"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Tag: lilies

Stargazer Lilies, Stargazing (2 of 2)

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From “Attracting Attention” in The Reason For Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives by Stephen Buchmann:

“Here for you to identify is a living organism, much loved and admired. Having no say in the matter, millions are bought and sold, removed from their natural habitat for the pleasure of the buyers, living fast, dying young, without offspring — then discarded without a second thought. Sometimes they enjoy a better fate, free to live outdoors, reproducing prolifically, enjoy full life spans, their beauty on display for all to see.

“The smell of this organism is a hauntingly sweet fragrance, once inhaled, never forgotten. The appearance is dramatic. A long, tumescent rod, topped by a broad, gray-purple tip oozing a clear, sticky liquid, juts suggestively from the center of a yellow, starlike throat…. Surrounding the long rod, six yellow-green arms project from the starlike mouth, the bulging, orange packages at their tips….

“Lacking legs or wings, this regal-looking organism is grounded — unable to move during its entire lifetime — and thus dependent upon animal intermediaries. If its concentrated appeal is able to reach out, it is the bees or perhaps other animals that transport its sperm helping it to reproduce. Earthbound and immobile, it casts a gaze upward, to the stars, as it whispers a name sending a message of fanciful dreams, optimism, and unlimited possibilities. What am I?

“A flower of course, but more specifically a Stargazer lily. The Stargazer, which came to market in 1978, is the result of many years of crossbreeding efforts by the eccentric genius lily-breeder Leslie Woodriff, who wanted a beautiful, fragrant, spotted lily that would hold its blooming head proudly high, unlike any other horticultural lily of the time.”

From “Green Finger Secret” by John Lyons in The Second Anthology of Poetry at the Albert, edited by John Bosley and others:

Sunlight caught you
on hands and knees
sniffing stargazer lilies,
moving with wonderment
among mosses and ferns
in cool places diffused with green light.

Later you returned home,
looked in the mirror;
your face was smudged orange
with lily pollen;

you smiled,
turned to water a plant
you once found tangled in your hair.
“Laughing grass,” you called it.

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring Stargazer Lilies from my garden; the first post is Stargazer Lilies, Stargazing (1 of 2). Here we take many close looks at the flowers’ intricate details, from a day, in real life, when we ingested an intoxicating amount of Stargazer Lily aroma while taking photos.

As is often the case with the flowers I photograph, I spent some time trying to learn about the Stargazer’s history. Since many of the books I use for digging into the past are not recently-published, there wasn’t a lot of information to be unearthed about this flower. So I turned to my imaginary research assistant ClaudeAI and asked for a summary of the plant’s background and how it got its name. Here’s what Claude told me — and it was a nicely written overview, so I thought I’d share the whole thing:

Stargazer lilies are a relatively recent addition to the world of flowers. They were first bred in 1974 by Leslie Woodriff, a lily breeder in California. Woodriff was known for his work with oriental lilies and was always striving to create new, exciting varieties.

The development of the Stargazer lily came about as Woodriff was trying to breed a lily with upward-facing flowers. Most oriental lilies at the time had downward-facing or outward-facing blooms. He wanted to create a lily that would “look at the stars,” hence the name “Stargazer.”

The name also has a poetic quality, evoking the image of someone gazing up at the night sky in wonder. This ties in well with the flower’s upward-facing blooms and its striking appearance.

Woodriff created the Stargazer by crossing Lilium auratum and L. speciosum, two species of oriental lilies. The result was a flower that combined the best qualities of both parent plants: the large, showy blooms of L. auratum and the hardiness and petal recurve of L. speciosum.

The Stargazer quickly gained popularity after its introduction. Its unique appearance, strong fragrance, and relatively easy cultivation made it a hit with both commercial growers and home gardeners. It became particularly popular in the cut flower industry due to its long vase life and dramatic appearance.

Today, Stargazer lilies are one of the most recognizable and beloved lily varieties worldwide. They’ve also been used to breed other lily cultivars, continuing Woodriff’s legacy of horticultural innovation.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Stargazer Lilies, Stargazing (1 of 2)

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From “Stargazer Lily” in Anthology of Flowers by Jane Field-Lewis:

“It’s been dubbed a floral celebrity for its striking good looks and, in plant terms, its relative youth, having only been introduced in the 1970s. The stargazer is a hybrid lily of the Oriental group, specially adapted so its blooms face skywards but still retaining the perfume of its cousins.

