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Tag: macro photography

Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (1 of 3)

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From “The Journey of the True Lily” in Lily (Botanical) by Marcia Reiss:

“Hybridization has produced an astonishing variety of lilies in nearly every colour, shape and size. More than 15,000 have been listed on the International Lily Register and just as many unregistered hybrids are believed to exist….

“Beginning in 1963, two standard-bearers of the lily world, the Royal Horticultural Society and the North American Lily Society, established an internationally accepted system of nine different divisions. Like the hybrids, the number of divisions kept increasing, but the eighth conveniently includes those not accounted for in any of the others…. The divisions are based on the species used to create the hybrids, distinctions that can be confusing to the average gardener. There are separate divisions, for example, called Asiatic and Oriental — a division that appears to be redundant….

“Asiatics, largely the hybrids produced at the Oregon Bulb Farms and their descendants, are beautiful, virtually pest-free and amazingly hardy. Their only drawback is that, for the most part, they are also fragrance-free. Orientals, mainly derived from the two Japanese stars of the nineteenth century, L. auratum and L. speciosum, are very fragrant and flamboyant in size and colour. These two species had been crossed as early as 1869 by Francis Parkman….

“One of the most successful Oriental hybrids, the colourful and fragrant ‘Stargazer’, was finally created a century after Parkman’s milestone. A cross between L. henryi and L. speciosum rubrum, it is a show-stopping beauty with crimson petals edged in white and sprinkled with dark red spots.”

From “The Lily Plant” in Lilies for American Gardens by George L. Slate:

“The flowers of lilies are diverse in form and color and it is this diversity which contributes to the charm of the genus. On this diversity of form and the position of the flower is based the classification of lilies.

“The parts of the flowers are in sixes. The outer part consists of three petals and three sepals which together are called segments and make up the perianth. Within are six stamens or the male part of the flower. These are composed of slender filaments at the top of which are the anthers or pollen-bearing organs. The pollen varies in color with the different species from yellow to dark brown and is of some taxonomic value. In the center of the flower is the pistil, or female part of the flower. At the base of each segment is a narrow groove, the nectariferous furrow which secretes nectar….”

Hello!

This is the first of three posts with photographs of Lilium speciosum — an Oriental lily whose common names include Japanese Lily and Japanese Show (or Showy) Lily. It does live up to its “showy” moniker: the plant blooms profusely over several weeks, often with a dozen flowers per plant, each flower showing rich and reflective shades of red, purple, or magenta colors that vary depending on the lighting provided by the sun or the way light bounces off their surroundings.

As you progress through the photos below (and those in the next two posts), you’ll see the effects of those varying lighting conditions: note how the petals of those photographed when the sun was out are redder than those taken in the shade, those taken in the shade shift more towards purple, and those with gray stone backgrounds shift from warmer red or purple tones to shades of magenta. Unlike the Tiger Lilies (Lilium lancifolium) that I presented in previous posts (see Capturing the Elusive Tiger Lily (1 of 2) and Capturing the Elusive Tiger Lily (2 of 2)) — which demonstrate a consistent, saturated orange color largely unaffected by lighting variations — the more translucent petals of Lilium speciosum may look completely different as conditions (or your standing positions when photographing them) change.

I identified this flower by uploading about 20 of my photos to PlantNet, which reported a 60- to 80-percent likelihood that Lilium speciosum was the correct species. Those are actually very high percentages; most flowers I identify that way are not nearly as recognizable, and I’ll use additional sources to try and get them right. Even so, though, the quotation at the top of this post suggests how complicated the genetics of any one lily plant can be, and this Lilium speciosum — one of the most important lily variants, whose botanical history we’ll explore in the next post — shows evidence of potentially having the spots, colors, and petal shapes of many of its predecessors, in its own distinct package.

I initially discovered these plants producing flower buds on June 21, where they surround the base of one of Oakland Cemetery’s prestigious monuments, which we’ll take a closer look at in the third post in this series. I took only three photographs that day, capturing the plant in its budding stage, where one of its distinguishing characteristics — the large number of blooms it can potentially produce — is evident.

