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Tag: hemerocallis fulva

Orange Double Daylilies (2 of 2)

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From A Passion for Daylilies: The Flowers and the People by Sydney Eddison:

“Daylilies are native to China, Japan, Korea, and Eastern Siberia. Long before the birth of Christ, they were mentioned as an anodyne for grief in the religious writings of Confucius, China’s greatest philosopher. By the fourth century A.D., they were being used to relieve physical as well as mental pain. A Chinese herbal of the period makes extravagant claims for juice extracted from their roots: ‘It quiets the five viscera [the heart, lung, liver, kidney, and stomach], benefits the mind and strengthens the will power, gives happiness, reduces worry, lightens the body weight and brightens the eye…. Now people often collect the young shoots and serve as a pot green. It gives a pleasant feeling in the chest.’ In addition, the thick roots were boiled and eaten like potatoes.

“It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that daylilies became cherished ornamentals for the pleasure garden. In a Chinese gardening treatise published in 1688, author Chen Hao-tzu describes a plant with leafless flower stalks (scapes in daylily parlance) and arching foliage: ‘The flower when it first appears, resembles the beak of a crane, then it opens with six radiant segments, yellow dusted red, opening in the morning and withering by night.’ This description still fits some of the old-fashioned daylilies.

“No one knows by what circuitous path these plants came to Europe in time to be recorded and described in medieval herbals…. However they traveled, the ubiquitous orange daylily (Hemerocallis fulva) and its yellow companion, the lemon lily (H. Lilioaspbodelus) had arrived in Europe by the sixteenth century. A hundred years later, this same pair crossed the Atlantic with pilgrims and took root in American soil. From the eastern seaboard, the tougher, more adaptable tawny orange daylily moved west with the settlers, earning itself the name of homestead lily. And during the late nineteenth century, a root or two of this hardy species wound up alongside the porch of a midwestern farmhouse. Here, it became an object of interest to young Arlow Burdette Stout, whose mother had planted it….

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a handful of breeders using half a dozen wild species were producing yellow and orange hybrids. Today, hundreds of hybridizers working with an enormous gene pool are producing a thousand new cultivars a year. (Cultivar combines the words cultivated and variety to distinguish garden plants from naturally occurring species.) Previously unknown colors and designs are now emerging from nurseries and backyards all around the country, thanks to Dr. Stout and Hemerocallis fulva.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of a double form of the daylily Hemerocallis fulva from Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Orange Double Daylilies (1 of 2).

Unlike those in the previous post, where they were planted as part of a precisely designed garden memorial…

… I found the daylilies in these photos in one of the “wild” sections of the property, where several different kinds of plants and flowers live together in a transitional space, arranged and layered for visual appeal. Their presence among densely planted variegated grasses produced interesting contrasts between the bright orange flowers and the green and white or gray stripes in the background, while that grass hid most of the daylily stems and leaves. I took about half of these photos using the gray/green grass as a backdrop, then changed positions so I could focus more closely on individual blooms.

The impressive height of these daylilies meant that they were easy to photograph not far below eye level, so zooming in reveals more of the structure and detail than I could capture from a distance in the previous post. Here we get a better look at not only the blended shades of orange, yellow, and red present in each flower, but also get a closer look at their structure. The layered petals appear to unfold like ribbons, with lower petals terminating in flat or rectangular shapes, and upper petals drawn to a point that is common to many daylilies, including the single form of Hemerocallis fulva itself. In early stages of blooming, each flower has a few upright petals surrounding and protecting its young stamens and pistils, which fold down to the lower layers as these reproductive segments strengthen and mature.