“Part of its popularity with the flower-buying public is the stargazer’s ability to rise to almost any occasion. Need to say sorry? The stargazer can. Congratulations? Its associations with aspiration, wealth and prosperity should do the trick nicely.

“It can also call on the lily family’s wealth of cultural and religious symbolism over the centuries, from ancient Greece, where it was linked to sexuality, to early Christian paintings, where it represented chastity and purity. It crops up in folklore, too, especially in determining the sex of an unborn child.

“Nowadays the flower has made common parlance. We talk about ‘gilding the lily’ to refer to unnecessary ornamentation or over-embellishment because it is viewed as a benchmark for idealism and flawlessness.

“Nothing, William Blake once wrote, can ‘stain her beauty bright.'”

From “Stargazer Lilies” in All of You on the Good Earth: Poems  by Ernest Hilbert: 

The vase itself is a spent shell casing —
Lush petals pour out like surging steam,
Lacquered battle-bent cuirasses, photograph
Of fireworks in humid July skies, racing
Into an umbrella of spark and cream,
Falling as luxurious glittered ash.
The arrogant smudged stamens jet high
And proud like vapor trails, the whole bouquet
Unfastening like a vast nebula,
Long pour of poisonous gas; arms fly
Out and fade, and the soft leaves, in late day,
Aim down, oar blades in air above Formica,
Limp and breathing in a dry universe,
Wet pennants, green ghosts, long surrendered spears.

Hello!

Returning to my garden once again, here we have the first of two posts with photographs of Stargazer Lilies, whose official name — Lilium ‘Stargazer’ — is uniquely not-confusing. These lilies made a cameo appearance in a previous post along with my Witch’s Hand Daylilies, but here we leave the daylilies backstage and promote the Stargazers to a well-deserved starring role. The first image below will give you a sense of how the lilies — living in two pots in my back yard — produced this boisterous batch of blooms in June and July.

I bought the Stargazers in 2023, but it was too late in the season for them to produce more than the single blooms they sported at the garden center — so I never took their pictures. I was pretty excited (possibly even surprised, as gardeners often are) to see them return this year and give me something striking to zoom in and out on with my camera. The images in the galleries below progress through a few of their large unopened flower buds to studies of the fully opened petals from various angles and distances. In the second post, we’ll do more of the same, and we’ll also push our faces right into the centers of the flowers. Since the Stargazer was “specially adapted so its blooms face skywards” and mine actually do that — this will be very easy and fun to do!

I liked the poetry I included up-top because it’s one of those unusual poems about a flower that mentions the flower only in the title. You’re left to decide, instead, how and to what extent the poet has described the flower accurately, or metaphorically, or with flourishes of realism and metaphor. Words and phrases like lush, lacquered, fireworks, spark and cream, glittered ash, vapor trails, oar blades, and spears — among others — all produce a mental image that reflects the flowers’ colors, texture, structure, scattered pollen, leaves, and even aroma. You might also gather a contrasting war-and-peace metaphor as well as reflections on the Stargazer’s life cycle ending in a vase on a kitchen countertop, from the poem as a whole.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Turk’s Cap Lilies (2 of 2) / Notes on Spots

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From “Lily” in Flowers in History by Peter Coats:

“In [John] Gerard’s time (1545-1612) lilies were certainly widely cultivated in many gardens; the most popular variety being the Madonna, L. candidum (its descriptive name was given it by Virgil), a native plant of southern Europe. This is said to have been first grown in England in 1596, though it must have been known by sight from Italian paintings many years before that. In 1596, William Shakespeare would have been thirty-two, at the height of his powers. In that year he was engaged in writing Romeo and Juliet, and the first sight of a Madonna lily must have been inspiration indeed to someone who loved and felt for plants as Shakespeare did….

“Or it may have been the martagon — the Turk’s Cap lily — which Shakespeare saw when he was a boy in Warwickshire, as there is a theory that the martagon, alone among lilies, is indigenous to England, as it is to northern Spain, Italy and Asia Minor.

“Until the last century, there were only a few types of lily cultivated in Western gardens and it is remarkable in the annals of the flower that the appearance of new varieties in Western gardens always coincides with the discovery and development of distant and little-known parts of the world.”

From “The Lady of the Flowers” in Acadian Ballads and Lyrics in Many Moods by Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton:

Up and down the garden walks
Every day I watch her go,
Past great clumps of nodding stalks
Crowned with blushing crimson roses,
Or with lilies, white as snow.

