From “The Lily Family and its Relatives” in The World of Plant Life by Clarence J. Hylander:
“The true Lilies… include some hundred north temperate species of large and beautifully flowered plants, of which the United States has a generous share. Few plants are so delicately and strikingly colored….
“Many of the native species are cultivated for their showy flowers, but in addition there have been introduced many familiar varieties. The common Easter Lily, grown to such an extent in Bermuda, is a native of China and Japan; its waxy-white blooms hardly need description. The Madonna Lily, a white-flowered species from southern Europe and Asia, is thought to be the lily so frequently referred to in the Bible; its flowers are smaller than those of the Easter Lily….”
“L. longiflorum comes originally from the Ryukyu Islands, and until the entire lily crop was wiped out by disease, was much grown in Bermuda. In the author’s youth, Easter or Bermudan lilies, as they were then called, were used by the thousand for party decoration, and in the ‘thirties, white lilies, with blue Echinops Ritro, the Globe thistle, arranged in square glass accumulator jars, were as popular as floral decoration as hosta leaves and Alchemilla mollis are today. L. longiflorum, as classic a lily as the Madonna, with its perfectly proportioned flowers with delicious scent, is still an appropriate flower for any occasion.”
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This is the second of two posts featuring summer-blooming Easter Lilies (Lilium longiflorum) from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post is Long-Legged Lilies (1 of 2). As with the previous post, I found these lilies growing in odd places throughout the gardens, mostly on single stems, except for those toward the center below — where their very tall stems sported a cluster of three blossoms rivaling the height of tree branches nearby.
“Native to a slender slice of East Asia, stretching from Japan to the Philippines, Lilium longiflorum is charming, fragrant and decorative. What’s more, it punches way above its weight on the floral world stage due to its adoption as the ‘Easter’ lily, a symbol of hope, purity and resurrection in the Christian faith….
“The large flowers are delightful, with perhaps half a dozen carried atop a stem clad in glossy, dark green leaves. Each long, white trumpet is palest green at the base, fading to white, while the central stigma, stamens and anthers are a faded, buttery hue.
“Left to its own devices, L. longiflorum and its cultivars would bloom in summer — usually between June and August in much of the northern hemisphere. But to perform at its best at Easter, the bulbs are forced. This is done by keeping the potted bulbs in cool temperatures – they need a period of chill in order to flower — and once they are in growth, the amount of light and warmth they receive is moderated to control bloom time….
“When potted Easter lilies have finished flowering, you can plant them out into the garden. Acclimatize the plants gradually before removing the pot, loosening the roots and settling them into the soil. The stem-rooting bulbs may take a couple of years to recover, but should flower at the normal time when they are ready.”
From “It Took Me a Moment to See” by Michael Moss in Minnesota Writes: Poetry, edited by Jim Moore and Cary Waterman:
North on Minnesota 59, hungry for the company of strangers, I drive past the barren golf course, the airport deserted at dusk, the abandoned missile silos, Oak Lake and Lower Badger Creek to the Third Base Supper Club; concrete deer grazing the dead lawn, pink Styrofoam flamingoes framing the Mediterranean door…
On the juke box Johnny Cash sings I’m a Hero, then Jerry Lee Lewis rocks Great Balls of Fire. Two migrant workers, a man and a woman, get drunk on Gallo, forget their food, their shack, the sound of their truck, forget their children’s voices, the reason they crossed the border. Wheat farmers in starched white shirts break bread with their huge hands. A late Easter lily blooms on the bar….
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I came across a single white lily flower at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens in early June, the blossom sitting all by itself at the top of a very long stem, much of it hidden from view until I walked around the headstones. There were no other flowers right nearby, so it commanded attention — and got me wondering if I could find others hiding out all by themselves around the property. This post — and the next one — feature variations of Lilium longiflorum that I found in odd places, all with a single flower or small cluster of flowers that had stems so long they appeared to be hanging from trees or emerging from shrubs nearby. In one of the photos, I got photobombed by a lily sneaking a peak; if you find that one and enlarge it, you might think the lily is smiling at you.
I’ve often been hesitant to call these “Easter Lilies” — their common name — because it seemed to me that “Easter Lily” ought to refer to a flower that bloomed much earlier in the season… you know, around Easter. So I was glad to learn about the blooming difference between those we see in early spring — typically in pots or vases — and those we see in gardens later during the summer, as described in the quotation at the top of this post. I guess the right approach would be to call them Easter Lilies when we see them around Easter, but use their full name Lilium longiflorum when we see them during the summer. Maybe we could call the summer versions “Lily Longlegs” since their stems are so long, or follow the origins of their scientific name (where longi means “long” and florum means “flower”) and dub them “Lily Longflower” instead!
