“The most prolific and abundant crinum in Southern gardens is a distinctive species with tapered, blue-green foliage. Each leaf reaches as much as two feet in length and three or four inches in width at the base. These wrap around each other to form a thick column topped with gracefully arching fountains of foliage. In the center of the rosettes, there are usually a few thin, wispy, blue leaves just emerging; this unique appearance makes this crinum easy to distinguish wherever it grows….
“All crinums bear peculiarly large, fleshy seeds, which makes most varieties easy to raise. If left on the surface of the soil in a humid, shady position, the thick, green embryos germinate and form perfect miniature bulbs. These usually send down long roots, which pull the young plants deeply into the soil. Three or four years’ growth on rich earth will mature the fledgling bulbs enough to begin flowering. Because of its prolific seed bearing, Crinum bulbispermum has sired numerous hybrids: this species is the forerunner of many of the old garden flowers of the South.
“The succulent leaves of Crinum bulbispermum stand more frost than most other crinums, and this is the best species to plant where freezes regularly penetrate the ground. The bulbs thrive anywhere in the South and are hardy in protected situations as far north as Denver and Long Island. Blossoms are most prolific in April and May but come almost any season if stimulated by rains. In sheltered gardens C. bulbispermum flowers welcomely through December and January.”
“One of our overlooked hardy Amaryllids, Lycoris squamigera, sometimes listed as Amaryllis Halli, would well repay more attention from discriminating gardeners. The name Lycoris refers to some unknown Greek lady. The species Squamigera was introduced to American gardens from China by Dr. G. R. Hall, a New England physician who spent considerable time collecting plants in China and Japan.
“Dr. Hall stated that the dainty pink trumpet flowers were highly regarded by the Chinese. Several other species are included in the genus, among them L. sanguinea, with reddish orange flowers.
“Lycoris sends forth strap-shaped foliage in early spring, which matures and disappears in early summer, only to be followed by naked stems, which often rise three feet, producing, in August, small clusters of soft pink lily-like blossoms that are delightfully fragrant…. Lycoris will thrive in partial shade and has been naturalized in woodlands.”
Hello!
We’re going to spend this post and the next three looking at photographs of plants in the Amaryllidaceae family, more commonly referred to as the “Amaryllis family” since some of its most prominent, well-known members are in the genus Amaryllis. The family encompasses about 1600 species of plants, including plants in the Crinum genus and Lycoris genus.
This first post includes images of Crinum bulbispermum — a large flowering plant often referred to by names containing “Swamp Lily” or “River Lily” — along with half of my photographs of Lycoris squamigera, also known as Resurrection Lily, Surprise Lily, or Naked Lady after its habit of blooming on tall slender stalks only upon dropping all its leaves (and appearing to be dormant) weeks earlier. The second post will contain the second half of my Lycoris squamigera photos, and the third and fourth posts will show one of its close relatives, Lycoris incarnata, whose candy-cane stripes have earned it the common name Peppermint Surprise Lily.
The Crinum bulbispermum — the first eighteen photos below — is a long-time Oakland resident that I’ve seen for at least a decade. It grows as a mass of numerous individual plants between sidewalks, in the sun, not far from the entrance to the property. As such it’s an eye catcher, drawing your gaze to one garden area that is surrounded by hydrangeas, daffodils, tulips, and flowering vines like quince and wisteria. Its later spring to early summer bloom period means that its colors and shapes replace many of those other flowers, ensuring that color endures through seasonal change.
The last fifteen photos below show Lycoris squamigera — whose name sounds a bit like an Italian casserole. It’s a much smaller and more compact plant than Crinum bulbispermum, and one that I encountered for the first time in June, so it must have been planted either late last year or early this year. The second quotation at the top of this post — from Garden Bulbs in Color by J. Horace McFarland — describes this plant’s Oakland environment accurately (“Lycoris will thrive in partial shade and has been naturalized in woodlands“) in that it was planted in the shade of numerous trees and shrubs, filling in previously empty spaces and catching filtered sunlight. As this may be its first blooming season, some plants appeared quite isolated from each other, while others — typically those that got more sunlight — managed to produce multiple stems and overlapping, bouquet-style collections of blooms. Either way, though, I found them fun and interesting to photograph, as the filtered sun produced some nice side-lighting and back-lighting, showing off the wide range of colors the flowers can reveal.
“It took the remarkable abilities of a French horticulturalist, Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, to change the world of water-lily culture. Inspired by an article written in 1858 lamenting the lack of bright colours and exquisite shapes in hardy water lilies, Latour-Marliac set about changing things, and judiciously crossed the brightly coloured tropical species…. It took him thirty-two years and his hardy successes… are still immensely popular….
