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

Tag: lilies

Fourth of July in America, 2021

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From Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism by William H. Goetzmann:

“In America… revolution has taken place by means of a peculiar process, that of absorption through selection — of people, of ideas, of images, of experiences, of things. Europe was at first an obvious source of inspiration because of its antique heritage, which made American history seem to be part of European, or ‘world,’ history. Very quickly, thanks to the sea traders of the Atlantic coastline, America’s inspiration became global, and the world itself acted as a gigantic museum from which Americans derived their education in self-identity. This process… requiring constant redefinition of America’s physical orientation in terms of changing concepts of global geography and a multitudinous observation of world lifestyles and values, has never ceased….

“Lacking a history and a character, Americans almost inadvertently created them early in the nineteenth century out of world history, world lifestyles, and world ideas…. America’s unity and national character arose, from a generous, indeed limitless, cosmopolitanism that embraced men and ideas from all nations.”

From Remarks by President Biden in a Naturalization Ceremony with Essential Workers and Military Service Members on July 3, 2021:

“You have each come to America from different circumstances and different reasons and 16 different nationalities.

“But like previous generations of immigrants, there is one trait you all share in common: courage. It takes courage to get up and leave everything you know… for a new start in the United States of America.

“So I want to thank you all for choosing us, and I mean that sincerely. Thank you for choosing the United States of America, believing that America is worthy of your aspirations, worthy of your dreams.

“Making this journey, you have done more than move to a new place. I’ve often said that America is the only nation in the world founded on an idea. Every other nation in the world is founded on the basis of… geography or ethnicity or religion. You can define… almost everyone else based on those characteristics, but you can’t define America…. We’re an incredibly diverse democracy.

“But there is one thing that does define us a country: We were founded on an idea that, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… Life, Liberty, [and] the pursuit of Happiness.’ It sounds corny to Americans, as we learn this in grade school and high school.  We’ve never fully lived up to it, but we’ve never, ever, ever walked away from it….

“Every generation opens that aperture a little bit wider.”

Hello!

I had never seen a Naturalization Ceremony — from which I excerpted part of President Biden’s speech above — before, but caught yesterday’s just as it was starting. It was quite moving to watch, especially given Biden’s characteristic style, describing everyone there — every new American citizen — as an equal to every other citizen, including the President of the United States. If you would like to read his remarks, click the link above the quotation; or, you can watch the entire ceremony here: President Biden Holds Naturalization Ceremony at White House.

As has become my habit, I’ve assembled a few photos — in red, white, and blue… and this time, with a pair of bees gathering pollen from a freshly opened blue Rose of Sharon bloom — and presented them in the galleries below.

Thanks for taking a look! and Happy Independence Day!

White Lilies (2 of 2)

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From “Some Beautiful Ways of Growing Lilies” in Lilies for English Gardens by Gertrude Jekyll:

“The greater number of the Lilies look their best when seen among shrubs and green growths of handsome foliage. Their forms are so distinct as well as beautiful that they are much best in separate groups among quiet greenery — not combined with other flowers. This general rule is offered for consideration as applicable to Lilies of white, pink, lemon-yellow, or other tender colourings…. The White Lily, also, which loves sunlight, is so old a garden flower, and seems so naturally to accompany the Cabbage Roses and late Dutch Honeysuckle and other old garden flowers of the early days of July, that one must allow that its place in our gardens is in combination with the other old favourites.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring white lilies only, from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. I took most of these photos from behind each lily or from a side view, to intentionally emphasize each bloom’s emergence from its long, curved stem. Quite elegant, no? 🙂

The first post is White Lilies (1 of 2).

Thanks for taking a look!

White Lilies (1 of 2)

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From Lilies for English Gardens by Gertrude Jekyll:

“If one might have only one Lily in the garden, it would have to be the beautiful old White Lily that has been with us since the end of the sixteenth century. Although we may take it to be the oldest of its kind in cultivation, we do not by any means know all about its wants and ways. For of all Lilies known in gardens it is what is called the most capricious. When we say a plant is capricious, it is, of course, a veiled confession of ignorance, for whereas we may well believe that the laws that govern the well-being of any plant are more or less fixed, and with most plants we can make sure of the right way of culture; in the case of this Lily we cannot find out what those laws are; and though it has been more than three hundred years in our gardens, we can only give general advice as to where and how it will do well.

“A plant so lovely should be tried in every garden.”

From a multi-day lily hunting expedition at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, I separated out photos of white lilies and “painted” their backgrounds black. Below is the first to two batches.

Thanks for taking a look!

Epic Lilies (3 of 3)

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From Lilies by Naomi Slade:

“The Victorian passion for botany is legendary. Daring chaps dashed around the globe and new species poured into gardens to the delight and amazement of all who beheld them.

