“Lantana montevidensis (Trailing Lantana, Weeping Lantana): Trailing lantana is a prostrate plant with brittle, twiggy, spreading branches. The leaves are rough and rather dull, but they are almost completely obscured by the wealth of rose-lilac flowers which appear in compact heads and literally cover the foliage. The plant is almost everblooming — from spring, through summer and fall, and even into the winter months in protected locations….
“Trailing lantana is perhaps most effective when planted at the tops of low walls and allowed to cascade over them. It is beautiful in hanging baskets, and may be trained on trellises to provide design patterns. Although the plant is an excellent ground cover, it loses its leaves in even mildly cold areas and is killed to the ground by freezing temperatures. It grows back readily from the roots the following spring, if properly mulched….
“Trailing lantana tolerates cold to central Texas and South Carolina. It grows well in Florida and the Gulf States, the southwestern desert areas, and the warm subtropical regions of California. [It] loses its leaves in cold spells and dies to the ground with frost…. If cut to the ground, the plant will grow back readily the following spring.”
From “Flowering Plants for Color on the Ground” in Color for the Landscape by Mildred E. Mathias:
“Lantana montevidensis (Trailing lantana): This species of lantana has long trailing stems with small leaves and bears clusters of lavender-purple flowers in profusion throughout the entire year. It is considered tender but is sometimes seen in interior valleys in sheltered locations. It stands much drought and neglect and is one of the most satisfactory and ornamental plants for slopes in areas with a favorable climate. It is best in full sun and is attractive when draped over a wall…. For a spectacular bloom over a whole year it is difficult to surpass the bush or trailing lantanas.”
Hello!
Once upon a time in October, I posted a series of photos of a flowering vine I later identified as Lantana montevidensis, which I thought was either new to Oakland Cemetery or had previously been undiscovered by The Photographer. The plant — originally named after one of its native regions, Montevideo in Uruguay — is known for its trailing or weeping habits and its ability to bloom through multiple seasons. Yet I was nevertheless surprised to see that it was still producing flowers on November 16, six weeks after I originally photographed it (see Lantana montevidensis, Weeping or Trailing Lantana) and after we’d had a few days of below-freezing temperatures early in the month.
Compared to its condition in the previous photos, it’s true that the plant now has fewer blossoms, they’re a bit smaller, and some of the vine’s leaves are extra-dark green, likely from frost. Yet the fact that there are blossoms at all, they’re mostly undamaged by the cold, and there are still buds waiting to turn into flowers is quite a demonstration of this plant’s hardiness. Its sunny physical location probably helps, and the stone and brick around it would reflect ambient heat to keep the plant warm when temperatures drop. I’m intrigued to see if it’s resilient enough to continue growing and flowering through the winter, or will flower in those very early spring days when hardy plants like quince, plums, and the first daffodils mark the transition away from winter.
From “Lantana montevidensis (Weeping Lantana)” in Annual Gardening by June Hudson:
“The weeping lantana, from South America, is treated in much the same way as the shrub verbena. However, for the best standards, run the plants up a stout post and train the shoots to cover an upturned basket….
“From a distance the resulting growth when in bloom gives the effect of a rosy lavender waterfall and is very beautiful. Keep pruned to shape throughout the season. Feed heavily with liquid feed to encourage a high density of bloom….
“Very effective in raised beds cascading over a wall or in Victorian-theme gardens. [These] are excellent plants for cool greenhouses, conservatories, and sun rooms. A white form, “Alba’, is also available.”
“Native of South America and widely planted in the South as a perennial and in the North as an annual. Especially well adapted for plantings in the center-city with stressful conditions. Performs best in full sunlight and a well-drained soil but tolerates a wide range of site conditions. Fast rate of growth. Propagated by cuttings in moist sand or vermiculite and seeds….
“Nearly vinelike drooping stems for a low-mounding, loosely informal mass with medium-fine textured foliage. If unpruned, forms a rambling ground cover. Excellent perennial planted at top of retaining walls and other raised plantings. Rosy-lilac flower heads, each one inch or more across. Verbenalike. Profuse flowering summer through autumn….”
Oleander, palm, hibiscus, yucca, Sepulveda Boulevard, the Security First National Bank, To tell us we have arrived at Los Angeles. Ahead the Verdugo hills, reminiscent of Tuscany, Terra-cotta coloured and serrated ridge Of old earthquake country. Here begin eucalyptus, peppers, camphor trees, The cuttings carpeted with purple lantana….