The shades of orange in these daylilies are remarkably stable; you can increase or decrease saturation substantially in Lightroom and still end up with an image that contains adequate contrast, detail, and color variation. That’s actually very common among orange flowers, whose colors — spectrally wide-ranging between yellow and red — are densely packed into the flower petals’ cells. Imagine, if you will, how these colors don’t just exist at the surface level, but at multiple microscopic levels stacked on top of each other. Luckily, our eyes (and our cameras) detect and perceive all these layers, even if they don’t actually register to our vision as multi-layered or multi-dimensional.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Orange Double Daylilies (1 of 2)

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From “Hemerocallis Fulva” in The Heirloom Flower Garden: Rediscovering and Designing with Classic Ornamentals by Jo Ann Gardner:

“The Orange or Tawny Daylily is a vigorous species with large flowers about 5 inches across — orange with darker zones and stripes in shades of red and mahogany — giving the effect of a tawny color, preserved in the Latin epithet fulva….

“In Asia, where Daylilies have been cultivated for thousands of years, they are regarded as a source of food and medicine. The flowers are picked fresh and fried in batter or dried and used to thicken soups. Preparations from the plant are used to relieve jaundice and dropsy and to reduce fever and pain….

“In Europe and the New World, the Daylily has always been cultivated for its beauty alone.
The Lemon Yellow was a special favorite in English cottage gardens. Both the Orange and Yellow Daylily were brought to the New World during the 17th century and widely cultivated across the land. The more vigorous Orange Daylily remains a faithful signpost to many heirloom plant collectors, who know that where it grows, an old garden cannot be far away.

“Until the late 19th century, only these two species were grown in America. By 1860 a double form of the Orange — crowded with petals — was introduced from Japan, where it had been noticed by European travelers since about 1712…. In 1897 a new Orange, ‘Maculata’, was added to the pool of Daylilies, offering later bloom and larger flowers with a deep bronze patch on each petal….

“By the 1920s, America had become the leading center for hybridization, the goal being the creation of ever-new types with larger flowers of diverse forms — wavy, frilled petals, for instance — an expanded color range, and a longer blooming period. The old Orange, naturalized along roadsides across the country, was one of the leading contributors to the breeding process….”

Hello!

This is another one of my favorite daylilies to photograph at Oakland Cemetery — which is probably something I can say about all the daylilies that I’ve ever photographed as well as those I haven’t photographed yet, but will.

It’s been three years since I dwelled with this particular batch of flowers. The last time was in 2022 (see Summer Daylilies (2 of 3): Double-Double Orange-Orange), when I determined that they were a double form of a more common yellow/orange daylily called Hemerocallis fulva.

Here’s where they live:

This is an especially distinctive space among the many distinctive spaces throughout Oakland Cemetery, notable for much more than the orange double daylilies standing tall at the back. When I took this photograph, the steel chain was in place to discourage entry; but in the past, it’s been accessible (note how there’s a rust stain on the top step, where they chain often sets) so I’ve walked up the steps and sat on the stone bench at the right of the photo.

From that position, the space demonstrates how it’s so unique. The use of grass throughout the space is unusual; and that, along with the placement of shrubs and trees around the edges, creates a sense of visual and auditory isolation from the rest of the property. That your sight is contained within its boundaries, and external sounds are effectively muffled to near silence, actually mirrors the design of the entire cemetery, with its acreage surrounded by hefty brick walls that separate you from the busy streets outside. It’s like a microcosm of the rest of the cemetery, one with its own independent architecture. And that architecture includes the use of plants whose appearance will vary with the seasons, since much of the greenery you see here will exhibit rich fall color in October and November.

Many of the designed plots at Oakland Cemetery contain elaborate sculptured memorials — statues, mausoleums, or other structures representing the people memorialized there and aspects of their lives. Note, however, this one contains only a single memorial stone (right in front of the daylilies) — which doesn’t necessarily convert the square into a straightforward garden, but suggests that its designers favored the creation of a contemplative space rather than a simple (or even complex) memorial. From the bench, there’s a sense of peace that unfolds while you sit there — one that is still quite powerful even if you can only observe it from the outside.

Some of the irises I photographed for my iris project made an appearance here a few weeks earlier, their remnants visible among the green leaves surrounding the daylilies. This daylily cultivar may have been bred to increase its height (while doubling its petal production), as some of its stems extend nearly four feet above ground. This was convenient for The Photographer, who — unwilling to jump the chain and invade the space (this time anyway) — used a zoom lens from outside positions to get a closer look at the flowers.

