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….
Hello!
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.
“There is a place near my house where a path leads down through a nut-walk to the further garden. It is crossed by a shorter path that ends at a Birch tree with a tall silvered trunk. It seemed desirable to accentuate the point where the paths cross; I therefore put down four square platforms of stone ‘pitching’ as a place for the standing of four Hydrangeas in tubs….
“Just before the tree is a solid wooden seat and a shallow wide step done with the same stone pitching. Tree and seat are surrounded on three sides by a rectangular planting of yews. The tender greys of the rugged lower bark of the Birch and the silvering of its upper stem tell finely against the dark velvet-like richness of the Yew and the leaf-mass of other trees beyond; the pink flowers and fresh green foliage of the Hydrangeas are also brilliant against the dusky green. It is just one simple picture that makes one glad for three months of the later summer and early autumn. The longer cross-path, which on the right leads in a few yards to steps up to the paved court on the north side of the house, on the left passes down the nut-walk… The Birch tree and seat are immediately to the right….
“Standing a little way down the shaded nut-walk and looking back, the Hydrangeas are seen in another aspect, with the steps and house behind them in shade, and the sun shining through their pale green leaves. Sitting on the seat, the eye, passing between the pink Hydrangea flowers, sees a short straight path bounded by a wall of Tree Box to right and left, and at the far end one tub of pale blue Hydrangea in shade, backed by a repetition of the screen of Yews such as enclose the Birch tree.”
Here, now, the days are long and the leaves of the hydrangea are supple and leathery, with raised veins like the back of a hand. A stick-woman in an old brown dress and floppy hat stands in the garden and frightens the birds. The sun dazzles away the early fog.
The quotation at the top — from Colour in the Flower Garden by Gertrude Jekyll — is one of Jekyll’s descriptions not only of hydrangeas in her garden, but of her own photographs of hydrangeas. Jekyll — well-known as a horticulturalist, gardener, and garden writer — was an early adopter of photography and energetically embraced this emerging technology. According to the biography Gertrude Jekyll: A Vision of Garden and Wood by Judith B. Tankard, Jekyll progressed from her initial interest in photography through photographing gardens for her books, like this:
“In 1885, she took up photography, which enabled her to bring together a number of interests. After she quickly mastered the cumbersome process and set up a dark room at Munstead House, she set out to record those elements indigenous to her native Surrey that were rapidly disappearing. She was fascinated by cottage gardens and their cottagers, and by the special construction trades that gave ordinary rural buildings their local character. In addition to these vernacular traditions, she also photographed her own garden as well as specific plants and tree forms, garden design elements, and the local landscape….
“Gertrude Jekyll’s favorite brother, Sir Herbert Jekyll (1846-1932), who shared many interests and friends with her, was an art patron and engineer as well as an amateur photographer. He assembled several carefully labeled family photograph albums and was interested in the preservation of rural buildings, so it is possible that he taught her the art of photography….
“Jekyll kept prints of most of her photographs in a series of personal photograph albums similar to her brother’s. Gertrude Jekyll’s earliest attempts at photographing and processing were closely supervised by her instructor, as the back of some of the earliest prints are critiqued in a handwriting different from her own. Some are marked ‘little over exposed,’ ‘bad light,’ ‘more pyro — more bromide,’ and ‘keep the camera level.’
“Starting in 1899, with the publication of Wood and Garden, Jekyll used her photographs to illustrate her books, probably using a stock of photographs she had already taken…. [As] Jekyll began to publish books on a regular basis, she now regarded each book that she illustrated as a photo assignment….”
If you would like to view the photographs Jekyll is describing up-top (and see how well she renders the words explaining the photographs), you can find three of them at these links from a Gutenberg edition of Colour in the Flower Garden:
If you page backward a bit from the last link (to the chapter title “Some Garden Pictures”), you’ll also encounter what could certainly be considered Jekyll’s artist statement, one which combines art, gardening, and the color, light, and compositional characteristics of photography:
“When the eye is trained to perceive pictorial effect, it is frequently struck by something — some combination of grouping, lighting and colour — that is seen to have that complete aspect of unity and beauty that to the artist’s eye forms a picture. Such are the impressions that the artist-gardener endeavours to produce in every portion of the garden…. [There] are some days during the summer when the quality of light seems to tend to an extraordinary beauty of effect. I have never been able to find out how the light on these occasions differs from that of ordinary fine summer days, but, when these days come, I know them and am filled with gladness.”
What a delightful way to describe how we see — and photograph — gardens, and I especially like how Jekyll blends sensory elements of art, botany, and photography in her writing. Now, imagine: if she’d been writing and taking garden photographs a hundred years later, she might have ended out with a blog, just like this!
“Stourton House, near to Mere in Wiltshire, is next to the car-park serving the famous National Trust property of Stourhead. It couldn’t be more different: warm, personal, sometimes verging on the chaotic, but entirely lovable…. The garden is largely geared to the production of material for [Elizabeth Bullivant’s] dried flower (and fruit) business. I am told that you can hardly move, in the house, for the quantities of drying and dried flowers hanging up….
“Across the lawn is the woodland garden. From the outside you are chiefly aware of large old rhododendron bushes and a frieze of hydrangeas, somewhat jostled, in front. Hydrangeas are a principal theme at Stourton House, being greatly valued for drying. In her book, Elizabeth is at pains to describe exactly the right stage at which to cull them for this purpose. Half this garden — the half I have so far been describing — is on neutral or alkaline soil, which tends to produce pink or red hydrangea flowers (those that are not white), while the other half, mainly comprising the woodland, with its rhododendrons and azaleas and the bulk of the hydrangea collection, gives rise to blue or purple hydrangea flowers.