Now Inglewood Park cemetery, where lies The dust of a small child of my blood and bone, A child wise and sad beyond his years, Who once looked long into my eyes, Was frightened by what he saw, Something beyond tears…. The airport-bus billows along Florence Avenue, Past Realtors, Refrigerators, Records, Eat with Joe, Every solicitation of eye and ear and taste. Not a breath in the air. Sweat pours down behind the ears. The scarecrow palms gesticulate Above the desolation of houses. We journey In gathering dusk towards still sun-tipped peaks.
Hello!
Various forms of Verbena are common at Oakland Cemetery, but their presence there doesn’t typically attract my attention because most of those I encounter don’t produce notable flowers, or produce clusters of flowers scrunched atop each other that are difficult to isolate for a photogenic image. They’re often used as ground cover, or to add visual contrast to scenes where other plants and flowers dominate, and I imagine if I trolled through my own photos I’d find plenty of images where Verbena variants play a supporting role. When I went on my first autumn aster-hunt a couple of weeks ago, though, I noticed these verbena-looking plants tumbling over stone walls near the property entrance, and the prominent purple flowers caught my eye, as purple flowers often do.
As some landscaping work was going on near this spot and my views were partially blocked by one of the city of Atlanta’s Giant Garden Trucks, I took most of these photos from a distance with a zoom lens and, through the camera’s viewfinder, didn’t get a clear look at the flowers. But I took a series of photos anyway, waited for the truck to rumble away, then took a few more — all the while thinking that even though this was Verbena, I might end up with some interesting photos anyway.
Several days later, I started working on the photos, having randomly picked this one to start…
… and thought: “Gasp! This isn’t Verbena after all — it looks like Lantana!” As I’ve grown multiple Lantana variants on my own property — including flashy annuals as well as perennials like Mary Ann Lantana and Chapel Hill Yellow Lantana — I recognized the flower shape immediately. Equally compelling were the color and shapes of the leaves, the way the flowers were connected to the stems, and how buds that were just barely opening look like a collection of tiny pillows arranged in a circle. These wee pillows, especially, are quite unique among flowers and definitely a sign that you’ve encountered something other than generic Verbena. Even though it’s true that Lantana is a species in the same family as Verbena (Verbenaceae), these visual differences are among the reasons Lantana has its own distinct name and is typically not referred to as Verbena.
But the fact that this looked like Lantana presented me with a mystery for several reasons: It was blooming on October 6, late for Lantana in my experience, with many flowers still waiting for their turn; the flowers were purple, and I’d never seen purple-flowered Lantana; and there is no other Lantana at Oakland Cemetery, not a single stem. I always assumed Oakland avoided Lantana because it’s often considered invasive in many regions including the Southeast where, counterintuitively, you can often buy it at grocery stores. And, I reckoned, Oakland’s caretakers may have chosen to avoid the maintenance it needs: it spreads wildly during the hottest part of the summer, then over the fall and into winter its stems become hard pointy spears that get so tough you might need a saw to cut them back. It’s easy to lose control of it; the perennial variants really have to be contained within some hard boundaries (mine are bounded by rows of stone), and cut as close to the ground as possible in spaces where people, small animals, or even children might bounce around in the garden and could get impaled!
After uploading a few of my photos to PlantNet, I learned that this plant was Lantana montevidensis — originally named after one of its native regions, Montevideo in Uruguay, and tagged with the common names Weeping Lantana and Trailing Lantana. Though in this case it’s not a component of an Oakland memorial display, it’s quite suitable as a plant providing visual interest and depth, along with early fall color, since it tends to bloom long after summer flowers have left the landscape but before most of the colorful asters and mums have started blooming in volume.
Both “trailing” and “weeping” (in the sense of a Weeping Willow) describe its growth patterns accurately: the plant expands along the ground in multiple directions, and the weight of the flowers causes it to spill over walls. Even though some of the plants will imitate their Lantana relatives and push upright for a while (see the last photos below), you can tell that those are arcing downward and will eventually join the rest of the pack on the ground. As the plant dies off toward winter, it’s most likely going to become a desiccated vine, rather than developing the unmanageable woody spikes that upright Lantana varieties produce. I think I’ll need to check its condition on my next visit to the property, and perhaps keep an eye on it over several years to see how it progresses. It’s always exciting to discover a new-to-me plant on my photoshoots, something that gives me a chance to explore yet another line of fresh botanical research — and it will be interesting to see if Oakland has enough success with this Lantana montevidensis that they expand its presence to other sections of the property.
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.