With a zoom lens and limited sight lines, I had to take whatever lighting conditions I could get, which meant that some of the flowers had a lot of sunlight on them when I took their pictures. The effect — which I didn’t notice until I got home — was that the saturated orange from the flowers combined with the yellow that is natural to sunlight caused the flower petals to act like reflectors casting yellow and orange throughout the entire scene. The effect is similar to results you could intentionally achieve in a photography studio, using a yellow or gold reflector to bounce light from the reflector onto your subject.

This level of warmth in an image of orange flowers isn’t necessarily wrong, nor is it uncommon. See, for example, all these images of double orange daylilies that display similar colors throughout the subjects and backgrounds. But I knew — from what we like to call “real life” — that while the stone behind the flower could have been that sandy brown color, it wasn’t. Much of the stone near these flowers was typical of Oakland Cemetery’s stonework: it’s gray to very light blue, with textures that alternate between the two colors. The leaves, too, didn’t seem quite correct; they should have been a more unadulterated green than the yellow-green in this image.

So these two characteristics of the image told me that some color correction was appropriate, to more accurately represent the colors that I saw. In this case, only a simple white balance adjustment coupled with reducing orange and yellow saturation a smite or two was necessary to remove the color cast, clarify the colors, and create better contrast between the blue-gray stone, the green leaves, and the star of the scene: the daylily’s rich orange.

When I last photographed these daylilies in 2022, this was the only family of them on the property. This year, however, I subsequently stumbled across another colony whose flowers were close to eye level and weren’t visitor-inhibited. That enabled me to get some much closer shots of individual flower blossoms and a few photogenic groupings, which I’ll feature in the next post.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Daylilies, Lilies, and Amaryllis on Black (1 of 5)

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From “Attention and Design” in The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford:

“When viewing two-dimensional representations, whether photographs, paintings, or screens, we are not able to move around and gain different perspectives on the scene depicted…. [We] normally orient ourselves in our physical environment according to an axis of proximity and distance, and this basic orientation is not available when the world appears through mediating representations.

“According to Alfred Schutz, the spatial categories we employ in everyday life arise from our embodiment. A person is ‘interested above all in that sector of his everyday world which lies within his reach and which arranges itself spatially and temporally around him as its center.’ Relative to this center, one carves up the surrounding world at its egocentric joints: right, left, above, below, in front of, behind, near, far. The world within ‘actual reach’ is basically oriented according to proximity and distance. This reachable world ’embraces not only actually perceived objects but also objects that can be perceived through [attention].’ Thus it includes, for example, things behind you that are close but currently out of sight. The content of this sector is subject to constant change, due to the fact that we move around.

“This idea of orientation around a bodily center helps us to see how the attentional environment that has emerged in contemporary culture is novel and somehow centerless. Recall that the basic concept at the root of attention is selection: we pick something out from the flux of the available. But as our experience comes to be ever more mediated by representations, which remove us from whatever situation we inhabit directly, as embodied beings who do things, it is hard to say what the principle of selection is. I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me.

“But where am I? … Is the mouse-click a kind of agency? This gesture, emblematic of contemporary life, might be seen as a fulfillment of the thinned-out notion of human agency we have signed on to when we conceive action as the autonomous movements of an isolated person who is essentially disengaged from the world.”

From “You and It” in Collected Poems of Mark Strand by Mark Strand:

Think what you like, but
It really is the same. Oh,
You can walk around on it
All right and, watching the speed
With which it falls back, fool
Yourself into thinking it changes,

Or, standing with your head
On it, think it above you
With all the grass of summer
Hanging down, mindless
Birds at your feet, your blood
Rushing up to greet your shadow.

But move, and only the angle
It is regarded from changes.
Turn up the stones and they
Reveal what has always been
Uppermost. Put them back?
And you are where you started.

Hello!

This is the first of five posts (yikes!) where I’ve taken the daylily, lily-lily, and amaryllis photographs that I’ve been posting over the past few weeks, and re-rendered some of them on black backgrounds. I wasn’t originally planning to do that because it can be so time-consuming (imagine spending about an hour on each one of these images, and doing that for 76 of them) — but with this long streak of temperatures seeping above 100 degrees every day, I’ve been keeping the outdoors outdoors and myself indoors more than usual.

