Tag: lilium stargazer

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.

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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!

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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.

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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!

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