Three weeks later, we see how that potential plays out in these photos showing one of the plants with four flowers in full bloom (Lilium Flowers describes how the blooms unfold), along with six styles that have previously shed their flower petals. So this plant was capable of producing ten flowers from a single stem emanating from the ground, each flower balanced on branching “tributaries” (just as the buds were) and positioned to offer pollinators opportunities to approach from varying directions. The flowers also demonstrate the typical staggered blooming strategy of many lily plants, a strategy that extends the plants’ accessibility to those pollinators from several days to several weeks.

Its extended blooming period gave me a chance to observe this Oriental lily in more than one stage of its lifecycle, even though I took most of the photographs on a single day. Below, in this image, we get a closer look at what happens after the flowers have finished blooming, where the styles to the left and right of the stem curve upward as a reminder of the original positioning of the flowers. We can’t tell from looking at this photo if pollination actually occurred; but if it had, then the stigma at the end of these styles would have been brushed with pollen by some fly-by bugs or the wind, beginning the next reproductive stage where the flower’s seeds get fertilized in the seedpod closer to the stem. We often see styles like this in our gardens; the fact that we may visually tune them out (or, as I have often done in the past, remove them from photos) suggests that we may not realize their significance, but I think we should — especially when they’re as artistically placed as they are in this photo.

This Japanese Show Lily shares the same Turk’s Cap form with Tiger Lilies, yet also demonstrates important differences. The two plants appear to take divergent approaches to managing their reproductive energies, with the Tiger Lily emphasizing large, heavy blooms to attract bigger pollinators, fewer flowers per plant, and a backup method of cloning itself with bulbils. The Show Lily doesn’t generate bulbils, but instead produces many more blooms on each plant, any one of which is smaller than that of a typical Tiger Lily. This larger quantity of blooms also introduces architectural differences between the two plants, with the Show Lily building an array of stems constructed like a scaffold to help distribute mechanical stress and send nutrients to the flowers and leaves.

The Show Lily’s flowers are also not only smaller than the Tiger’s, but — as you can see from most of the photos — their recurve is not as tight as that of the Tiger Lily. This keeps the interior of the flower — where nectar resides — open to many small pollinators, like the wasp you can see approaching a flower’s anterior in the first three photos below. The wasp would likely have been attracted to the flower’s varying colors, including the bright green ribbing — which not only supports the flower’s curved petal structure (as I explained in this Tiger Lily post), but also distributes nutrients to the flower petals. With the more open form of the curved petals, the wasp can easily alight between the petals, and its movements might generate enough vibration to facilitate pollen transfer from the anthers — which are much closer to each other and to the stigma than the Tiger Lily’s — even if it doesn’t fly near them, with bonus pollen awarded to the flower if it does.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Capturing the Elusive Tiger Lily (2 of 2)

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From “Pollen and Pollination” in Exploring Biology by Pamela S. Camp and Karen Arms:

“Pollen develops in chambers at the ends of the stamens. Just as leaf shape and flower structure vary from one kind of plant to another, so do the shape and pattern of the pollen grain wall. Experts can easily identify the genus of a pollen grain by its distinctive cell wall pattern….

“Pollination is the transfer of pollen to the stigma. Pollen cannot move on its own power. Plants rely on wind or animals as agents of pollination. Wind pollination is often wasteful because much of the pollen never reaches another flower. Pollination by animals may save energy on pollen production. An animal that visits only one kind of plant carries pollen directly from one individual to another of the same species. Animals that serve as pollinators include insects — bees, butterflies, moths, wasps, flies, and beetles — and vertebrates such as birds, bats, and even a South African mouse!

“How do flowers attract animal pollinators? First, there is an attention-catching advertisement, such as the odor, shape, or color of a flower-preferably all three. Second, there is some type of reward — usually a sweet nectar. The reward is so located that the animal cannot reach it without at the same time acquiring a load of pollen. All of this has a cost: the animal-pollinated flower must invest energy in making its nectar and its large, showy petals, even though it need not make the prodigious quantities of pollen required for successful wind pollination.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of Tiger Lilies (Lilium lancifolium) that I took in June of this year. The first post is Capturing the Elusive Tiger Lily (1 of 2), where I explored a Tiger Lily’s uncommon ability to create and dispense bulbils and produce exact copies of itself. Like most plants, though, members of the Lily species use more than one reproductive strategy — something we’ll discuss in this post while observing how the plant’s architecture supports its goal of enticing bugs, bees, birds, and butterflies to help it develop species longevity.

