“Dipladenia is one of the modern favorites in the list of conservatory climbers. The Gardener’s Record [pdf] thinks too much prominence cannot be given to it; for, ‘like many climbing plants, it blooms best when grown prominently forward near to the glass, and perhaps to perfection near to the roof of an intermediate house, with general temperature not below about 55 degrees.’
“Dipladenias are natives of Central America, and belong to the order of Dogbanes, a name given by Dr. Lindley to a certain class of plants, which I believe Linnaeus described as having contorted or twisted-like flowers, with corollas resembling a catherine-wheel firework in motion. To this family belong the Periwinkle, the Oleander, etc….
“With twining habit, and large graceful flowers nearly five inches in diameter, in form like a Convolvulus, and with color varying from pale pink or French white, to clear delicate rosy pink, I know not any more lovely climbing plant for summer, and what is commonly called early autumn. It may be grown from layers, from cuttings, and from seed.”
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This is the second of two posts with photographs of Dipladenia Rio White from my garden. The first post is Dipladenia Rio White (1 of 2). Moreso than in the previous post, you can see “pale pink” or “rosy pink” (described above) that appears in the blooms during their unfolding, color swatches that tend to be more apparent in the second or third blooming cycle — though this is one of my completely unscientific observations.
Did you know “moreso” isn’t a word? Allegedly, I say! When I typed the previous sentence, the computer ensquiggled “moreso” at me as a misspelling, and I of course just assumed the computer was wrong. It turns out that “moreso” should be written as “more so” or “more-so” — but I don’t like either of those so I’m sticking with “moreso.” I’ve already used it in five previous posts, which makes it a word as far as I’m concerned. And, like everything else in our modern era, it’s controversial — see More So Vs. Moreso: Which is the Correct Spelling? — so I think I can follow my own path.
“The large, convolvulus-like, and exquisitely-colored blossoms of this plant are hardly matched by those of any twiner with which I am acquainted, and, under proper management, its charming flowers are produced very abundantly for some two or three months in succession. Notwithstanding that, it is, perhaps, the finest of all twiners which we possess, it is by no means universally cultivated; for in the hands of many it is found to bloom very shyly, or not at all, consequently it has never received the attention which it deserves.
“To insure success in its culture, a light, warm, moist situation and a brisk bottom-heat are indispensable, and where such accommodation cannot be commanded, it is useless to attempt to grow it; with proper convenience, however, it grows very rapidly and blooms abundantly. Cuttings, made of short-jointed, half-ripe shoots, root freely if inserted in sandy, peaty soil, covered with a bell-glass, and afforded a sharp bottom heat….
“In autumn, gradually reduce the supply of water, expose the plants to a circulation of warm, dry air, in order to ripen the wood, and, when this is effected, remove them to a house where the temperature may average from [50 to 60 degrees], and allow them a period of rest, giving no water to the soil during that season. Towards the end of January, or as soon afterwards as circumstances will admit, turn the plants out of their pots, shaking away a portion of the old soil, so as to be able to repot them in fresh materials without using larger pots, at the same time cutting back the shoot to a strong bud near the base. Be careful to have the fresh soil in a moist, healthy state, so as to prevent the necessity of giving much water until growth shall have commenced, and the roots taken to the soil.”
White petals unfurl like delicate fans, Yellow centers aglow in fading light, Dipladenia blooms on weathered back steps, A graceful display as day turns to night.
Autumn whispers through waning warmth, These flowers defy the season’s chill, Their brightness a lingering memory of summer, On steps where time stands still.
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Every spring for the past bunch of years, I’ve gone to one of the nearby garden centers to buy six dipladenia plants. I come home and dig out the previous year’s spent roots from six pots, replace them with the new plants, then set three pots on each side of my back steps. I’ll sometimes choose red dipladenia or sometimes pink — but I especially like these white ones with the yellow centers (officially known as “Dipladenia Rio White”), pictured below. Once they start blooming, they make a nice bright visual pathway from my back door to the courtyard, producing vines that are just robust enough to be attractive and shapely, but only require a trimming or two all season to keep the human or the dog from tripping on them.
