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

Tag: lycoris squamigera

An Amaryllis Family Gathering (2 of 4)

 , , , , , , , 0

From “The Surprise Lily” in Beautiful at All Seasons: Southern Gardening and Beyond by Elizabeth Lawrence: 

“In midsummer, when heat and drought have drained all color from leaf and blossom — in spite of all of the city water that is poured on them — the surprise lily rises mysteriously from the ground. One day there is nothing, and the next there is a tall, pale stem that grows to about three feet and then produces, at the top, a circle of flowers of the most luminous and delicate pink….

“The surprise lily is not really a lily. It is a Lycoris, as lovely as the nymph it was named for, and it belongs to the amaryllis family. It is sometimes called Hall’s amaryllis for the New England doctor who brought it back from a Japanese garden nearly one hundred years ago….

“Although it has been in gardens so long, and is one of the easiest bulbs to grow, the surprise lily has never become common…. The bulbs do their growing in late winter when the wide, gray-green leaves come up. The time to plant new ones, or to dig and divide old clumps, is when the leaves die. The bulbs need not be dug unless you want to increase the supply. They will go on blooming indefinitely in the same spot. The flowers bloom whether they are watered or not, even in the driest season, and no spraying is required….

“I think the other reason that surprise lilies are so little known is that their specific name, squamigera, is so long and so ugly. It means scaly, which sounds equally unattractive, and means that with a hand lens small scales can be seen in the throat of the flower — a fact of no interest to the gardener. Nevertheless the Latin name will be needed when the bulbs are bought, for they will be listed by the bulb growers as Lycoris squamigera.”

Hello!

This is the second of four posts with photos of an Amaryllis family gathering that I attended during the summer. The first post is An Amaryllis Family Gathering (1 of 4) where I introduced the three plants I photographed for this four-part series: Crinum bulbispermum, Lycoris squamigera, and Lycoris incarnata.

In this post, we see a second planting of Lycoris squamigera, located in a separate area of Oakland Cemetery than those I showed you previously. While the environmental conditions were similar — filtered sunlight for plants growing among larger greens — these either got more sun or were a little older, as most of the plants had produced multiple stems topped with flowers in bunches. They are, however, otherwise identical — and they were mixed among plantings of Lycoris incarnata, which you can see in the backgrounds of the first three photos. This landscape of pine bark and stubs of grass — which in previous years was mostly barren — is now punctuated with the alternating colors of the Surprise Lily and the Peppermint Surprise Lily, creating a fine, fetching scene.

While I was working on the Lycoris squamigera photos, I noticed that many of the flower petals had a bit of blue at their tips, almost as if someone had dabbed the edges with a watercolor brush dipped in blue. Because I took the photos in low light, I thought it might be an artifact present in the image, something that I see occasionally with low light and any Sony camera I’ve used. I ended up leaving the blue color intact rather than trying to remove it, though, when I discovered this botanical drawing by Matilda Smith (who I wrote about in an earlier post about Regal Lilies), which shows the same blue color in similar locations.

I cropped the drawing a little to make it fit in this post better, but you can see the full version on Flickr, or see it in a Curtis’s Botanical Magazine issue from 1897 here. I thought it was fun to confirm that my color choices were accurate using an image published 128 years ago from one of that era’s preeminent botanical artists.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Surprise Lily is one of this plant’s common names, a name that recognizes how the plant drops all its leaves and becomes a dormant stalk before it produces any flowers. But it apparently it has other surprises, as the excerpt above suggests: unlike most bulb plants that are typically divided and transplanted at the end of their blooming season, Surprise Lilies should actually be split up between the time they drop their leaves and the time they start blooming. I had never encountered this unusual maintenance sequence before, which made me wonder if Lycoris has still more surprises in store.

Thanks for taking a look!

An Amaryllis Family Gathering (1 of 4)

 , , , , , , , , , 2

From Garden Bulbs for the South by Scott Ogden:

“The most prolific and abundant crinum in Southern gardens is a distinctive species with tapered, blue-green foliage. Each leaf reaches as much as two feet in length and three or four inches in width at the base. These wrap around each other to form a thick column topped with gracefully arching fountains of foliage. In the center of the rosettes, there are usually a few thin, wispy, blue leaves just emerging; this unique appearance makes this crinum easy to distinguish wherever it grows….