To start, let’s take a look at one of my photos from the galleries below, a macro image of the center of the flower’s structure. Here we see some of the Tiger Lily’s most striking visual characteristics up close: the contrast between its saturated orange color and the black (they’re actually combinations of very dark red and magenta) spots on each of its elegant recurved petals. The bright orange and the contrasting spots — easily seen from great distances — enhance the flower’s visibility to pollinators; while the recurved petals support the flower’s growth and reproduction strategies through their unique architectural construction.

Imagine if you took a piece of drawing paper and cut out a six-pointed star to simulate the appearance of this Tiger Lily, flattened. Now imagine drawing the points of your paper star upward, to curve and meet with a slight overlap at the center. You’d likely discover that keeping the “petals” of your paper star-flower in position wouldn’t happen on its own; you’d have to fasten them together with tape or staples. Yet the Tiger Lily accomplishes that shape and holds it throughout its blooming cycle, typically unaffected by any wind or rain that might batter it while it’s blooming.

Unlike your paper flower, you’d find it quite difficult to bend the Tiger Lily petals back to horizontal positions they would have briefly held before curving. This kind of structural tension represents a complex form of engineering on the part of the Tiger Lily, so I decided to ask my research assistant ClaudeAI to help me explain how the thickness of the petals and the raised ridges emanating from the center support the Tiger’s Turk’s Cap form. Here’s what I learned:

Your insight about the thicker petals and ridging at the center solving the structural challenges of the Turk’s cap form shows remarkable botanical intuition. Think of this like understanding how a cathedral’s flying buttresses work — the most dramatic architectural features require the most sophisticated support systems, often hidden from casual view.

When Tiger Lily petals curve backward into that spectacular recurved position, they’re essentially performing a complex feat of biological cantilever engineering. Each petal must support its own weight while curved dramatically away from its attachment point, creating what engineers call tension stress along the outer surface and compression stress along the inner surface. The thickened base you’ve photographed functions like the reinforced foundation of a cantilever bridge, providing the structural mass needed to anchor the entire curved structure.

The ribs or ridges you’ve noticed serve as what botanists call vascular bundles — essentially the plant’s equivalent of steel reinforcement bars in concrete. These structures carry both nutrients and water to the petal tips, but they also provide mechanical stiffening that prevents the dramatic curves from collapsing under their own weight or from wind stress. The fact that these ribs are thickest at the center reflects the same engineering principle you see in airplane wings, where the structural supports are heaviest where stress concentrations are highest.

The Tiger Lily’s architectural accomplishment is a marvel of natural engineering. Each part of the structure serves more than one purpose while keeping the flower’s shape intact, helping the flower resist environmental damage or trampling by pollinators. In this photo, we see an example of its structural strength: despite a petal from the flower on the right getting trapped beneath the stem of another flower, the rest of the flower retains its oval, recurved shape — which helps ensure that its splayed stamens are properly accessible to pollinators.

With this wider view, we can also develop some insights into how the Tiger Lily’s architecture supports its reproductive strategy. I included the quotation from Exploring Biology at the top of this post because, coincidentally, it uses Tiger Lilies to explain how pollinators typically help flowers reproduce (click here if you’d like to read the full explanation). Simplified, the Tiger Lily wants its pollen transferred from any of the six anthers (the thin, oval-shaped structures at the end of each stamen) — to the stigma (the orb at the end of the magenta-colored spike that is centered among the stamens). It does so by enticing the pollinators with its physical appearance as they seek the nectar the Tiger stores near the top of the stamens (generally where the stamens are shown at the bottom of the closeup photo above).