I had tried other plants in these same six pots in the past, but have kept returning to dipladenia since — it seems to me — squirrels will leave these plants alone. Any stems or vines they chew or slice with their Freddy Krueger fingernails will exude a sticky white substance they probably don’t like. I don’t like it, for sure; so I’m guessing squirrels don’t like it either and so tend to stay away.
Dipladenia also has a strong root system, even in medium-sized pots, and isn’t bothered by the torrential waterfalls that flow from the double-peaks of my roof during thunderstorms. And here in the southeast, they’ll bloom from April until right about now (or longer, in warmer autumns) so are especially fetching at dusk when receding sunlight catches the contrasting white, yellow, and dark green colors. Late summer and early autumn — when many other flowering plants have passed their blooming stages but fall color hasn’t yet appeared — are my favorite times to photograph them.
If you read the quotation at the top, from the very old book The Floral World, Garden Guide, and Country Companion (sometimes shortened to “The Floral World and Garden Guide”), you know now how to propagate dipladenia in a greenhouse, 1879-style. I don’t actually have a greenhouse — though I’ve often wondered if I could ensqueeze one on my property somehow — but was impressed by how concisely (though somewhat old-Englishly) the author Shirley Hibberd described the process. It would be fun to try it, so if you do, let me know.
If you’ve been here before, you know I often hunt down poems about what I photograph and post them along with one or two non-fiction selections about each kind of flower or plant. I’ve written before — see here and here — about discovering all sorts of excellent books and poetry on the Internet Archive, and how much I’ve learned by doing that. But the Internet Archive (including my favorite part, “Books to Borrow”) has been offline since October 9, after suffering a data breach and a cyberattack — one so significant that it’s gotten its own Wikipedia page: Internet Archive Cyberattack. The organization is still recovering from the attack over a week later, and remains offline until… well, until it’s not offline any more.
Having used it for several years now, I can honestly say that I’ve found it indispensable, and I’m really missing my fingertip access to thousands and thousands of poems. So for today’s poem — “Autumn Dipladenia” — I instead asked my imaginary friend (and amateur poet) ClaudeAI to produce some poetry by prompting it to “write about the Dipladenia variant with white flowers and yellow centers, in pots on someone’s back steps, as they appear in late afternoon autumn light.” After a bit of back and forth with me, it developed that two-stanza poem, which surprisingly placed the plants on “weathered back steps” — which is how my steps look in real life, though I didn’t mention it when asking for the poem. Apparently ClaudeAI has (somehow!) sneaked a peek at my back yard; and I’ll leave you to decide if the poem is any good or not (it does have some pretty good imagery).
From “Question Drawer: Treatment of Lantanas” in The Canadian Horticulturist (1899), Volume XXII by Fruit Growers Association of Ontario:
“Question: Sir, how should four-year-old lantana be treated?
“Answer: The lantana is a shrubby little plant, which after a long period of blooming should be rested by witholding water any more than may be necessary to keep them alive. When beginning to make new growth after resting, they should be repotted firmly into good rich soil, and the top should be severely pruned back. More water will be required as the plants begin to grow freely. Syringe the foliage frequently to keep the plants free from the red spider.”
So tiny, your thin, colored wings, painted pale-tan with blue spots, entire body no bigger than the lantana bloom you perch upon….
Small wings fluttering. you drink all the nectar you can find buried deep inside each flower, long, thin, tubular tongue mining the last drop. Then you wobbly-bobbly fly to the next blossom, silent as a rainbow, seeking more sugared, life-sustaining juice, desire pangs never completely sated, always hungry….
As easily entertained as I can be, I thought calling lantana a “shrubby little plant” (in the quotation up-top) was quite funny. It is indeed shrubby, but whether it’s little or not depends on your experience. Those whose photographs I show here are little because they’re restricted to the pots I scrunched them into, but if you move lantanas from pots to the ground for a year or so, they’ll succeed at filling the available space.