“[Lantana] is not particular as to soil, provided the exposure is sunny, and also that the soil is well supplied with moisture at least until a fair growth has been made. When well established the plants do not seem to mind drought, and continue bright and attractive in the hottest weather. They should not be transplanted out in the open before danger of frost is over. If the old plants are wanted for propagation, cut them back and transfer to pots early in September, and when they start into new growth the soft wood will furnish cuttings that root easily. Keep young stock in a warm position through the winter months, and repot in April….
“Save the old plants, after frost has nipped their freshness late in autumn, prune severely back, remove them indoors, giving them a temperature anywhere above 40 degrees, and with a little attention and fresh soil, every plant will be a perfect specimen, covered with blooms in May.…
“Gardeners train them into fine standards, as prim and shapely as need be.”
“This family consists mainly of shrubs and trees, and many herbaceous members of the family are slightly shrubby in growth. Most of them have square stems and leaves in opposite pairs, and most of them are distinctly aromatic, having a strong smell when handled or crushed, sometimes a pleasant scent, and in some cases a disagreeable odour. One of the best known species in this country is Lantana camara, a straggling, very prickly bush, originally introduced from America; this has spread widely over large areas of the country and is now declared a noxious weed. It has quite pretty, circular heads of orange and red flowers followed by black berries, but it is held responsible for a number of cases of cattle poisoning. It is also encroaching rapidly onto grazing lands, and an effort is being made to eradicate it entirely.
”Lantana angolensis is an erect, unbranched plant of up to fifty centimetres in height, flowering early in the year, and common in woodland clearings and on waste land. The stems are square, hairy, and woody towards the base, and the leaves grow on short stalks, either in pairs or in whorls of three around the stem. They are narrowly oval with a slight point, evenly toothed around the edges and hairy on both surfaces. The tiny, bright mauve flowers are borne in axillary and terminal clusters, half a dozen or so in a cluster surrounded by a ring of green bracts, the whole on a short, hairy stalk. More noticeable than the flowers and more attractive are the juicy, bright purple berries which follow them; these are much enjoyed by many kinds of birds.”
Hello!
This is the last of three posts featuring lantana from my garden; the first post is Lantana camara ‘Mary Ann’ (1 of 3) and the second post is Lantana camara ‘Mary Ann’ (2 of 3). Here I adjusted cropping and recast some of the previous photos on black backgrounds. They always look like colorful pieces of candy to me when rendered this way; and, as it turns out, there are lantana varieties with “candy” in the name — including cotton candy, candy crush, and candy-candy!
From “Invaders of the Plant World” in The Plant Hunters by Carolyn Fry:
“One unwelcome side effect of the myriad transfers of plants and seeds around the world is the translocation of ‘invasive’ species. Plants arriving on foreign shores with an agreeable environment and a lack of predators have often quickly become naturalized. Those also encountering a ready pollinator or suitable means for dispersing seeds have been able to spread rapidly. In some cases, the new conditions have made the plant much more successful in its new locale than in its indigenous habitat. When a plant becomes disruptive to native flora in a particular location, it is deemed invasive….
“The brightly colored flowers of Lantana camara made it a popular garden flower in Europe when it arrived there from Central and South America. As the colonial powers expanded into the tropics it, too, became widely dispersed. Today, it is considered a problem in at least 50 countries. Since it was introduced to South Africa in 1880, it has invaded natural forests, plantations, overgrazed or burnt veld (grassland), orchards, rocky hillsides, and fields….
“It arrived on Floreana Island in the Galapagos Islands in 1938 as an ornamental.Since 1970, it has replaced Scalesia pedunculata forest and dry vegetation of Croton, Macraea, and Darwiniothamnus. Two of the three populations of Lecocarpus pinnatifidus and one of Scalesia villosa, both endemic to Floreana, the smallest island in the Galapagos, face elimination if the invader continues to advance. If Lantana reaches the crater area of Cerro Pajas, it will endanger the last remaining nesting colony of dark-rumped petrels on the Galapagos Islands. Thorny thickets of Lantana are so dense they would prevent the birds from making their nesting burrows at the breeding site.”
If you spend any time researching lantana, you’ll quickly find that in various parts of the world, it’s considered a seriously invasive species — owing in part to its rapid growth, entangling brush, and how its brush becomes woody and hard to cut as seasons progress and it spreads. The quotation above from Carolyn Fry’s The Plant Hunters above is one example, where she describes how it has impacted the Galapagos Islands flora, and it was my first encounter with a description of the plant’s potential impact on a avian species, the seabirds known as petrels.
As I’ve photographed and written about lantana each year, I’ve tried to learn a bit more about it with every post. If you’d like to peruse my other coverage of its invasiveness, its appearance in literature and film, and different ways I’ve photographed it, this tag — lantana — will take you to all my prior posts.