“Producing some seventy beautiful varieties in the years he spent breeding these plants, Latour-Marliac’s work was then carried on by his son-in-law and by others all over the world. Just how he obtained his hybrids is not known, for their parentage was never revealed and he kept his methods strictly secret….
“Since water lilies are easy to propagate vegetatively by rootstocks, his cultivars are still available and have in turn been used in hybridizations for the creation of more new hardy varieties. Growing water lilies en masse creates a marvellous impression; indeed, many consider Claude Monet’s magnificent series of paintings of water lilies at Giverny (his garden in northern France) to be the epitome of Impressionism. Monet was the leading spirit of the Impressionist school, and he painted the world as he saw it — quivering with light and atmosphere. He and Latour-Marliac were exact contemporaries and the first of the water-lilies series was painted in 1903, twenty-four years after Marliac’s first hybrid successes had been introduced to the gardens of the time. The pale-pink water lilies in Monet’s exquisite Giverny masterpiece are Marliac creations — another incidence of the inspiration these most wonderful of flowers have given to all sorts of people.”
“[Monet’s] goal, which he frankly admitted was unattainable, was to paint his carefully chosen object… under singular and fleeting conditions of weather and light. As he told an English visitor, he wanted ‘to render my impressions before the most fugitive effects.’ [Since] objects changed their color and appearance according to the seasons, the meteorological conditions, and the time of day, Monet hoped to capture their visual impact in these brief, distinctive, ever-changing moments in time. He concentrated not only on the objects themselves but also, critically, on the atmosphere that surrounded them, the erratically shifting phantoms of light and color that he called the enveloppe….
“But freezing the appearance of objects amid fleeting phantoms of light and air was no easy task… Recording the fugitive effects of color and light was integral to Monet’s art. Setting up his easel in front of Rouen Cathedral, or the wheat stacks in the frozen meadow outside Giverny, or the windswept cliffs at Étretat on the coast of Normandy, he would paint throughout the day as the light and weather, and finally the seasons, changed….
“Because lighting effects changed quickly — every seven minutes, he once claimed — he was forced, in his series paintings of wheat stacks and poplars, to work on multiple canvases almost simultaneously, placing a different one on his easel every seven minutes or so, rotating them according to the particular visual effect he was trying to capture…. In the 1880s the writer Guy de Maupassant had likewise witnessed Monet ‘in pursuit of impressions’ on the Normandy coast. He described how the painter was followed through the fields by his children and stepchildren ‘carrying his canvases, five or six paintings depicting the same subject at different times and with different effects. He worked on them one by one, following all the changes in the sky….’
“One irony of Monet’s approach was that these paintings of fleeting visual effects at single moments in time actually took many months of work.”
As I mentioned in the previous post, I had never photographed Oakland’s Water Lilies before. While I briefly had some Water Lilies in my own small backyard pond about a decade ago, they never bloomed because they couldn’t get nearly enough sun (most variants require close to a full day of sunlight), and my wee but voracious goldfish snacked on the plants roots, leaves, and stems. So they didn’t last long enough to get their pictures taken, and photographing Oakland’s was my first experience with these plants.
As a photographer without an aquatic camera and scuba gear, I’m limited to what’s visible above the surface, mostly, except for those plant stems we can see twizzling just below the water line. Despite the stability provided by each plant’s overlapping leaves, the slightest breeze — or the landing of a visiting pollinator — would send enough ripples through the pond to set the plants in motion and shift them out of focus. Exposure bracketing came in handy — where I set the camera to take a series of photos from a single shutter press — to freeze the plants in place. This is typical of my botanical photography — because plants wiggle around far more than we register visually — since I learned that I could pick from these multiple shots of the same scene and keep only those with the sharpest focus.
By far, the most challenging aspect of photographing these Water Lilies came from a combination of complex relationships between how flowers produce color, how we perceive color, how cameras interpret it, and how programs like Lightroom let us edit our photos. Here, for example, is one of the photos from the gallery below — which we would refer to as a pink Water Lily — taken when the sun was out, in its fully-edited, final version.
Because of the bright sunlight, however, the camera actually saw the flower like this…
… where the color red is highly saturated (especially toward the bottom of the flower) and red overpowers the subtle shades of pink or magenta tones the flower actually produces. In addition to red color blowout, though, note how the flower petals seem out of focus, and how that blurriness extends even to the yellow pistils at the center of the flower. These combined effects occur not just because of the color relationships and how the red tones are over-saturated, but because the flower petals themselves are quite translucent — so excess color seeps through different parts of the flower and we can no longer perceive sharp boundaries between individual petals or between the petals and the pistils.