For these five posts, instead of searching for quotations or verses about the flower families as I usually do, I decided I would look for quotations about photography that are not from books about photography, and poems about the summer season. The excerpt from the poem “You and It” by Mark Strand above seemed to capture, coincidentally, my experience of photographing flowers — as I often photograph each one from many different angles and positions, and most of them don’t survive the “cutting room” where I try to eliminate all but the ones I’m most technically satisfied with that represent what I saw, when I saw it.

And the poem echoes the rather obtuse selection from Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head, in that both describe actual experience in the world, and the way we position our physical bodies to capture variations on that experience. Crawford, of course, is contrasting our worldly experiences with our virtual experiences, raising questions about the latter — something I also did when I quoted him in one of my earlier posts on using AI image generators: Irises on Black / Notes On Experiences (2 of 2) and its companion post Irises on Black / Notes On Experiences (1 of 2).

I think it may mean something that after spending a lot of time with Adobe Firefly for those two posts, I subsequently lost interest in it, feeling mostly the kind of digital angst Crawford implies above. I’ll probably try again once its capabilities are incorporated into a Photoshop update (it’s currently available in a beta version of Photoshop, which I’ve decided not to install) because I’d like to see what happens if I apply some other creative styles to my own photographs. It might be interesting, for example, to render my own images as watercolor paintings, or in a Hudson River School style, or perhaps as antique botanical illustrations. I’ve tried each of these with Firefly, but since I can’t yet do any of that with pictures I’ve taken, the results lack meaning and just seem like a flood of randomly generate images of no personal significance. So, for now, I’ll stick with my black backgrounds — which I can do with the tools at hand, and (hopefully!) result in images that you find compelling.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Early Hemerocallis (Daylilies)

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From “Hemerocallis” in Flowers and Their Histories by Alice M. Coats:

“There are not very many species of Day-Lily — about thirty in all, including several which are probably only sub-species of the ubiquitous H. fulva, whose range extends from Europe to China. In that flowery land it was cultivated at a very early date, and appears in a painting of the twelfth century; it was called Hsuan T’sao, the Plant of Forgetfulness, because it was supposed to be able to cure sorrow by causing loss of memory….

“In England both H. fulva and H. flava were cultivated before 1597, and called by the early botanists Lilly-Asphodills or Liliasphodelus, because they seemed to embody the characteristics of both families — a lily flower with an asphodel leaf. H. flava, the yellow day-lily or Lemon Lily, ‘is a native of the northern Parts of Europe; it gilds the Meadows of Bohemia; and in Hungary perfumes the Air, in some places for many Miles’. It is very hardy, flourishing even under trees and in towns, and was recommended for London gardens as early as 1722. The foliage is reported to make excellent fodder for cattle, particularly for cows in milk….

“Hemerocallis comes from two Greek words meaning the beauty of the day.”

From “Daylily” in 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells:

“The botanical name [hemerocallis] comes from the Greek hemera (day) and kallos (beauty) because the flowers’ beauty lasts but a day, which is also why they are called ‘day lilies.’ They were named by Linnaeus, and the names ‘fulva‘ for the tawny lily and ‘flava‘ for the lemon lily are rare instances where he named specific plants by the color of their flowers.”

From Day Lilies by L. S. Asekoff:

One by one, the unborn
announce themselves — risen from green shadows
day lilies tremble into light.

Hello!

It was only last year that I learned that daylilies are no longer classified as lilies — yet I still associate them with an invented summer time period I call “Lily Season” since they tend to bloom along with true lilies such as Easter Lilies, Madonna Lilies, and the lily-like Amaryllis family’s Swamp Lilies or Crinum. My Lily Season doesn’t have a set start date, though: it starts when I post my first batches of lily and lily-adjacent images, so this year begins on July 6 and will end when I run out of photos. Imaginary seasons can be very flexible.