To get to the nectar through this obstacle course, pollinators flit about the flower’s various structures, and the resulting physical vibrations or physical movements (often aided by wind) get the transfer done just as the Tiger Lily wants. Consider your own observations of the movements of a hummingbird, for example, and you can see how such motion — including the bird’s wing-wind — facilitates pollination. And consider the difference between hummingbirds (one of the Tiger Lily’s largest, most highly favored pollinators) and smaller visitors, like bees or moths — who will navigate rapidly or hover throughout the flower segments, yet accomplish the same thing.

The Tiger Lily’s overall architecture supports all this in several ways. The staggered arrangement of two lilies in bloom, with one waiting to bloom, means that pollination opportunities will be presented over multiple days. Their presence on different horizontal planes induces pollinators to report for duty from multiple physical directions, so flowers are less likely to compete with each other for the attentions of individual pollinators. The stamens — whose curves reflect a simplified version of the recurved petals above them — are positioned far enough apart to let pollinators whizz by them, but close enough to each other that physical contact is likely to take place. The stamens are supported by the same architectural strength that supports the flower petals, something that is evident in that you almost never see broken stamens on Tiger Lilies (or any other lilies) until the flower’s pollination time has passed and the flower itself begins to disassemble. Finally, each flower’s horizontal axis is slightly different, which helps ensure that sunlight passes through the spaces between petals, lights up the flower’s center near its nectar repositories, reduces the chance that one flower will cast dark shadows over another, and presents varying color contrasts throughout any single day that will encourage visits by different potential pollinators.

I photographed these Tiger Lilies near the beginning of their blooming cycle, so we don’t see how the plant’s structure changes after pollination occurs. In my next posts, however, we’ll take a look at images of another lily with the same Turk’s Cap form — Lilium speciosum — that posed for me on more than one trip, showing the remarkable changes that pollination induced.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Capturing the Elusive Tiger Lily (1 of 2)

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From “Treasure Hunts in East Asia” in Lily (Botanical) by Marcia Reiss:

“European collectors did not open the treasure chest of lilies in East Asia fully until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the first and most popular discoveries, the tiger lily, L. lancifolium, was sent from Canton (now Guangzhou) to Kew Gardens in London by William Kerr in 1804….

“A Turk’s cap lily, it forms tiny black bulbils in each leaf axis, making it easy to propagate. The Chinese had a charming anthropomorphic description for its downward-facing form and reflexed petals — the ‘Flower that turns its Head to See its Offspring’. But the Japanese saw it quite differently. Its Japanese name is oniyuri, the ogre lily, and while its orange colour may account for the name tiger lily, its speckled petals seem more reminiscent of a leopard, albeit one with purple spots. (There is also a panther lily, L. pardalinum, a Turk’s cap species found in California, but it also has spots.)

“A few orange-coloured lilies had made earlier appearances. L. bulbiferum, native to central Europe, is a remarkably realistic detail in the Portinari Altarpiece, of the Adoration of the Shepherds, commissioned by the Medici from the south Netherlandish painter Hugo van der Goes in 1475. It gets its name from the bulbils in its leaf axis, like those of the tiger lily….”

From “The Lily” in The Collected Earlier Poems by William Carlos Williams:

The branching head of
tiger-lilies through the window
in the air —

A humming bird
is still on whirring wings
above the flowers —

By spotted petals curling back
and tongues that hang
the air is seen —

It’s raining —
water’s caught
among the curled-back petals

Caught and held
and there’s a fly —
are blossoming

Hello!

The mid- to late-summer floral displays at Oakland Cemetery feature various collections of lilies, amaryllis, and crinum — collections that, as a whole, rival the diversity of their seasonal predecessors (irises and daylilies) and their seasonal successors (asters and mums). Over the next several weeks, we’ll take a look at some of these species — flowers and plants whose scientific identification is often challenging, as many of them have multiple shared common names stemming from similar visual characteristics, but have botanical stories that are very different.