I have a pair of previously-potted Mary Ann Lantana plants in my front yard, which I’ve allowed to grow a bit wild for two seasons since they got frozen nearly to death a couple of years ago — and they’ve gone pretty quickly from being little shrubbies to taking over an 8-foot by 4-foot section of the yard. When or whether or not one should drastically cut back lantana can be controversial in Gardening World, but I’m only about a week away from heading out front and dramatically hacking them close to the ground — sort of like Joan Crawford did with her roses, but without the hysterical psychosis.
“Lantana provides a profusion of bright, cheerful blooms that last from planting time in spring all the way through a hard frost in autumn. Lantana is a favorite of hummingbirds, butterflies, and honeybees, and in warmer parts of the South it may be perennial….
“Lantana likes it hot and sunny and even a few hours of shade will reduce flower production significantly. It is perfect for planters and container gardens but will need consistent watering since it’s a rampant grower….
“Lantana is a flowering powerhouse and uses a lot of water and energy for this purpose. The more you feed and water, the higher your reward. Deadheading is not necessary, but occasional light pruning will help control the size of the plant. Some people find that the tiny hairs on the leaves irritate their skin, but this is nothing serious.”
From “Phantom Spring” by Bill Carnahan in Let Them Write Poetry, edited by Nina Willis Walter:
October came in lavender This year, it seems to me; In other years she wore burnt orange And scarlet on each tree.
She stole the colors of the spring, And put them in her hair; She stole the very scent of spring To April-ize the air!
She stole the freshness of spring rain, She brought the April green, She mixed it with the purple hues That thrive when April’s queen….
The lilacs, ever welcome, Upon their twisted bough, Purple framed in ashen grey, Are frailly lovely now!
The figs are ripening purple As they daily plumper grow, While twilight makes an autumn sky Seem mauve in sunset’s glow.
Lantana on her brittle stem, Beside the rain-bleached wall, Nodded like an April thing In the winds of fall….
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Here we have the first of two posts with photographs of lantana blooms from my garden. This variant is well-known in the southeast, and goes by the name “Chapel Hill Yellow Lantana.” Like most lantana, these baby yellows come and go from early summer through early fall — and I often post lantana photographs this time of year, as we begin moving into cooler autumn weather. We have finally dropped out of daytime temperatures in the 80s and low 90s, and even — like this morning — made it down to the low 60s. No fall color to speak of yet, but the autumn asters, daisies, and mums have started to bloom, so I’ll be out photographing them over the next couple of weeks and posting them as I do.
Lantana — including Chapel Hill Yellow — produces batches of blossoms that stay a few days, drop off then get replaced by subsequent batches. It’s always fun to see the new flowers come in: you look out the window at what was mostly green leaves one day, then, on the next day, see the dark green punctuated with dots of yellow, suggesting what’s to come.
The structure of lantana flowers always intrigued me, especially when viewed through a close-up or macro camera lens. In the early hours of blooming, the florets open at an irregular pace, so — as you can see in the first three photos — a few will look like they have little fists sticking out from the flower cluster. As the flower continues to age, the form looks more like a flat circle, then matures into a globe shape — one about the diameter of a quarter coin or comparable to a medium-sized marble. This transition is a good example of “Symmetry-breaking and patterning” as described in Philip Ball’s book Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does:
“All kinds of systems and processes, involving both living and non-living objects, can spontaneously find their way into more or less orderly and patterned states: they can self-organize. There is no longer any reason to appeal to some divine plan to explain this, and there is nothing mysterious about it — but that need not diminish our sense of wonder and appreciation when we see it happen. Without any blueprint or guidance, molecules, particles, grains, rocks, fluids, and living tissues can arrange themselves into regular, sometimes geometrical patterns….
“Symmetry is at the root of understanding how such patterns appear. Because in everyday terms we associate patterns with symmetry… we might be inclined to imagine that the spontaneous appearance of a pattern in nature involves the spontaneous generation of symmetry. In fact, the opposite is true. Pattern comes from the (partial) destruction of symmetry.