Let’s compare the photos side-by-side. By substantially desaturating red (using Lightroom’s Calibration panel), the photo on the right more accurately represents the pink Water Lily as I saw it at Oakland. You should now be able to better differentiate individual flower petals, and see more contrast between parts of the flower. Nearly every photo in this entire Water Lily series got similar treatment, because nearly all of them have red, pink, or magenta variations in color — even those whose tones lean towards orange or yellow — and all of them have translucent flower petals.
So my first time photographing and processing Oakland’s Water Lilies turned into a series of learnings for me, linking color theory to post-processing to the botanical characteristics of color production in certain kinds of flowers, and, finally, to a better understanding of the effects of bright sunlight on plants and flowers containing colors like this. It resonated with me, then, to read about Monet’s obsession with repeatedly painting the same subjects (see the second excerpt above) in different light, and frequently painting the same (or very similar) scenes to present them in varying lighting and weather conditions.
One of Monet’s goals — “to capture their visual impact in these brief, distinctive, ever-changing moments in time” (excerpted above) — is not unlike any photographer’s goals, since as photographers we’re always dealing with “instants” that disappear as soon as the camera clicks. What we do next is up to us and can lead to many different results; but it seems that photography and painting, as creative processes, might have more similarity than is readily apparent, sharing similar concerns about lighting and color fidelity that we can learn from if we approach deliberately.
By looking through enough of the images in Monet’s series of 250 Water Lily paintings, we can also see how so many versions of similar subjects became both a botanical and environmental or ecological study, where Monet alternated between “zooming in” on individual flowers and widening the view towards the broader habitat. Of course, I’m co-opting photographic theory and language here and applying it to another visual art; Monet was believed to occasionally paint from photographs (considered scandalous, by some) but apparently preferred his “exposure bracketing” and different zoom levels in the form of jockeying multiple canvases. According to Mad Enchantment, “Monet’s apparent lack of interest in technologies such as photography and film is curious and even paradoxical in someone otherwise so obsessed with the immediacy of the visual impression.” But maybe it’s not that paradoxical, since all of Monet’s Impressionist paintings represent a kind of abstraction — in part, what Monet called enveloppe, or the depiction of impressions — where his visual language emphasizes relationships among color, light, and form rather than the more literal reproduction that a camera (or realistic painting) would render.
“The endlessly popular water lily dominates planting design in open water. There is very little that can rival it for what it does. The Latin name, Nymphaea, is derived from the mythical Greek beings who were often associated with water. Water lilies are among the most primitive of all flowering plants, since fossils have been found in Jurassic rocks (201 million – 145 million years ago) and many species are thought to have changed little since….
“Water lilies in gardens are often hybrids, many bred in the nineteenth century by the Frenchman Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac. He produced about 100 varieties, initially as a hobby, but later realizing their commercial importance and subsequently naming only sterile selections, so that other growers could not obtain them from seed. He produced varieties that grew at various depths, including dwarfs. Tropical water lilies have also been extensively and gloriously hybridized.
“The flower is particularly associated with the prolific French Impressionist painter Claude Monet, who in 1883 bought a house at Giverny outside Paris and dedicated himself increasingly to gardening, including making extensive ponds in which he grew wild and hybrid water lilies. Many among his final series of paintings, which record his progressive loss of sight, feature his ponds and water lilies on vast, highly atmospheric canvases.”
“Plants adapted to life in the water are called hydrophytes (water plants). The evolution of vascular plants involved increasing adaptation to a terrestrial environment. Hydrophytic vascular plants — especially those that live submerged — therefore demonstrate specific adaptations to overcome their own terrestriality! To adapt to loss of essential radiation by the light-filtering effects of water, leaf surfaces may be large and expansive near or above the water surface, like those of the water lily (Nymphaea)….
“Because water loss is not a problem, leaf area is not limited by this factor. Similarly, a dense cuticle is not critical to survival except for the exposed surfaces of emergent or floating leaves, like those of the water lily. Large intercellular spaces in the leaves enhance gas exchange and provide buoyancy to keep leaves near surface sunlight….
“Hydrophytes obtain oxygen and carbon dioxide by direct diffusion between plant tissues and the water or through stomates on surfaces exposed to the atmosphere. In the water lily, for example, stomates are localized primarily on the upper surface of the leaf. In contrast, terrestrial plant leaves usually have a preponderance of stomates on the lower leaf surface.
“Most hydrophytes have reduced water-conducting systems, apparently as an evolutionary response to very restricted (if any) net water loss. In addition, large air channels provide internal gas exchange pathways for stem and root tissues.”
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of Water Lilies that I took on one cloudy and one sunny midsummer day at Oakland Cemetery. I had never photographed their Water Lilies before, though the fountain and pond have occasionally snuck into other photos — such as those of the Formosa Lilies that I posted a couple of weeks ago (see Discovering the Formosa Lily (3 of 3)).