I decided to start this next post run with Tiger Lilies (Lilium lancifolium), because this is the first summer in three years that I managed to catch them in bloom. The bloom time of amaryllis, crinum, and many other lilies is quite predictable, but the Tiger seems to slide its blooming by several earlier or later weeks depending on weather conditions preceding the plant’s emergence from the soil. In those years I’ve gotten it to pose for photoshoots, we’ve held those shoots as early as the first week of June and as late as mid-July. This year — when I was out still photographing daylilies — I noticed the Tiger Lilies just starting to produce flower buds on June 7, so went back exactly two weeks later to find this nice grouping of flowers ready to capture.

The quotation from the book Lily (Botanical) by Marcia Reiss above serves as a useful way to kick off these lily posts. The author introduces the Tiger Lily’s official name, Lilium lancifolium — a replacement name for Lilium tigrinum, from which the Tiger Lily common name was derived. She also mentions the Japanese name “ogre lily” — which I had not heard before, though I’ve seen in my research that the Tiger Lily has also been referred to as a Leopard Lily, Devil Lily, Orange Lily, and Pine Lily, depending on the resource I’ve come across and its connection to a particular region or vernacular. While we don’t need to be too concerned about these variations, it can be fun to observe how they’re used when we humans encounter plants in different historical eras or contexts. Here we’ll stick with Lilium lancifolium and Tiger Lily as the most accurate and prevalent current usage.

Reiss describes the Tiger Lily as a “Turk’s cap lily” — a phrase that is often used to describe some specific lily cultivars, including the Tiger Lily. Most accurately, though, “Turk’s cap” is best used as a description of a lily form rather than a specific lily. “Turk’s cap” describes the way the flower petals of some lilies curve upward and meet at the center, reminiscent of the way a turban is assembled. While people — including me — often call some lily variants by the name “Turk’s Cap Lily,” we’ve learned more about the subtle distinctions in plant naming conventions so will no longer do that.

I noticed Reiss’s mention of “bulbils” because Wikipedia’s article about Lilium lancifolium describes the Tiger Lily like this:

“L. lancifolium produces aerial bulblets, known as bulbils, in the leaf axils. These bulbils are uncommon in Lilium species and they produce new plants that are clones of the original plant. The flowers are odorless. Each lasts a few days and if pollinated produce capsules with many thin seeds.”

This excerpt is only four sentences, but there’s actually a lot going on here that is fascinating to learn about once you uncover how significant it is that “bulbils are uncommon in Lilium species” and that the bulbils “produce new plants that are clones of the original plant.” This means that Tiger Lilies — along with a consequential minority of other lilies — employ dual natural reproduction strategies: reproduction aided by pollination, which, as one might expect, would produce related but genetically different plants; and the production and dispersal of bulbils, which produce exact clones of the plant that distributed them. And while you may encounter sources referring to these berry-looking globes as seeds, they’re not seeds at all. They are, in effect, mini-me versions of the original plant, whose escapades — described here — go like this:

“Two of the best-known bulbiliferous plants are Lilium bulbiferum of Europe and L. lancifolium of Asia. The latter species is common in cultivation and has naturalized in North America and Europe. Both species form bulbils in the axils of the leaves. In Lilium lanceolatum, the margins of the leaves are turned up slightly where the leaves join the stem. Raindrops landing on the leaves are channeled toward the stem and dislodge bulbils (ombrohydrochory), causing them to fall to the ground. Bulbils dispersed by raindrops land near the parent plant and might be carried farther by sheet flow or runoff. If not dislodged by rain, the bulbils eventually fall when the stem senesces at the end of the growing season.”

Since I captured these Tiger Lilies early in their blooming cycle — when most of the plants had one flower in bloom, with one waiting on the side to bloom later — their bulbil production was also in its early stages. Here’s one of the plants in a tight closeup, where you can see two bulbils positioned exactly as described above, with the leaves slightly folded and angled to catch and channel raindrops to help detach the bulbils.

The bulbil on the right demonstrates yet another feature of their production: those half-dozen black dots just below the red circle are not spots; they’re bulbils that didn’t form fully and so were pushed down the leaf in favor of one bulbil growing to maturity. This pattern illustrates how the plant allocates its energy resources: since it must divide that energy between flower and bulbil production in its two-part reproductive strategy — and respond to environmental conditions at the same time — it may produce some bulbils that don’t fully form while working on developing its spectacular flowers.