“The most symmetrical thing you can imagine is something that you can rotate, reflect, or translate any which way and yet it still looks the same. That’s true if the thing is perfectly uniform. So to get pattern from something that is initially unpatterned and uniform involves reducing the symmetry: it is what scientists call a process of symmetry-breaking, which is nature’s way of turning things that are initially the same into things that are different. The more symmetry that gets broken, the more subtle and elaborate the pattern….
“In the natural world, perfect uniformity or randomness are surprisingly hard to find, at least at the everyday scale…. All around there is shape and form: diverse, yes, but far from random, far from uniform. Symmetry is being broken, again and again.”
I arranged the photos in this post as a visualization of Ball’s explanation — from the initial pattern break (the tiny raised “fists”) through iterations that show nearly perfect symmetry, followed by a few last photos where symmetry is again broken because some of the florets have dropped off the flower. A transition like this is not unique to lantana, of course — we can see something similar by observing many flowers and plants over time — but is very easy to see here because our brains register these flowers as clusters of circles or globes, until we zoom in a little closer.
“Gaillardia (Blanket Flower): Handsome perennial and biennial herbs including some of the showiest flowers, valuable for their long duration both on the plants and in a cut state. The genus numbers some half a dozen across, the ray florets having an outer zone of orange-yellow and an inner one of brownish-red, while the centre is deep bluish-purple. It is the commonest kind, and having been raised largely from seed, has many varieties, differing more or less widely from the type, with various names….
“G. picta somewhat resembles G. aristata, but has smaller flowers, and is a biennial. It is dwarfer, and its flowers are brighter. G. amblyodon is a beautiful Texan annual, introduced a few years ago. Its flowers are even smaller than those of G. picta, and are of a deep cinnabar red.
“Gaillardias in many soils soon exhaust themselves by their flowering, and should be renewed periodically from seed, the seedlings being most vigorous and free…. All thrive in good friable garden soil, but not on a cold stiff soil or on one that is too light or dry. Where possible they should be grown in bold groups, for they thrive better if so placed than as solitary plants in a parched border, and no plants have a finer effect in a bed by themselves….”
“The gaillardias, in spite of their French name (after M. Gaillard de Marentonneau, a patron of botany), are natives of North America, whence we have received so many yellow-rayed composites — Coreopses, Heleniums, Rudbeckias, Heliopses, Sunflowers and Goldenrods — that we might be justified in believing that continent to be paved with gold. The gaillardias, however, mix their gold with blood, and Willa Cather speaks of Nebraskan pastures where one of the species ‘matted over the ground with the deep velvety red that is in Bokhara carpets‘….
“The three kinds most usually met with in gardens are the red and yellow G. pulcella (syn. G. bicolor, 1787), perennial although usually treated as an annual, and parent of many garden varieties; the perennial yellow G. aristata, sent by [David] Douglas from the Rocky Mountains about 1826; and G. amblyodon, a red annual from Texas and New Mexico, collected by [Ferdinand] Lindheimer in 1844 and again by [Thomas] Drummond the following year. The name of Blanket Flower was probably given to G. pulcella on account of its grey woolly leaves; but the flower might very well recall the gay colours and zig-zag patterns of the Indian blankets of its native land, and one of the garden varieties is aptly named Indian Chief….”
Now another autumn holds what warmth it can for as long as possible, as I want to hold onto him to keep winter away. Last night the hard frost picked the last delphinium, and the final pair of gaillardia probably will not respond to the warm breath of day. Every garden row is raised in a brown silhouette. Today orange blazes everywhere….
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On the same trip to Oakland Cemetery’s gardens where I discovered the Cosmos flowers that I wrote about previously (see Discovering Cosmos), I also found another plant that I had never seen before. The red and yellow-tipped flowers below are Gaillardia variants; most likely, I think, Gaillardia pulchella — which is known by several other common names (including “Blanket Flower”), but my favorite is the very descriptive name “Firewheel.”