(P.S. It’s possible that some of these are Madonna Lilies (Lilium candidum) rather than Lilium longiflorum, but it’s hard to differentiate between the two given the angles of some of my shots.)
“This large family is found in all parts of the world, but especially in the northern temperate regions. It varies so much that some botanists think it should be split up into several families.
“Roses are probably the best known and best loved of all garden flowers. But, though they have given their name to the family, they form only a very small part of it. Much more important to man are the fruit-bearing trees: apple, pear, cherry, plum, peach; and the berry-covered vines: strawberry, black-berry, raspberry. Almond fruits look much like apricots, but their seed is the nut we eat. Rose fruits (hips) are edible and were used in England during World War II as a valuable source of vitamin C.
“Medicines are derived from a number of the plants in this family: almond, wild-cherry, peach, blackberry. The leaves of burnet are a delicate addition to salads. And the wood of some trees — cherry, apple — is valuable for furniture and engraving.
“Our gardens and countrysides are full of beautiful members of the family…”
Light splashed this morning on the shell-pink anemones swaying on their tall stems; down blue-spiked veronica light flowed in rivulets over the humps of the honeybees… this morning I saw light kiss the silk of the roses in their second flowering, my late bloomers flushed with their brandy. A curious gladness shook me….
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This is the second of two posts featuring a variety of early summer roses from Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens. The first post is Some Perfect Roses (1 of 2). For the photos in this post, I zoomed in for a close look at some of the details of individual flowers, filling the frames with rose petals and buds.
I was recently amused to learn that what we call rose “thorns” are technically not thorns at all, but the botanically correct term is “prickles” — because there is a scientific difference between thorns, spines, and prickles, described in some detail in the article How Did a Rose Get Its Prickles? Well, maybe so, but rewriting the famous Poison song to Every Rose Has Its Prickles doesn’t quite work, does it?
“Roses are the favorite flower of the Christian and the Muslim worlds: varying hugely in color (but famously never blue), shape, and scent, and are loaded with cultural significance and symbolism. The ancestral rose, Rosa gallica, may have been pink, but it threw up genetic combinations for red forms early and was stable enough to be still very important in rose breeding. It dominated the gene pool of the rose until the nineteenth century….
“‘Old’ roses flower only once every year, in early summer. The Chinese R. chinensis, however, carries genes for repeat flowering, so its introduction brought about a revolution in rose breeding. However, the repeat flowering habit was recessive, which limited the breeding possibilities in the early nineteenth century, in addition to which hybrids between this species and others were usually sterile….
“[A] fertile cross was achieved in France in the 1830s and gave rise to the hybrid perpetual group. As well as flowering only once, ‘old’ roses were also only available on a spectrum from crimson to white. It was not until the 1820s that the first yellow rose species were introduced to Europe and the United States, but it took many decades before successful hybrids were created….
“The French Joseph Pernet-Ducher (1859- 1928), regarded by many as the greatest rose breeder of all time, created the first yellow roses; his hybrid tea class ‘Soleil d’Or’ of 1900 was the first ‘real’ yellow, as opposed to the wishy-washy yellows of previous attempts….
“Importations of roses from China were frequent during the nineteenth century; often they arrived on cargo ships bearing tea, which led to the roses which were bred from them to be dubbed ‘tea’ roses. Many had a touch of yellow, were well scented, and, unlike the flat blooms of traditional European roses, had a slight point in the center of the flower. This point gave each flower a very different character to what people were used to — and made the flower look particularly attractive just as it was about to burst out — a bud that spoke of promise as well as beauty. “
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met. All tenderly his messenger he chose; Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet — One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret; ‘My fragile leaves’, it said, ‘his heart enclose.’ Love long has taken for his amulet One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get One perfect rose.
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The roses featured in this post (and the next one) played a supporting role in one of my previous posts (see Orange and White Irises — and Creamsicles!), where I got them to pose as background color for the irises. You can see one of those irises in the first three images below, and get a sense of how many many-colored roses formed a border around them.