That bulbil-making plants like the Tiger Lily produced exact clones of their source plant would have been a twentieth-century discovery, requiring the scientific methods and tools to analyze plant DNA. Earlier botanists might have observed, by contrast, that the bulbils produced new plants — by a method similar to that of seed or bulb distribution — but would not have understood the natural cloning or clonal reproduction that would be proven much later. As I discussed in several of my iris project posts, these botanists often relied on evidence presented in botanical drawings and combined that with their fieldwork to theorize about plant behavior. So it’s not surprising to find drawings or watercolors of Tiger Lilies with their bulbils in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries — like this pair by Pierre-Joseph Redouté (from Volume 7 and Volume 8 of his book about lilies Les Liliacées [The Lilies]), where the bulbils are as prominently featured as the flower blossoms themselves:

These accurate renderings served both artistic and scientific purposes, especially in the eras of botanical exploration that preceded pervasive use of photography. Both drawings show exactly the positioning of bulbils discussed earlier: each bulbil emerges near the connection of leaves to the stems, with each leaf slightly curved and angled downward to enable the bulbils to slide from the plant to the ground, especially during a rain. Botanists working with such Tiger Lilies likely would have observed and drawn conclusions about how this natural behavior enabled Tiger Lilies to spread, with those observations and conclusions providing the basis from which later discoveries would determine that the new plants were duplicates of the originals.

In the next post, I’ll explore the visual characteristics of these flowers, and what else — besides bulbils — photographs of them can reveal, well beyond how photogenic they are to the camera and how delightful they are to see (and re-discover) in real life.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Red and Yellow Daylilies (3 of 3)

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From “History of the Daylily” in The Illustrated Guide to Daylilies by Oliver Billingslea:

“[Dr. Arlow B. Stout] produced many early hybrids which served as source material for other hybridizers. He registered his first cultivar, H. ‘Mikado’ in 1929. One of his most significant achievements was the cultivar ‘Theron’ (1934), which became the forerunner of red daylilies. In the 1930s, a large number of scientists and amateurs became involved with the hybridization of daylilies, swelling the number of registrations.

“When in 1937 it was found that colchicine, an alkaloid isolated from the autumn crocus (Colchicum autumnale), was successful as an agent for increasing chromosome numbers, a major breakthrough occurred. Colchicine doubles the diploid number of chromosomes (most species found in the wild are diploids) by acting upon the cells which are dividing, resulting in induced ‘tetraploid‘ daylilies, which have twice the number of chromosomes and increased breeding potential. Today’s hybrids are either diploid or tetraploid, since hybridizers’ efforts have continued along both lines.

“In the eyes of most, the modern daylily has far surpassed the species in beauty. Originally the only colors were yellow, orange, and shades of fulvous red, but today’s hybrids range from near-white to rich purple, from lovely pastels to fabulous blends, from the brightest yellow to the most vivid red, and there is progress toward the blue, especially in the eyezones of daylilies….

“There are many daylilies that are eyed, banded, edged, watermarked, or patterned. Improved flower substance, sun-fastness, increased petal width, and intense ruffling have become realized goals. There are miniatures, small flowers, large and extra-large flowered ones. Relation of scape height to flower size has been improved, better branching achieved, and marvelous variation in form perfected, from spider to full, rounded blooms. Doubles are now full and elegant, and polymerous, sculptured, and other unique forms continue to emerge. In addition to all of this, major efforts have been made to extend the blooming season by breeding for ‘remontant’ or reblooming cultivars, and hybridizers are more aware than ever for needed disease resistance and vigor. Today there are over 77,000 registered cultivars.”

Hello!

This is the third of three posts with photos of red and yellow daylilies that I took during two June trips to Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Red and Yellow Daylilies (1 of 3) and the second post is Red and Yellow Daylilies (2 of 3).