From the book excerpts at the top of this post, you can learn a little about the characteristics of this plant, its history, and its distribution. When I was processing these photos in Lightroom, I originally thought the blue highlights that you can see in some of the flowers’ centers were artifacts, possibly even a reflection off the blue coat I was wearing, so I removed the blue color. Then I saw the description from The English Flower Garden — “the centre is deep bluish-purple” — and I put the blue highlights back!
“C. bipinnatus is a handsome annual, 3 feet to 5 feet high, having finely-divided, feathery foliage, and large Dahlia-like bright red-purple blossoms, with yellow centres. It is best raised a tender annual by sowing the seeds in February or March in a heated frame, and transplanting in May in good, rich soil with a warm exposure….
“It flowers from August to October, is good for grouping with bold and graceful annuals. There are now varieties rose, white, purple, and orange. C. atropurpurea, called the ‘Black Dahlia,’ is a handsome plant with nearly black flowers, thriving in ordinary soil.”
“From Mexico in 1799 came two near relations of the Dahlia: Cosmos bipinnatus (with leaves arranged like a feather) and C. sulphureus…. The seed had first arrived in Spain, and as with the Zinnia had been sent to England by the Marchioness of Bute. A further pair crossed the Atlantic in 1835, C. diversifolius and one that shows how simple it is for plants to drift away out of fashion and out of nursery catalogues unless they are continually loved and nurtured: C. atrosanguineus, the deliciously chocolate-scented dark maroon annual from Mexico….
“The seed was received in 1835 by William Thompson (1823-1903), who had earlier founded a nursery at Ipswich (which later became the world-famous firm of Thompson and Morgan). The plant made an immediate impact, with its dramatic deep maroon colour, and was widely grown, but despite being admired — and commented on by such plantsmen as E. A. Bowles (1865-1954) — and receiving an RHS Award of Merit in 1938, it fell out of favour. It was only at the very end of the twentieth century that it was ‘rescued’ and recovered its self-esteem to flourish again in our English gardens.”
Oh, that I,
In my demeanour,
Might be like the modest single-petalled
Cosmos flower!
Hello!
Here we have nineteen photos of three varieties of an annual flowering plant called Cosmos, which I stumbled upon while photographing zinnias and asters this fall at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. It fascinates me that despite making so many photo-trips to these gardens over several years now, there are still discoveries to be made — as I’d never seen these Cosmos before, yet they were just a few feet from spots I’ve stomped around in repeatedly.
There were only a handful of Cosmos plants blooming in a plot of short grass by themselves (so I photographed all of them), though empty stems nearby suggested I might have discovered them at the end of their flowering time. Having now learned a little about this plant, its history, and some of its varieties — briefly covered by the quotation from The Origin of Plants up-top — I’m curious about whether or not the “Black Dahlia” variant (Cosmos atrosanguineus, originally Cosmos atropurpurea) might have been blooming there earlier. I’ll have to try again next year, since the plants have done their late fall disappearing act (as plants do!) — but click here if you would like to see some images of the “Black Dahlia” Cosmos from around the web.
Cosmos is in the Aster family Asteraceae, and these have the typical composite structure of individual florets and tiny seeds. The white and orange varieties look like they’d already ejected seeds from their florets, leaving some of them to look like miniature flying buttresses. Whether those seeds generate another batch of Cosmos next year remains to be seen: it’s not unusual for plants considered annuals in the Southeast to behave more like perennials if we have a mild winter.
In the photos of the purple Cosmos and in the last three photos of the orange ones, you can see their thin, delicate stems and leaves, some as thin as pieces of string or as wispy as ferns — “feathery” as described in the quotations above. The slightest breeze — and some photo-bombing wasps hunting for pollen — sent the flowers bouncing like acrobats, delightful to watch but requiring some patience to photograph. And one of the wasps seemed to match its colors to the orange flowers — so I didn’t realize it was there until the very last stages of working on these photos. See if you can find it!
