“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.
“Named for French botanist Pierre Magnol (1638–1715), Magnolia is a famously old genus. It is also hard to define; current thinking suggests 200-plus species. Some botanists favour splitting it, others dumping the entire Magnoliaceae into it. The fossil record is rich, with family members dating back 98 million years, and Magnolia itself being of Cretaceous origin, i.e., contemporary with the dinosaurs but before bees: it is thought the first magnolias were pollinated by beetles.
“Magnolia flower buds are used for treating sinus problems in Chinese herbalism, and the bark… is prescribed for a wide range of conditions, although it does contains high levels of alkaloids and concerns have been raised over its safety. Flowers are used for flavouring, or at least ornamenting, certain Chinese teas, while buds are deep fried and eaten as a spring delicacy; they are somewhat tasteless, but the petals make an attractive addition to a salad….
“Wreaths of M. grandiflora foliage are traditional in the American South (they dry slowly and can be kept for months), and the flower, an emblem of the Confederate army in the U.S. Civil War, remains a potent symbol of the white American South…The 1989 film Steel Magnolias conjures up an image of something beautiful but also very tough; the tree symbolised the character of the women in the film….”
Despite making over sixty trips to Oakland Cemetery’s gardens over the past year, I hadn’t previously turned my camera toward any of the large magnolia trees growing on the property, some originally planted in the late 1800s and still thriving. They tower in height second only to the gigantic oak trees for which the property was originally named (see Early Landscapes: The Trees of Oakland), produce an enormous volume of blooms, and shed leaves as large as footballs that drop in a circle surrounding each tree’s trunk. The circles are as wide in diameter as the trees are tall, and as thick and bouncy as the beds of discarded pine needles you might find in any ancient forest.
Magnolia tree branches are some of the densest and most twisty-looking structures in the plant kingdom, I swear, making it a challenge to find a focal point for composing a photo. It’s also true that very few of their flowers are at a height I can get too without a ladder, which of course doesn’t fit in my photo bag. Nevertheless, with a zoom lens and the luck of finding a few branches hanging low to the ground (like the fourth photo below) I took a few dozen photos of the blooms that I could zoom in close enough to “fill the frame” — expecting I could figure out how to isolate the blooms from the entangled branches once I got at them in Lightroom.
Here are the first three, where I kept most of the leaves directly attached to the bloom stems in the frame, while blacking out all the rest.
Here’s one of the few flowers I found close enough to the ground (about five feet up) that I could get a shot that included the Internal structure of the flower, conveniently framed by an old and highly photogenic stone wall. If you’d like to get a closer look, click here.
Here are the last three, where I isolated just the flower — or, in the last photo, isolated the flower with a few of the leaves that (for reasons only the tree understands) were all reversed, showing the yellow-gold backs of the leaves instead of their dark green fronts.
Here are before-and-after versions of the seven photos, with most of the adjustments complete in both versions, but where I turned off the black background mask to show the blossoms in their original context: a mass of leaves and lots of blown-out highlights from sunlight filtering through the branches. It was a fun experiment to see if I could get results I wanted from the originals: creating the illusion that I’d taken macro photos of the magnolia blooms when, in reality, I used a zoom lens and stood about twenty feet from the trees to get these photos. It was also a lot of work — about two days of brushing black over the backgrounds and fine-tuning the mask — but I’m glad I gave it a shot.
Select any image in the gallery if you would like to compare the before and after versions in a slideshow.
“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:
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…