For this last post, I’ve revisited some of the photos from the previous two posts, with tighter zooms to provide a close-up look at the flowers’ central structures. Whenever I take close-ups like this, one of my goals is to ensure that all the stamens and pistils are in focus. Even though those aren’t necessarily the focal point or what will strike you as the subject of the photo, getting their focus correct typically means that, at least, the petals are in focus at the point where they emerge from each flower’s center. This means two things when I process the photos in Lightroom: (1) I can create separation between the stamens and pistils and the rest of the flower, giving them a three-dimensional appearance; and (2) I can crop the photos to get an even more macro look at their structures. Here, for example, is a 200% zoom on one of the photos:

Zooming in this much is a bit extreme, because any noise or grain in the image will also be more visible. But if you click on the image for a larger version, note how — despite the now-visible noise or grain — the stamens and pistils are in focus from where they emerge from the flower to their ends. When I come back from a photoshoot of flowers like this (or one of any flowers that have similar long, prominent center structures), that’s one of the first things I’ll check to decide if I’ve captured a usable image. If the stamens and pistils are not in focus, then nearby flower petals would also likely be out of focus, and their colors would appear to blend or merge with the colors behind them. Those that don’t make this cut get cut, so I don’t spend time working on a photo that is not in sharp focus to begin with.

The quotation at the top of this post tells us a little about how it became possible for breeders to produce daylilies with extra-large flowers and these smashing arrangements of colors. The discovery that a chemical extracted from another plant — in this case, a crocus variant — would double the amount of genetic material that geneticists could use to influence a daylily’s colors, shape, size, or number of blooms is similar to something I wrote about while working on my iris project. In my previous post, Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (9 of 10), I described the “conversion from diploids to tetraploids” — and, as it turns out, the same chemical, and the same mechanisms, were used to genetically enhance both irises and daylilies. This discovery and its application ushered in the extremely active breeding and modification period for both irises and our gorgeous daylilies that ran from the mid- to late-twentieth century, each effort extending their appearance (in the ways Billingslea explains above) from their Hemerocallis fulva or Hemerocallis flava origins.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Red and Yellow Daylilies (2 of 3)

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From “The Botanical Characteristics of Daylilies” in Daylilies: The Wild Species and Garden Clones, Both Old and New, of the Genus Hemerocallis by Arlow B. Stout:

“In appearance, habits of growth, and botanical characteristics, the daylilies form a rather sharply defined group of plants known as the genus Hemerocallis….

“The daylilies are all herbaceous perennials. The parts which appear above ground and are conspicuous as the plants grow in gardens are the leaves, the flower stalks or scapes, and the flowers.

“The stems are in the soil or extending slightly above its surface. In temperate regions the foliage of most daylilies dies to the ground in autumn or is killed during early winter and the plant is dormant until spring arrives. In the tropics many daylilies are evergreen.

“The leaves of daylilies are linear, strongly ribbed, and arranged in two ranks that are closely compacted and equitant at the base and that spread gracefully above to form a symmetrical ‘fan.’ In the disposition, height, and color of the leaves there is considerable diversity among species and garden clones.

“The flower stalks or scapes arise directly from the crown in the midst of a cluster of leaves. They are naked except for leaf-like bracts at the few nodes and subtending the branches and the flowers. The scapes are slender, erect or ascending, and branched or unbranched at the top according to the character of the species.

“The flowers of daylilies are large and colorful. In the general appearance of the perianth, six stamens, and single pistil they resemble the flowers of the genus Lilium; but they are shorter lived, in some types lasting for one day only, and the six segments of the showy perianth are united at the base to form a well-defined tube. The flower colors for the different species range from pale yellow through shades of yellow and orange to combinations with fulvous red. In the newer hybrids the colors have been extended especially into rosy pink, red, and purplish shades.”

From “The Flower” in The Illustrated Guide to Daylilies by Oliver Billingslea:

“Sculpted daylilies are… defined by several forms. Relief sculpting is characterized by vertically raised ridges that extend from the throat and project from the petal surface. The ridges may grow parallel to the veins, or they may radiate outwards from each side of the midrib. Pleated sculpting occurs when petals have a deep longitudinal crease on each side of the midrib. These creases cause folding of the petal upon itself creating a raised platform extending from the top of the perianth and ending between the throat and the petal tip. Cristate defines a form of sculpting that refers to appendages of extra petal tissue growing from the midrib or elsewhere on the surface of the petals. When the extra tissue grows from the midrib, the form is called midrib cristate.