Water Lilies are conveniently included on Wikipedia’s List of plants known as lily page, which, despite its title, actually lists many plants that are commonly known as lilies but aren’t — that is, they aren’t members of theLilium genus that encompasses “true lilies.” They are, instead, members of the Nymphaea genus — a name that’s easy to remember given how the word “Nymphaea” (pronounced “nymphia”) is connected to water nymphs of Greek mythology.
Since this was the first time I had dwelt with my camera on Oakland’s Water Lilies, I didn’t know much about them, but I believe I’ve identified this collection of plants as a mix of Nymphaea candida, Nymphaea odorata, and Nymphaea mexicana. I’ve also learned that since Water Lilies are “extensively and gloriously hybridized” — as Noel Kingsbury notes above — they could be hybrids of any of those three (or others). We won’t worry about that too much; the genus identification of Nymphaea is close enough for now. With that in mind, we have quite a few interesting stories to explore here (and in the next post) about these plants, their flowers, their botanical and cultural history, the fountain and pond where they live at Oakland, and the use of Water Lilies in Victorian garden cemeteries. Let’s begin!
The fountain in these photos is called “Out in the Rain” and features a boy and girl holding an umbrella as they stand above the center of the pond. When the fountain is in operation, water sprays from the finial or ferrule (the very top of the umbrella tube), then cascades down the umbrella’s canopy to sprinkle into the pond, with soft sounds like rain tapping at a puddle. In my first photo below, you can see — at the bottom of the frame — part of the inlaid historical marker near the edge of the pond wall. Regrettably, The Photographer neglected to take a picture of the whole marker, but subsequently found it on a fascinating website called The Historical Marker Database, so you can see it here. The marker was my initial introduction to the fountain’s story — which has a variety of interconnected threads that can start us traveling through the learnings I mentioned above.
“Out in the Rain” was commissioned by the city of Atlanta from a company called J. L. Mott Iron Works, and installed at Oakland around 1913. Its cast-iron design was based on that of a fountain created by the terracotta company Galloway & Graff, who based their commercially popular design on that of a similar fountain presented by an Italian artist at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition in 1876. Its appearance, then, derives from several generations of artistic inspiration; and, while I’m unable to find any exposition photos of the original Italian design, I did find a photo of Galloway & Graff’s version. You can see it on an auction house website, here — where the fidelity between the terracotta version and Oakland’s iron version is very apparent.
The fountain and pond have undergone multiple restorations and renovations — though you can’t tell from its appearance now, which is quite pristine. The oval-shaped, concrete-bound pond again reflects its 1913 design, which was supplanted for a few years by being covered with bricks until 2008 when it was rebuilt to reassert its 1913 roots. I didn’t know this, having never seen the brick version; but found a photograph of it here — where, by comparison, you can see the extent to which Oakland has enhanced the grounds around the fountain with considerably more plants and the dense fern plantation behind the pond.
These iterations of the fountain — and the addition of more recent, thick plantings — demonstrate the extent to which foundational thinking about historical cemeteries has changed to re-emphasize elements of their original Victorian characteristics over the use of more modern-looking materials like rows of bricks. This approach of looking back to original designs and intentions reflects broader shifts in how Victorian cemetery landscapes like Oakland’s are being imagined anew — something I covered in a previous post, Discovering the Formosa Lily (1 of 3) — and are consistent with trends that now emphasize the cultural, botanical, and memorial elements of their historical design.
Fountains, and fountains filled with Water Lilies, are often used in public gardens like Victorian cemeteries to create transitional scenes of serenity. “Out in the Rain” was established with that in mind: it’s not placed to memorialize an individual or family, but is located at a central intersection of several Oakland walkways, walkways that lead to gardens filled with the irises, lilies, roses, and zinnias (among other flowers) that I’ve shared with you on this site.
The second excerpt I included at the top of this post from Botany, Principles and Applications provides some insight into how Water Lilies differ from their landlubber counterparts. While a bit technical, it does reveal that Water Lily leaves — which spread profusely as they expand to cover the water’s surface — gather sunlight for each plant and its flowers, overlapping enough to provide the plant with stability while ensuring that most of each leaf is exposed to the light. Each leaf contains cells that, like pillows of air, enable them to float; while their waxy coating helps them shed water so they won’t absorb it like a sponge and sink. The plants’ submerged roots and the winding stems connected to the leaves help them collect and move nutrients needed for photosynthesis and growth. The plant’s leaves and roots might be considered its most important features, botanically speaking; while, like all plants, the flowers help enable its propagation by attracting the interest of pollinators with bright, highly reflective colors.