But with their long and complex cultural history, the roses deserved some attention of their own — so after finishing up my iris photography, I took their pictures too. They all may have been new plantings in this section of Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens, or I may have just passed them by or missed their blooming season in previous years — but they were a delight to see and the combinations of yellow, red, white, and orange colors were fun to photograph. Plantnet identified the roses in these photos with several possible variant names, including Austrian Copper Rose, Wichura’s Rose, Tea Rose, and French Rose — which probably reflects the color varieties as well as the varying flower structures you can see in the photos.
The quotation from Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding at the top of this post provides a widget of early rose breeding history, including mention of an “ancestral rose” called Rosa gallica from which most of our modern roses were hybridized and developed. Rosa gallica presents a simpler form than the roses in this post — typically with a single row of flower petals similar to a dog rose or even anemone flower — but its genetic characteristics made it possible to create variants with other colors, flower forms, and blooming frequencies. In The Rose: A True History, author Jennifer Potter describes this rose as “the foundation species from which most of our garden roses have evolved.”
Now you know a little about the origin story of roses!
“The Blackberry Lily spreads wide its distinctly spotted tepals (look-alike petals and sepals) as if to draw attention to its short-lived beauty, as each blossom lasts only one day.
“A native of China, the Blackberry Lily has escaped cultivation to become widely established in North America. Showy flower sprays appear in the midst of fan-shaped clusters of long, narrow, flat, medium-green leaves. Pear-shaped seedpods form in late summer. When ripe, they split to reveal a cluster of shiny blackberry-like seeds, the source of the plant’s common name; the spots, of course, lend another name — Leopard Lily. A species of a different genus also goes by the name Leopard Lily; Lilium pardalinum, native to California, has somewhat similarly spotted tepals that curl. Its range does not overlap with that of Iris domestica.”
“This genus is native to China, Japan and northern India. The plants look like iris, with fans of quite wide leaves. Given a moist, humus-rich soil they will grow outdoors in temperate zones and should survive most winters, but they are not long-lived plants. There is just one species, B. chinensis, which usually grows to 60cm (2ft) when in flower.
“The inner and outer petals are very similar except that the inner ones are slightly smaller, and the flowers open flat, facing upwards. The petals are orange, spotted with red at the base, and are attractive but not showy. This plant is called blackberry lily because the seed pods open to reveal shiny black seeds.”
Here’s one of the images from the galleries below, where you can see some of the unique features of Iris domestica that add to its photographic charm but also serve important botanical purposes. As the flowers age, the petals fold and twist in on each other, forming a tight spiral that retains much of the color from the underside of each petal. This change may occur within a few hours of blooming, as Iris domestica flowers often open and close within a single day.
Coincidentally, they share this trait with daylilies — and their aging process is another example of flower senescence, as I described in one of my previous posts, Red and Yellow Daylilies. This is a complex chemical and biological process, one that enables the plant to conserve energy and retain water, as the spiraled flowers will consume less energy and require less water. The plant can then redirect that energy and water toward the growth of other flowers and stems.
In the classic iris book The Genus Iris by William Rickatson Dykes, the author describes the process for Iris dichotoma, a closely-related iris that exhibits the same behaviors:
“This Iris probably produces more flowers on each stem than any other Iris. The stem is much branched and even the branches often issue in pairs at the same point. Moreover from each spathe as many as five or even more flowers are produced in succession. Each flower, unfortunately, lasts only a few hours and often only opens in the afternoon… However, such is the profusion of flowers that there are usually four or six to be found open at once on each plant.
“Another peculiarity of this Iris lies in the fact that it does not begin to bloom until about the middle of August and then continues in flower for about three weeks or a month. Each flower as it dies twists up in a curious spiral and often falls off together with the ovary between which and the pedicel there is an articulation.”
Sounds complicated, of course, but here we don’t worry too much about chemical and biological mechanisms we don’t (yet!) fully understand. You can click the links above for definitions of the three key botanical terms, if you like, but the process (somewhat speculatively) amounts to this:
The aging flower twists in a spiral, possibly to help the plant conserve water and energy. The position of the twisted spiral at the top of the seedpods helps protect the pods from insect or weather damage, until the pods themselves begin to dry out and open to reveal black seeds inside (the behavior that led to the common name “Blackberry Lily”). The seeds are then distributed by any of several seed dispersal methods, including gravity, wind, rain, and creatures like birds or passerby people.
All this enables the plant to make new plants — so I can take pictures of them again next year. Plants are both smart AND photogenically cooperative!