“All crinums bear peculiarly large, fleshy seeds, which makes most varieties easy to raise. If left on the surface of the soil in a humid, shady position, the thick, green embryos germinate and form perfect miniature bulbs. These usually send down long roots, which pull the young plants deeply into the soil. Three or four years’ growth on rich earth will mature the fledgling bulbs enough to begin flowering. Because of its prolific seed bearing, Crinum bulbispermum has sired numerous hybrids: this species is the forerunner of many of the old garden flowers of the South.

“The succulent leaves of Crinum bulbispermum stand more frost than most other crinums, and this is the best species to plant where freezes regularly penetrate the ground. The bulbs thrive anywhere in the South and are hardy in protected situations as far north as Denver and Long Island. Blossoms are most prolific in April and May but come almost any season if stimulated by rains. In sheltered gardens C. bulbispermum flowers welcomely through December and January.”

From “Lycoris” in Garden Bulbs in Color by J. Horace McFarland:

“One of our overlooked hardy Amaryllids, Lycoris squamigera, sometimes listed as Amaryllis Halli, would well repay more attention from discriminating gardeners. The name Lycoris refers to some unknown Greek lady. The species Squamigera was introduced to American gardens from China by Dr. G. R. Hall, a New England physician who spent considerable time collecting plants in China and Japan.

“Dr. Hall stated that the dainty pink trumpet flowers were highly regarded by the Chinese. Several other species are included in the genus, among them L. sanguinea, with reddish orange flowers.

“Lycoris sends forth strap-shaped foliage in early spring, which matures and disappears in early summer, only to be followed by naked stems, which often rise three feet, producing, in August, small clusters of soft pink lily-like blossoms that are delightfully fragrant…. Lycoris will thrive in partial shade and has been naturalized in woodlands.”

Hello!

We’re going to spend this post and the next three looking at photographs of plants in the Amaryllidaceae family, more commonly referred to as the “Amaryllis family” since some of its most prominent, well-known members are in the genus Amaryllis. The family encompasses about 1600 species of plants, including plants in the Crinum genus and Lycoris genus.

This first post includes images of Crinum bulbispermum — a large flowering plant often referred to by names containing “Swamp Lily” or “River Lily” — along with half of my photographs of Lycoris squamigera, also known as Resurrection Lily, Surprise Lily, or Naked Lady after its habit of blooming on tall slender stalks only upon dropping all its leaves (and appearing to be dormant) weeks earlier. The second post will contain the second half of my Lycoris squamigera photos, and the third and fourth posts will show one of its close relatives, Lycoris incarnata, whose candy-cane stripes have earned it the common name Peppermint Surprise Lily.

The Crinum bulbispermum — the first eighteen photos below — is a long-time Oakland resident that I’ve seen for at least a decade. It grows as a mass of numerous individual plants between sidewalks, in the sun, not far from the entrance to the property. As such it’s an eye catcher, drawing your gaze to one garden area that is surrounded by hydrangeas, daffodils, tulips, and flowering vines like quince and wisteria. Its later spring to early summer bloom period means that its colors and shapes replace many of those other flowers, ensuring that color endures through seasonal change.

The last fifteen photos below show Lycoris squamigera — whose name sounds a bit like an Italian casserole. It’s a much smaller and more compact plant than Crinum bulbispermum, and one that I encountered for the first time in June, so it must have been planted either late last year or early this year. The second quotation at the top of this post — from Garden Bulbs in Color by J. Horace McFarland — describes this plant’s Oakland environment accurately (“Lycoris will thrive in partial shade and has been naturalized in woodlands“) in that it was planted in the shade of numerous trees and shrubs, filling in previously empty spaces and catching filtered sunlight. As this may be its first blooming season, some plants appeared quite isolated from each other, while others — typically those that got more sunlight — managed to produce multiple stems and overlapping, bouquet-style collections of blooms. Either way, though, I found them fun and interesting to photograph, as the filtered sun produced some nice side-lighting and back-lighting, showing off the wide range of colors the flowers can reveal.

Thanks for taking a look!