The remaining excerpt above provides a brief introduction to the artistic significance of Water Lilies throughout history — one of the most well-known being that of Claude Monet’s approach to acquiring the plants then creating a series of 250 Water Lily paintings. Monet’s Water Lilies may be the most ubiquitous cultural reference connecting an artist to a plant genus, and we’ll compare the visual characteristics of Water Lily photographs with Monet’s impressions of Water Lilies in the next post.
“More than any other science, botany depends on pictures. The fragility of plants and even dried specimens, which lose their living colour and form, make scientific study difficult. Botanical illustrations made plants visible and reproducible for analysis. They evolved from hand-drawn copies and crude woodcuts of stylized plants in medieval herbals to finely detailed copper etchings and splendid colour lithographs in lavish folios, books and magazines. In the process, which unfolded over centuries along with new botanical discoveries and developments in printmaking techniques, they presented a more complete natural history of nearly every plant and flower, including extraordinary images of many different kinds of lilies….
“By the early seventeenth century flowers were increasingly grown, not only for food or medicine but also purely for their beauty and decorative qualities…. As gardening became increasingly popular, botanical illustrations found new outlets in periodicals that combined botanical discoveries with horticultural information. Published in Britain, France, Belgium, Germany and America, they appealed to a wide readership. Many of the plants discovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had their debut in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, first published in London in 1797 by William Curtis, an apothecary-turned-botanist, and still produced by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Veitch Nurseries, one of the most important plant collectors in the nineteenth century, displayed more than 400 of its plant introductions in the magazine, including the wild lilies discovered in Asia by Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson.
“Despite printing innovations in the first half of the twentieth century, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine used only hand-coloured plates before 1948…. After [Walter Hood] Fitch’s resignation in 1878, Matilda Smith became the chief artist. Lilian Snelling was the magazine’s chief artist from 1922 to 1952, and among her individual accomplishments was the supplement to [Henry John] Elwes’sMonograph on the Genus Lilium in the years 1934–40.”
“While some lilies could be considered awkward or even vexatious in the garden, delightful Lilium regale is a species that is not only magnificent to look at, but also satisfyingly easy to grow. Encountered in 1903 by legendary plant hunter Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson in the Min Valley, Sichuan Province, China, he wrote of this flower:
“‘There, in narrow, semi-arid valleys, down which thunder torrents, and encompassed by mountains composed of mud-shales and granites, whose peaks are clothed with snow eternal, the Regal Lily has its home. In summer the heat is terrific, in winter the cold is intense, and at all seasons these valleys are subject to sudden and violent wind-storms.… There, in June, by the wayside, in rock-crevices by the torrent’s edge, and high up on the mountainside and precipice, this lily in full bloom greets the weary wayfarer. Not in twos and threes but in hundreds, in thousands, aye, in tens of thousands.’”
Hello!
This is the second of two posts with photographs of Lilium regale — also known as the Regal Lily, Royal Lily, or King’s Lily — that I took at Oakland Cemetery earlier this summer. The first post is Lilium Regale, the Regal Lily and Its History (1 of 2), where I wrote about Ernest Henry Wilson’s expeditions and his singular connection to the Regal Lily.
In this post, we’ll take a look at Wilson’s use of photography and writing together to document his explorations and discoveries, and how that work intersected with the burgeoning interest in botanical illustration in the service of science, art, and horticulture — reflecting botany’s reliance on pictures, as described in the first excerpt above.
The first photo below is from Wilson’s book Plant Hunting: Volume 2 and the second one is from The Lilies of Eastern Asia. They are, of course, of the same scene; but I thought it was interesting that Wilson captioned them differently: the one on the left as “Her Majesty, Lilium Regale” and the other as “L. Regale Wilson” — the difference likely because Wilson’s plant hunting volumes are more informal and autobiographical, while The Lilies of Eastern Asia presents his discoveries in a scientific and naturalist context. The use of “Her Majesty, Lilium Regale” also coincides with what I discussed in the first post about Wilson’s use of monarchy-adjacent terms to describe Lilium regale — something he was more likely to do in his writings that were directed toward general audiences.
This photo appears to have been taken in a garden setting, not during any of the China trips Wilson made to gather Lilium regale specimens. Though I never could identify exactly where it was taken, it is not among those photographs I linked to in the previous post — E. H. Wilson China Expedition Photographs from the Arnold Arboretum — so I might speculate that Wilson took it later to illustrate his books rather than as an expedition image. With some exceptions, his expedition photographs were more often documentation of the locale, terrain, shrubs, trees, and assistants he employed on his trips, an approach that also reflected the ephemeral nature of the species he encountered (they may or may not have been blooming when he found them), and the nature of photography at the time, where cameras were more suitable for what we would now think of as wide-angle photography.