“But gather plants together and, sooner or later, hybrids will emerge; sometimes naturally but often as a result of an irrepressible human desire to improve on nature. While fabulous, lilies had gained a reputation for being challenging and capricious to cultivate. They were exciting; they were expensive; and they were quite likely to die on you after a couple of years. Inevitably, they attracted a certain type of well-heeled horticultural brinksmanship, right up until amenable Lilium regale emerged, bringing down both prices and the level of skill required to cultivate this most desirable of flowers.”

Below is the last batch of photos of my Tiny Epic Asiatic Lily, a few more black-background renderings. The previous posts are:

Epic Lilies (1 of 3)

Epic Lilies (2 of 3)

Coming soon: more lilies!

With spring winding down, the summer varieties are starting to appear — and I’ve made several trips to Oakland Cemetery’s gardens to hunt down and capture some of the rather astonishing varieties that grow well there in large, cultivated spaces (as opposed to pots in my back yard). With a tropical rainstorms hitting my area over the next few days, I’ll be sticking pretty close to home, so will be sorting and processing white ones, yellow ones, red ones, orange ones, and blends of pink and red lilies that (I think) are new to the garden — or at least new to me. Stay tuned…

… and thanks for taking a look!

Epic Lilies (2 of 3)

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From Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden by Eleanor Perenyi:

“The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the golden age of plant collectors: David Douglas who brought the Douglas fir, the Monterey pine and many other conifers to England; John Jeffrey who followed Douglas to the American West; E. H. [Ernest Henry] Wilson who gave us the Chinese dogwood, the Regale lily and the dazzling Davidia or dove tree that in bloom seems to be aflutter with white birds; Reginald Farrer, George Forrest and dozens of others who changed the face of our gardens….

“Plant collecting was a dangerous business then. Douglas was torn to pieces by a wild bull in Hawaii; Farrar met his end in Upper Burma; Jeffrey vanished into the California gold rush; Forrest died of heart failure on his seventh expedition to Yunnan. And since that time the floral storehouses of western Asia have become if anything more difficult to penetrate….

“We hear no more of famous botanist-explorers or newly discovered specimens for the garden. Today it is the hybridizers who revolutionize our plantings, and of these none has wrought more changes than the American lily breeders in the last thirty years. We can now be said to dominate this field, though the lilies themselves have come from every part of the earth.”

From 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells:

“Ernest Wilson, called ‘Chinese Wilson’ because he explored so extensively in China, just escaped sacrificing his life to lilies. He went twice to China, the second time in 1910, to collect the regal lily. He had gathered an enormous load of lily bulbs and was on his way home with them when his mule train was caught by an avalanche. He jumped out of his sedan chair just before it was hurled down a precipice. His leg was shattered by a falling rock. There was a mule train coming the other way, and the only way it could pass without, perhaps, causing another avalanche was for Wilson to lie on his back while more than forty mules stepped over him. He reached safety but was left with what he called a ‘lily limp.'”

I don’t normally repeat quotations from one blog post to another (in fact, it’s a “thing” for me to double-check my blog to be sure I’m not repeating quotes) — but I did this time because of the references to Ernest Wilson, a British explorer and plant collector active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first quote expresses the risks such explorers took as they scoured the world botanically; the second describes in more detail an occasion where one of them almost lost their lives in search of flowering plants.

I honestly never knew such things had occurred; it’s becoming a fun learning experience for me to begin seeing the historical through-line represented by the lives of botanists and naturalists. What I began by simply looking for neat quotations about the flowers I was photographing seems to be morphing into a new (for me!) view into history from an unfamiliar (and unexpected) perspective. I always start a new post by looking for quotations, and now end out digging a little into the lives and times of people I come across, gathering bits of new information in the way I like to learn — a rather messy accumulation that I don’t worry too much about sorting out but just pile on instead.

From a Western or European perspective, the period (roughly) from 1800 through the early 1900s represent the culmination of the “Age of Exploration” — which also coincided with expanding European empire, the rise of the United States as a world-influencing power, the explosion of technological and scientific inventions, and the gradual (though debatable) increase in leisure time. Botany, as a science, has undoubtedly ancient roots; but it coalesced and connected to consumer culture and leisure time during the 1800s as more people became capable of outfitting their homes and gardens with new, and even exotic, plant species discovered by the plant explorers or developed by horticulturists. You may have never thought about it this way, but the fact that you (if you’re a gardener, or even if you’re not) can acquire plants in handy packaging to populate your garden or feature in a kitchen window has a direct historical connection to the plant explorers of the past.

Or, in other words, your trips to a nursery or Home Depot to buy plants and gardening supplies are actually a late-Victorian era invention. Isn’t that something?

With a thankful nod to Ernest Wilson: The photos below are a second batch of Tiny Epic Asiatic Lilies from my garden (the first photos are here: Epic Lilies (1 of 3)), rendered with black backgrounds rather than bricks from my courtyard.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!