“Edges, or the outer periphery of the petals and sepals of daylilies, can possess structural distinction as well, such as knobs, braids, tentacles, fringe, and teeth. Some structural edges reach out onto the surface of the flower giving a sculpted three-dimensional effect.”

Hello!

This is the second of three posts with photos of some red and yellow daylilies that I took during two June trips to Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Red and Yellow Daylilies (1 of 3).

In the previous post, I included this photograph showing where these daylilies hang out and mentioned that I took this photo on my first visit, when only one of the flowers was in bloom. I’ve also included it in this post, so we can speculate on how this arrangement of plants affects both our visual perception of their forms and colors, as well as the growth patterns of the plants and their individual blossoms.

We tend to experience scenes like this holistically, as a single small garden constrained by stone and concrete boundaries. But even this limited space contains a large number of environmental variables, all of which have an impact on the growth and blooming patterns of its plants. If we think of this scene as a micro-environment or micro-climate instead, we can then imagine that factors like water absorption and retention, protection from adverse weather conditions, or sun exposure might vary significantly for some plants over others. We can see, for example, that the plants in the lower left corner receive the most sunlight throughout the day, exposing those plants to the sun for the longest continuous periods. The plants at the right and toward the back left get more shade as the sun passes behind the trees and shrubs surrounding the monument. The back-left plants get very little sun much of the day; and, unsurprisingly, have far fewer blooms than the rest of the plants.

Here are three representative photos from the galleries below.

I took the first two at the sunny left corner, the first one when the sun was out and the second one when it slipped behind clouds for a few minutes. This diminished sunlight shifts several colors from warmer (with more yellow light) to cooler, where yellow light is filtered out by the clouds and blue light wavelengths become more prominent. This is why we see the second photo’s yellow as more like orange, and its red/magenta as more like purple or burgundy — an effect not unlike taking cans of paint with those colors and mixing in a bit of blue. Even the bricks in the background of that second photo take on a cooler, more blue appearance, and some of that blue is reflected back into the camera, contributing to the shift from warm to cool colors. And — as I mentioned several times in my iris project posts — shaded or filtered sunlight lets us crank up color saturation in photos taken in those conditions without distorting their appearance or relationships, so we can reveal an intensity and variability in the flower colors that isn’t as apparent among those taken in the sun.

In terms of flower forms, the first two are more alike than they might initially appear, simply because they’re at different stages in their lifecycle, with the first flower in an earlier stage than the second. A day or two after I took these photos, the two would have looked more alike, with their petals dropping into a similar horizontal position. The flower in the third photo, however, looks quite a bit different, almost as if it was a different variety with a more downward, convex form — one that’s similar to a recurved daylily where the flowers present as more circular and its petals bend downward toward the flower’s base.

While it’s not impossible that these daylilies have propagated their own variants — the number of plants has, after all, expanded over the years I’ve photographed them — it’s more likely that we’re seeing an environmental effect. The flower in the third photo receives far less sunlight than those in the first two photos, leading it to adapt to those conditions by producing downward-facing petals that can capture light coming from different directions. It’s not simply forming an alternate flower shape for observers to wonder about; it’s responding to its environment by creating a form that will optimize its ability to take advantage of its less optimal position in the garden.

It also demonstrates variations in the shapes of knobs, braids, or fringes along the edges of the petals that are different from the first two sun-bathed photos. The production of that fringing requires a significant amount of plant energy, so those that capture less light are consequently less capable of producing petals that incorporate extensive corkscrew-like shapes along the flower’s edges. While the fringing does exist, it’s less pronounced and less likely to appear along all the petal edges, but more likely to occur only where individual petals get the most light.

With this information in mind, you could now examine the photos and make educated guesses about which ones receive full sunlight, which ones receive sunlight filtered by nearby trees, and which ones live mostly in the shade — regardless of whether I photographed them when the sun was out or was behind the clouds.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!