While photography was consistently used on botanical explorations around Wilson’s time, as his photography skills grew, Wilson became notable not only for the quantity of photographs he took, but for his profuse use of his own images in his books. His biographer Roy W. Briggs gives us some insight into that, and also helps us see where Wilson’s photography fit in the history of photography more generally, in this passage from the book “Chinese” Wilson: A Life of Ernest H. Wilson, 1876-1930:
“It is the quality as well as quantity of the photographic illustrations in Wilson’s books that sets them apart from the works of other authors of the period writing in the same field. It must have been a source of annoyance to Wilson that the technology for producing colour photographs had not been developed. The disparity between what he had originally seen projected on to the ground-glass plate at the focal plane of his camera lens and the final processed monochrome image must surely have been a disappointment to him.“
That color photography was still in its early development at the time — it was largely experimental — explains why complete documentation of encountered botanical specimens was bridged through a combination of photography and botanical art in Wilson’s era. While Wilson’s use of photography documented his expeditions and the species he encountered, publications like Curtis’s Botanical Magazine sought to appeal to scientists, horticulturalists, and gardeners of varied levels of expertise with detailed, accurately colored illustrations.
Here, for example, we have Lilium myriophyllum (an early though imprecise name assigned to Lilium regale) by Matilda Smith (from Flowers From the Royal Gardens of Kew: Two Centuries of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine), which shows not only the characteristics of a typical Regal Lily and renders its stunning colors and its growth patterns, but also includes smaller sidebar details of the flower’s unopened blossoms and its pistils:
And here’s a similar example by Lilian Snelling (from Digital Commonwealth Massachusetts Collection), where once again we see an elaborate but realistic presentation of the shapes, textures, and colors of the plant and its flowers, as well as the structure of its rooting bulbs.
For botanists, explorers, horticulturalists, and gardeners alike, this accumulated demonstration of developing botanical knowledge — starting with expedition photography like Wilson’s followed by his extensive narratives, augmented by the art in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine — provided a robust picture of the discovery and movement of previously unknown plants throughout the Western world.
“Now known as Lilium regale, this handsome lily was collected in 1903 by Ernest Henry Wilson (1876-1930), who found it growing in the semi-arid valley of the Min River in northwest Sichuan. This Chinese species is considered one of the ten best garden plants in the world. It is easy to grow, is deeply fragrant, with many funnel-shaped flowers of creamy white, and has slender stems, each from two to four feet tall. Thriving in moist but well-drained soil and requiring many hours of direct sunlight, the regal lily has been grown for over one thousand years in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean gardens.
“E. H. Wilson is considered the most famous of all the plant collectors who traveled to China. His first voyage there in 1899 was for the Veitch family, the best-known of the nineteenth-century British nurserymen. He hunted chiefly for the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University from 1907 to 1919 and eventually was appointed Keeper of that institution. It is estimated that as many as six hundred of his one thousand or so introductions are still in cultivation.
“During Wilson’s celebrated return trip to the valley of the Min in the fall of 1910, when he and twenty accompanying porters and collectors harvested over six thousand regal lily bulbs for distribution throughout North America and the British Isles, his caravan was struck by a disastrous rock slide on a narrow mountain pass. Wilson, whose leg was broken in two places, was forced to lie still while pack mules walked over him in an attempt to vacate the path.
“Recalling this episode in his book Plant Hunting (1927), Wilson later wrote: ‘How many people know the size of a mule’s hoof? Quite a number have felt the strength of a mule’s leg and the sharpness of his teeth; his obstinacy is a proverb. But the size of his hoof is another matter. Frankly, I do not know with mathematical exactness but, as I lay on the ground and more than forty of these animals stepped over my prostrate form, the hoof seemed enormous, blotting out my view of the heavens.’ Miraculously, Wilson sustained no further injury, but the limp that was to plague him for the rest of his life became affectionately known as his ‘lily limp.'”
“This Lily has a surprisingly limited distribution being confined to about fifty miles of the narrow semi-arid valley of the Min River in extreme western Szech’uan between 2,500 and 6,000 feet altitude — a region where the summers are hot and the winters severely cold and where strong winds prevail at all seasons of the year. I never saw it wild outside of this valley, which is walled in by steep mountain slopes culminating in perpetual snows. There it grows in great plenty among grasses and low shrubs and in niches on the bare cliffs. From the last week in May to the first in July, according to altitude, the blossoms of this Lily transform a desolate lonely region into a veritable garden of beauty. Its fragrance fills the air and ’tis good to travel there when the Regal Lily is in bloom, though the path is hard and dangerous as personal experience and notices in Chinese characters carved in the rocks, urging all not to loiter save beneath the shelter of hard cliffs, testify.
