dougherty-Connely memorial, but is that of Timothy Burke, another Irish immigrant to Atlanta who’s also mentioned on the same Irish resident’s page. It’s quite common — especially in this old section of the cemetery, its Original Six Acres established in 1850 — for memorial spaces to appear to merge from certain angles simply because they’re so close to each other, which was perhaps another reason the Dougherty-Connely section has boundaries defined with a wall.
These three photos also illustrate another defining principle of garden or rural cemeteries: their blend of constructed and natural elements that were intentionally planned to combine the two. The movements that created this element blending — which started with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston — evolved from a confluence of several emergent nineteenth-century concerns: rapidly growing populations in U.S. cities and the resulting need to expand cemeteries; backlash towards the unrelenting effects of capitalist progress and its effects on the environment; and rising worries about how urban centers detached human beings from the natural world.
Garden cemeteries like Mount Auburn or Oakland — often called “rural cemeteries” to reflect their design rather than their location — were proposed and developed with these concerns in mind. They were created as memorial spaces that served multiple purposes simultaneously, including that of providing a resource for living residents to explore history, architecture, and nature not far from their homes. The compressed history I excerpted from Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery: An Illustrated History and Guide at the top of this post connects Mount Auburn’s development to Oakland’s; and the book Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition by Aaron Sachs takes up their representation of nature and the environment, starting with an evocative description of Mount Auburn and leading us to its nationwide influence:
Many Americans came to see Mount Auburn as a new paradise. Their experiences of the cemetery, though, suggest a garden not of carelessness but of caring — not of gratification but of gratitude. It was a grounded, earthly Eden. Within just a few years, Mount Auburn became perhaps the leading tourist attraction of the young republic, often mentioned in the same breath as Niagara Falls and George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon….
The cemetery offered serenity but also excitement — a sense of seclusion in sheltered dells, but also the confusion of labyrinthine trails and the stimulation of broad views…. It taught the ravishing beauty of autumnal decay, the Romantic pleasure of melancholy. It suggested that the fullness of life could be tasted only through a constant awareness of death. It offered the consolation of regeneration even as it reinforced the pain and anxiety of limitation. It was an asylum, a sanctuary, but not necessarily an evasion. Visitors sometimes came to the cemetery not just to recuperate from modernity, but to rethink their role in it….
Both men and women spent their leisure time at Mount Auburn…. The cemetery clearly cultivated a spectrum of emotions, and it was large enough to accommodate expressions of both joy and grief, but most people at Mount Auburn seem to have experienced a reverent, satisfying mixture of the two….
This embrace of social unity, of a public spirit manifested in environmental terms, of wild nature as a tonic and a countervailing force against a hubristic Progress, was expressed by civic leaders again and again, in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Rochester, Albany, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Providence, Louisville, Savannah, Charleston, Richmond, Buffalo, Detroit, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis, and Cleveland — each of which consecrated a nonprofit rural cemetery between 1836 and 1853.
Taken together, these developments show us how garden cemeteries have evolved to embrace so many cross-cultural characteristics. Grounded in both history and nature, we see why it happens that a place like Oakland contains such a mixture of often-exotic plants and flowers, while simultaneously representing Georgia-native and naturalized flora and fauna within the same physical space. And much of its architecture takes all this into account: it’s common for monuments like that of the Dougherty-Connely families to mirror the landscaping around it. Here, for example, we can see how the monument’s carvings are not incidental or accidental: from top to bottom, fleur-de-lis that resemble the lilies planted at its base are sculpted in stone…
… likely proscribed in the initial design of the memorial, then maintained in historical continuity for the next 175 years. The monuments reflect the landscape, and the landscape is constantly being developed and revitalized to reflect the art and symbolism in the monuments, throughout that entire time.