I took the photos below — along with some of the other varieties I just mentioned, which I’m working on — in the first half of June. They seemed to have bloomed earlier than usual this year, but even though I was iris hunting at the time, I didn’t want to miss them. “Plants behaving strangely” is sort of a theme for gardens and gardening this year (see, for example, Dogwoods with White Blooms (1 of 2)). I’m still puzzling about the lingering effects of a long and unusual deep freeze we had at the end of 2022 — which did a lot of damage to plant life throughout the area — that was followed by a second one a few weeks later that did further damage to plants that were just beginning to recover. Even this late in the year, I see quite a few plants in my own garden that produce new leaves, lose them, then produce another set. I have read elsewhere that some plants — especially struggling shrubs like mine — may need another season to return to their normal cycles, since they’re clearly not dead but not exuberantly alive either.

I’m hoping that there are additional batches of daylilies and true lilies this month, but recurring stormulous weathers have kept me away from the gardens for the past few weeks so I hope my hope is not misplaced.

“Hemerocallis” — the daylily’s genus — is a favorite new word for me, one I only learned when researching their botanical characteristics and history. It looks like a word I might make up, but — alasp! — I did not. Sometimes I holler it to The Dog just because I like how it sounds. And somehow he got it associated with his playtime… so now when I yell “Hemerocallis!” — he runs off and gets his ball…. 🙂

Try this: Let “Hemerocallis” roll off your tongue once or twice the next time you’re out at your favorite speakeasy; it’s sure to impress all your friends!

Or not!

Thanks for taking a look!

Summer Daylilies (3 of 3): Red, Orange, and Yellow

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From “History of the Daylily” in The Illustrated Guide to Daylilies by Oliver Billingslea:

“The modern daylily is a highly evolved plant, the ancestors of which were species native to the temperate parts of central and northern Asia. According to the American Botanical Society, the genus consists of some 13-15 species of evergreen, semi-evergreen, and dormant herbaceous perennials found growing along the margins of forests, in mountainous areas, marshy river valleys, and meadowlands in China, Korea, and Japan, and occasionally into Manchuria and eastern Siberia….

“The ancient Chinese, in particular, used the species for food and medicine. The flower buds were palatable and nutritious, and the root and crown often served as an effective pain reliever…. Because its flowers were bright and cheerful, the daylily also came to symbolize for the ancients an outlet for grief, its primary effect an emotional one….

“Two species brought to America were the orange H. fulva, commonly known as the ‘roadside’ or ‘homestead’ lily, and H. flava, the ‘Lemon Lily’ of early twentieth century gardens.”

From Colour in My Garden (1918) by Louise Beebe Wilder:

“Among the most lovely and useful of yellow flowers are the Day Lilies (Hemerocallis). Their colour is very pure and fine, and runs the scale from mild lemon colour to strong fuscous orange. The flowering season of the different varieties covers a period of nearly three months, and few plants grow with such hearty good will in all sorts of positions….

“Yet I seldom see any save the common Lemon Lily (Hemerocallis flava) made any great use of in gardens, and this, though truly lovely, is usually relegated to out-of-the-way places where more capricious things have scorned to grow. The Orange Day Lily (Hemerocallis fulva) we commonly see decorating the roadside near to some old garden, but its colour is magnificent and it is well worth a place within the garden.”

Hello!

This is the last of three posts featuring photos of daylilies I took at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens earlier this summer. The first post is Summer Daylilies (1 of 3): Burgundy and Yellow; and the second post is Summer Daylilies (2 of 3): Double-Double Orange-Orange.

The orange daylilies below are the “single” variation of the double Hemerocallis fulva that I showed in the second of these three posts.

“Fuscous” — from the second quotation above — is a fun new word, don’t you think? I’d never heard it before, though perhaps it’s commonly used in Victorian-era botanical culture (or not). It means “dark” or “dark-hued” so let’s use it in a sentence. Here’s the Atlanta weather for today, which prompted me to increase the brightness on all these photos before posting them:

It was a fuscous and stormy day.

Pretty cool, huh?

Thanks for taking a look!