“It was my privilege to discover this Lily in August, 1903, and in the autumn of the year following sent about three hundred bulbs to Messrs. Veitch. These arrived safely in the spring of 1905, flowered that summer and were afterwards distributed under the erroneous name of “Lilium myriophyllum.” In 1908 I shipped with indifferent success bulbs of this Lily to the Arnold Arboretum and to some friends, but in 1910 I succeeded in introducing it in quantity to America and the stock passed from the Arnold Arboretum to Messrs. R. and J. Farquhar and Co., Boston, Mass….
“Under cultivation in Europe and America the Regal Lily has behaved royally, being equally indifferent to winter colds, summer droughts and deluges and has flowered and fruited annually. It is the only Lily of its class that ripens seeds in the climate of New England. The seeds germinate freely and many millions of bulbs have been raised. It forces well even after cold storage and there seems no reason why it should not become the ‘Easter Lily’ of the future….
“The pollen is very cohesive, which makes shipping the plants in flower a comparatively easy matter, and the fragrance of the blossoms is pleasant, being not so strong as that of related species. The canary-yellow of the inside of the funnel contrasts well with the lustrous and translucent, marble-white upper part of the segments, and often the rose-purple is pleasingly tinted through, more especially if the flowers are allowed to open indoors or in light shade as under cheese-cloth. Some critics object to the coloured flowers, some to the narrow leaves, but in adding it to western gardens the discoverer would proudly rest his reputation with the Regal Lily….”
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of Lilium regale, a historically and botanically significant plant and flower whose common names include Regal Lily, Royal Lily, and King’s Lily — names that emerged during imperial British explorations of Asian countries such as China and Japan, and reflect the sense that this lily was both opulent in appearance and impressive in its ability to conquer its environment.
The flowers of the Regal Lily are among the largest of those produced by any lily, in a recurved trumpet or funnel shape extending five to six inches across. Strong, densely-leaved plant stems may stretch six feet, with multiple flowers emerging on any given stem. Here you can see what I often find when photographing these lilies at Oakland Cemetery, where the volume and weight of the flowers — especially after a windy thunderstorm — pushes the mass of plants into a horizontal position, yet with nearly all of the flowers intact and the stems bent but not a single one broken.
This sort of presentation might not seem ideal, aesthetically and photographically speaking — but that doesn’t matter to the lily, whose growth, flower production, and pollination strategies are only minimally impacted despite tipping over. And as you can see from the photos below — and those in the next post — for the photographer it’s just a matter of slinking among the leaves to get a satisfactory point of view on the plant’s stunning blooms.
The introduction of Lilium regale to British (and United States) horticulture began with the Chinese expeditions of Ernest Henry Wilson in the early twentieth century. Wilson — a botanical explorer and avid photographer — made several trips to China during which he encountered the Regal Lily and collected hundreds of bulbs to expatriate. Any research you encounter on Wilson — like the first excerpt I included at the top of this post — will undoubtedly mention the injury he suffered on the fourth China expedition, where he broke his leg after slipping between some rocks and used parts of his camera tripod as a splint so he could be carried from the accident scene. Wilson subsequently coined the phrase “lily limp” to describe the permanent injury he suffered, and that phrase remains linked to Wilson, Regal Lilies, and his China expeditions to this day. The chapter Advent of the Lily Royal in his book Plant Hunting (Volume 2) contains his elaborate and occasionally self-deprecating description of the events, and you can learn more about Wilson’s China trips and see some of his photographs at these links:
“While fabulous, lilies had gained a reputation for being challenging and capricious to cultivate. They were exciting; they were expensive; and they were quite likely to die on you after a couple of years. Inevitably, they attracted a certain type of well-heeled horticultural brinksmanship, right up until amenable Lilium regale emerged, bringing down both prices and the level of skill required to cultivate this most desirable of flowers.”
The other lilies I’ve photographed this year — such as Tiger Lilies, Japanese Show Lilies, and Formosa Lilies — were well known to early twentieth-century botanists, as they had all been encountered and transitioned to Western horticulture in the nineteenth century. Each species was being actively and broadly studied, hybridized, and sometimes naturalized in new environments for decades before Wilson’s Asian expeditions. But each transplanted lily species also presented often futile growing challenges for gardeners — as Slade describes above — until Wilson fetched the previously unknown Regal Lily from China, first in 1903.
As Wilson describes it — in the second excerpt above, from his book The Lilies of Eastern Asia — this hardy Regal Lily, found in remote and difficult-to-explore locations in China’s mountains, adapted well to European and North American gardens, as it “behaved royally, being equally indifferent to winter colds, summer droughts and deluges and has flowered and fruited annually.” This single statement helps us see how gardening with lilies moved from a specialized activity of horticultural experts, to something gardeners of any level of expertise could do — and how it can happen that, over 120 years later, we find a large batch of Regal Lilies at Oakland Cemetery producing robust, colorful, and fully intact flowers despite having been nearly knocked to the ground by the wind.