Lilacs dashing on the air
Persian odors, in delight
Bend and almost touch her hair;
On the bough where he reposes
Sings the oriole with his might….

Easter lilies crave the touch
Of her carmine-tinted lips —
Finer flowers by far than such
As bedeck the fields immortal,
Whose soft fragrance Juno sips.

Down a pink-plumed peony row
Into purple iris lanes,
Onward still I see her go,
To a Turk’s-cap-lilied portal,
Where perpetual coolness reigns….

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photographs of Turk’s Cap Lilies (Lilium martagon) from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post is Turk’s Cap Lilies (1 of 2), where I described the physical location in the gardens where these lilies grow.

It’s been a little over six years (six years!) since I published one of my earliest posts about learning to use Lightroom’s features, covering the software’s spot removal tool. In that post — Before and After: Red Brick with Ivy — I described using the tool to remove white spots from a simple photograph of a red brick wall framed with ivy. Then, after gaining more experience, I posted another example — Before and After: Bernadine Clematis, An Illusion — where I explained how I had learned to use it to not only remove spots, but repair damaged sections of flower petals and accurately blend their colors and textures. In both posts, I noted how time-consuming it could be to remove spots and heal blemishes, but that the work was often worth it because it noticeably improved the photos.

This kind of image cleanup has remained part of my workflow for all my images. Most of my photographs are closeups or macros of flowers and plants, taken out in the wild, where all manner of smudgies attach themselves to my subjects. Clumps of pollen, dust and debris, cobwebs, and photobombing spiders, ants, and other bugs are the most common distractors — so I use my first post-processing pass through every batch of photos to eliminate them.

These spot removal tools work like this: you use the mouse to select or brush over a spot, then release the mouse button, and Lightroom attempts to replace the spot you selected with something else from the image. What you selected is called the target, and the replacement Lightroom chose is called the source. Its choice of source, however, has always been hit-or-miss. With photos of flowers where even the smallest sections contain many different textures and colors, it would often fail to choose a source that matched in color or blended textures properly. This meant that I often had to manually reposition the source, or go over it multiple times until Lightroom provided a satisfactory match. Imagine — using some of these photographs as an example — that the raised parallel lines running down the center of individual flower petals were broken at several points after removing bugs from them — and you can visualize what happens when Lightroom selects a source improperly.

Then, in May of this year, Adobe released an enhancement to the spot removal tools called Generative Remove, which uses the AI capabilities from Adobe Firefly (see Irises on Black / Notes On Experiences (1 of 2) and Irises on Black / Notes On Experiences (2 of 2) where I wrote about Firefly) to help with the removal of unwanted objects from photographs. With this enhancement, the target-source approach I just described (and the frustration of using it) no longer applies. Instead — when you select something to remove from the image — Lightroom blends elements of your photo with what it interprets would have been behind or would have surrounded the spot you selected, if the spot hadn’t been there to begin with. Amazing, yes? Let’s look at a couple of examples!

Here are two photographs from this Turk’s Cap series, as they looked when I took them…

… where I didn’t like the mass of stems and leaves on the left side of each photo. Very distracting! In the olden days of six months ago, I would have probably just cropped them out and been content with a larger view of the flower. In neither case would I have been successful changing the image with the original spot removal tools — since for each element you try to remove, you have to manually choose something from the photo to replace it with.

With Generative Remove, however, a new kind of sorcery presents itself. Imagine now using the mouse to brush over the entire left quarter of each of these images and letting the Remove tool do its work. When I did that, here’s where I ended up…

… and here’s what’s happened. In the first photo, Lightroom has removed the stems, leaves, and flowers from the image — and filled the space by extending the stone behind the plants (which was actually there, in real life, how did it know?), and matched the stone’s textures and colors. In the second one, it has done something similar: it has removed the mass of stems and leaves behind the flower, and has created a blended background that matches the area nearby. It also adjusted the stems and leaves of the (now single-stemmed) flower, with new leaves.

While I would normally try to avoid composing pictures so changes like this would be necessary — by shifting my shooting position or zooming in closer — I framed these two like this just to see what I could do with Generative Remove. Here you can compare the images before and after I used Generative Remove by clicking on the first image and paging through.

But wait! There’s more! And this may be my favorite discovery….

Consider again this image of the spotty brick wall, that I mentioned above. With Generative Remove, I no longer have to select each individual spot and double-check that Lightroom chose an acceptable replacement before moving to the next one. Instead I can select all of the white spots one after the other (fastly!), press a single “Apply” button and go play ball with The Dog for a couple of minutes. When I return, Lightroom will have removed all the spots (I’ve tried as many as sixty) in one pass — and, in most cases, without making any mistakes matching colors and textures.