“At an RHS autumn show, quite recently, Elizabeth brought up a vase of ‘Hamburg’ hydrangea heads. This is a large-flowered, bun-headed hortensia. In colour, according to the age of the inflorescence, whether it grew on acid or alkaline soil and whether in sun or in shade, the flowers ranged from green to purple and deep bricky red, through deep blue and deep pink. All the colours were intense, but they varied to this amazing degree….
“Truly the hydrangea is versatile, especially when you add to its variability the differences between a bun-shaped inflorescence or a conical, and a head packed with sterile florets or a flat-topped lacecap wherein the sterile florets are arranged in an outer ring, while the central disc consists entirely of tiny fertile flowers.”
Underneath the eaves A blooming large hydrangea Overbrims its leaves.
Hello!
This is the second of three posts featuring hydrangibles from my garden. You do not know what is a hydrangible, you say? Then you should read the first post in this series, Mophead Hydrangeas (1 of 3).
“The name of this plant originated from the Greek words ‘hydor’ meaning water and ‘angeion’ meaning vessel, with reference to the fact that the shrub requires adequate water for successful growth. It is known as the Hortensia, the name having been conferred by the discoverer of the shrub in China in 1767, namely the French physician and botanist Filibert Commerson. The Hydrangea was brought to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for the first time by Sir Joseph Banks in 1789…. “The Hydrangea has been cultivated since ancient times in China and Japan. The first shrub of this species to be brought to Great Britain was apparently also a cultivated and not a wild type. Its flowers were red, its umbels composed mainly of sterile flowers. The new shrub aroused great interest at that time with its outstanding beauty. Through cultivation and cross-breeding new forms were produced, but at first the growers were unable to attain much diversity of colour, dull, pinkish-red or pale pink predominating…. “Indeed the Hydrangea resisted all attempts to improve it for a long time. It was only after the importing of a glowing-red variety from Japan (the ‘Rosea’ variety) and its cross-breeding with ‘Otaksa’ [that] French horticulturists… succeeded from 1910 onwards in breeding a large number of new forms differing not only in colour, but also in shape, which surprised visitors to the horticultural exhibition taking place in Paris at the time. Further progress was achieved when it was discovered that the Hydrangea reacted strongly to certain chemicals in the soil by a sudden change of colour in its flowers. For example, it was found that iron or ammonia in the soil fostered the growth of blue flower-heads, formerly a very rare phenomenon in this flower.”
Water vessel — patina of summer — its zeppelins soar all the way into September, the heads colored like the flavored ice atop snow cones….
Beside a driveway and a house, a few orbs, flamingo-like, float on thin stalks. Others, laden with bloom, rest, like tails of tired poodles, on the ground.
Each mophead is a bevy, a beveled blue, a standing ovation, that fumes with lattices of spume, solid but fretful, like sleep. I never knew that ecstasy could arrive at so many angles….
Hello!
When I moved into my house in 2004, there were two batches of hydrangeas in the back yard, one on each side of the steps leading to the courtyard. All of them produced flowers in the “mophead” shape, a descriptor used to differentiate them from hydrangea flowers of the “lacecap” style, like the Bluebird Hydrangeas I added to the garden myself. “Mophead hydrangea” is also a common stand-in name for hydrangea varieties that produce flowers like this.
The came-with-the-house hydrangeas were a mix of several varieties (probably Hydrangea paniculata, Hydrangea arborescens, and Hydrangea macrophylla) but since I wasn’t sure of their identities, I got into the habit of calling them all “hydrangibles” — a word I made up that combines “hydrangea” and “dirigible” in honor of their large, floppy blooms that seem to float above the leaves. Imagine my surprise to find the poem I excerpted above, where the poet describes hydrangeas as “zeppelins” — since zeppelins are a kind of dirigible and the poem evokes the same “floating above the garden” imagery I was going for with “hydrangible.”
About half of the hydrangibles got frozen out a couple of years ago, during two weeks of plant-destroying deep-freezes we had around the winter holidays. When spring came, those that didn’t die behaved very badly, producing only a handful of new stems pointing in all sorts of odd directions (as hydrangeas often do), and developing only a few anemic flowers. This year, though, they did quite a bit better — so I got them to pose for a couple of photo-shoots and their flowers were big and floppy enough that I could refer to them as hydrangibles once again.
While working on the photographs, I wondered if I could pretend there was a real-life people-moving vessel that might be called a “hydrangible” — since, you know, it’s quite common that our plant names (even imaginary ones) are based on something else. So I went to Adobe Firefly (which I wrote about here and here, and haven’t used since) and asked it to generate “a photograph of a dirigible that’s covered with hydrangea flowers, flying over the city of Atlanta” — and it produced for me these five images…
… which obviously prove that hydrangibles capable of flying people around in the clouds actually do exist, because, hey, the internet “knows” about them. Now I just need to figure out where these hydrangibles take off from so I can go for a ride, and would especially like to fly over (and hang out at) the fanciful lake and park in the last image, as I didn’t even know about that lovely body of water and greenspace smack-dab in the middle of downtown Atlanta.