As a primary source for research, Wilson’s firsthand and comprehensive account — from which I excerpted just three paragraphs — also tells us a lot about this pivotal moment in the botanical history of lily distribution from Asian regions to the West. We can derive from his account how Liliium regale’s geographic presence was originally quite limited, contributing to its absence from Western lily culture until Wilson’s expeditions. The narrative gives us insight into the physical difficulties plant explorers faced and how they overcame them — often only over multiple expeditions — to redistribute their specimens to their home countries and foster subsequent propagation and commercial development. The excerpt even demonstrates how botanical naming conventions evolve: Lilium regale was initially marketed and sold under the name “Lilium myriophyllum” — a name that you will still find in historical resources — and Wilson’s suggestion that the Regal Lily might become the “Easter lily of the future” was applied to a different lily entirely, Lilium longiflorumrather than Lilium regale. Yet Wilson’s preference for describing this lily as “behaving royally” — or elsewhere describing it with numerous monarchy-adjacent terms — did stick throughout subsequent decades, which is why this lily’s most common nicknames Regal Lily, Royal Lily, and King’s Lily sound like they were anointed by The Crown rather than this intrepid, determined explorer.
From “Lilium formosanum” in Lilies by Henry John Elwes:
“This remarkable lily was found by Charles Wilford, a Kew collector, on the coast of Keeling in western Taiwan (Formosa) in June 1858, but does not seem to have been known in Britain till 1881, when it bloomed in Messrs Veitch’s nursery at Chelsea.
“The bulbs were sent to Messrs Veitch by… one of their collectors who found them in Taiwan, and they were offered in the firm’s catalogue of plants for 1881, at ten shillings-and-sixpence and one-guinea apiece…. [John Gilbert] Baker had previously described the lily as a variety of L. longiflorum, and it was illustrated in Veitch’s catalogue as L. longiflorum var. formosanum…. It is readily distinguished from L. longiflorum by the narrower leaves and longer, narrower trumpet as well as by the purplish colouring outside….
“In 1912 [William Robert] Price…. gathered seeds of this lily at 2050 m on Mount Morrison. A stock of bulbs was soon raised from these seeds and distributed to the botanic gardens at Kew, Edinburgh and Glasnevin and to friends and, until a few years ago, that stock was the source of all specimens of Price’s lily in this country…. It has been found useful as a rock-garden plant since it flowers very quickly from seed…..
“The behaviour of the type plant under cultivation suggests that the taller forms are not generally suitable for outdoor cultivation in British gardens. Possibly autumnal frost and damp may destroy the leaves before they have had a chance of replenishing the bulb. However, they have succeeded in some places. As a cool greenhouse plant it is excellent, but its susceptibility to virus diseases makes it desirable to raise fresh stocks from seed at frequent intervals. In fact it has been used frequently as a test plant to establish by inoculation whether a virus is present or not…..
“‘I have noticed that at altitudes above 1800 m this lily takes on a different form. In the plains the flower is pure white, but as one ascends the perianth becomes faintly marked with red on the reverse. Above 1800 m it is wonderfully different, being quite a small slender plant about 31 cm high with a perianth of conforming size. At the higher elevations the red markings become deeper and take the form of rich, red bands on the keels of the perianth segments. The change is so gradual and continuous that it is obviously the same species all the time.’
“Few lilies vary more than this in their behaviour in different parts of the country, and for reasons probably partly due to the later start in spring growth, and perhaps partly climatic, it seems to be more successfully grown on the other side of the border than in the south of England. In southern gardens it is happiest in full sun, but with the shelter of dwarf shrubs to screen the stem-roots and protect the vernal growth of the stem from the rigours of the climate….
“The plant is unusually quick to reach the flowering stage from the sowing of the seeds, and in October single flowers have appeared on stems of bulbs of which the seeds were sown in February of the same year. In eastern North America specimens of L. formosanum grew to 2.25 m high and carried more than 30 blooms. The remarkable length of the flower is a characteristic of both the alpine and tall forms; it may be as much as 10 cm long.”
Together these three posts show how well the Formosa Lily adapts to different environments, from its sandy full-sun location in the first post; to the more shaded location in the second post; to this location among a densely packed growth of ferns. The presence of so much fern-life, alone with the nearby pond, means that this third location likely has not only higher humidity but richer, more nutrient-dense soil, enabling the lily to produce darker green leaves and stems as well as large, robust flowers with swatches of pink “painted” along their ribs. While these environmental variations aren’t nearly as dramatic as those described in the excerpt at the top of this post, it’s still possible to see — by observing that sunlight and growing conditions change between sections at Oakland — how the plants’ behavior and appearance changes based on where it was planted.