How sweet is that!?!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Turk’s Cap Lilies (1 of 2)

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From “Lily: Symbol of Purity” in The Story of Flowers and How They Changed the Way We Live by Noel Kingsbury:

“‘Lily’ is one of the most confusing flower names, since a vast number of unrelated plants are landed with it. There are about 100 species of true Lilium, although the boundaries are much disputed by botanists….

“L. candidum, is the Madonna lily of Christianity, although it is known from the frescoes of the Minoan civilization, some 1,700 years bc. Its origins are obscure, since it was widely traded by the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions. The purity of the white of its flowers made it a great favourite for religious symbolism, and the association with the Virgin Mary became particularly strong.

“The other lily of pre-modern Europe, L. martagon, is a very different plant, its dark pink, spotted petals reflexing in a way that flowers very rarely do. Dubbed the ‘Turk’s cap’ lily after the turbans worn by the Ottomans, it was extensively cultivated in the gardens of the wealthy after its introduction in the late sixteenth century.”

From “Study in Still Life” in Oars in Silver Water and Other Poems by Hildegarde Fried Dreps:

I have planted lilies, but will they all grow well with me?
Will they like the glitter of this north-looking hillside?
Will they like the rude winds, the stir, the quick changes?
Would they not have shadowy stillnesses, and peace?

Lilium chalcedonicum, calla aethiopica,
Lilium auratum, candidum, the martagon,
Lilium speciosum, pardalinum, umbellatum,
Amaryllis, convalleria, nerine.

All these lovely lilies, I wish that they would grow with me,
No other flowers have the texture of the lilies,
The heart-piercing fragrance, the newly alighted angel’s
Lineal poise, and purity, and peace….

Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photographs of Turk’s Cap Lilies (Lilium martagon) from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. These lilies all grow in the same place — and have expanded their presence in the past few years — in front of a fifteen-foot tall monument marking the grave of Patrick Connely (1791-1851), about whom I could learn very little. I did, however, find a reference to his grave site with some photographs of the monument and a short bio. This page shows the monument in a nine-year-old picture — and you can see a few stems of these lilies, which now surround the monument on all sides.

“Turk’s Cap” is one of my favorite flower names, even as its use may include several different kinds of lilies and a few other flowers. It fits these flowers well, with the Turk’s Cap “feature” mirroring the shape of a turban or similar head-covering made of fabric that winds from a circle at the bottom toward the top, often giving the impression of being a spiral built from multiple layers of cloth. And the Turk’s Cap Lilies are apparently very smart — because in addition to imitating human fashion, their flower petals contain sets of dark spots or dots that (though they may appear randomly placed) are believed to guide insects toward the juicy, pollinatory parts of the flower.

They’re like runway lights, but for bugs!

Thanks for taking a look!

Discovering Regal Lilies (2 of 2)

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From “Revelation” in Oars in Silver Water and Other Poems by Hildegarde Fried Dreps:

The Regal Lilies in my antique bowl
Reveal a song,
I see them etched upon an ancient scroll
With leaf and prong.
A simple altar and a sculptured tomb
Display their grace…
I find them stitched upon an old heirloom
Of fragile lace,
They crown the Virgin, babe, and fireside shrine
With halos bright,
And in each human heart they are divine
Symbols of light.

And peace they bring into an aching breast
Sweet as the lilies are, so sweet the rest.

From “Study in Still Life” in Oars in Silver Water and Other Poems by Hildegarde Fried Dreps:

Regal lilies in a bowl
Whose fragrance feeds my soul,
Blend with two waxen candles
Tipped with gold.
And I compare
The ivory pages of an open book
That lay serenely there.
Close by,
A Buddha calmly sits
With desire in his mystic eyes,
He gazes at the waxen candles
Because no light flames
From their golden tips.
All this is light to me!
Born of earthly fire…

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photographs of Regal Lilies (Lilium regale) from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post is Discovering Regal Lilies (1 of 2).

As you proceed through these photos, you may notice how I varied the lighting — from backlighting, to sunlight from above, to mostly shade, to bright sun with shady backgrounds, and finally to light filtered through nearby trees. Pause for a moment and consider how different kinds of lighting alter your perception of the flowers’ colors and shadows, but also how the texture of the flower petals looks different in each of these conditions.

Thanks for taking a look!