“Blackberry Lily. Leopard Flower. A hardy, herbaceous perennial, which is an old garden favorite. The first of the popular names comes from the clusters of shining black roundish seeds, and the second from the flower, which is orange, spotted red. It is more commonly sold as Pardanthus, which also means leopard flower. Perianth [segments] oblong, the [three] inner slightly shorter and spirally twisting as they fade: stamens in one group only at the base: [capsules] pear-shaped, the valves ultimately falling away…. Of easy culture in rich, sandy loam and in a sunny place….
“The seed-stalks are sometimes used with dried grasses for decoration. It is said that the birds sometimes mistake the seeds for blackberries.”
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For this post, I took a few of my Iris domestica photographs from the previous post (see Leopard Flower Variations — and used various Lightroom masks to paint the backgrounds black and isolate the blooms or, in some cases, isolate the blooms, stems, and leaves.
“Blackberry Lily or Leopard Flower: This handsome flower is not a lily, as its popular name implies, but belongs to the Iris family. Its [early] name, Pardanthus chinensis, is derived from pardos, leopard, and anthos, a flower — hence leopard flower; and chinensis means of China. The Chinese Leopard Flower was formerly very common in gardens, but like many another deserving plant, has given way to the universal craze for novelties.…
“The stem grows three or four feet high, branches at the top, where it bears regular flowers of an orange color, and abundantly dotted with crimson or reddish-purple spots. One great merit of the Leopard flower is that it is late flowering, being in bloom from midsummer to September….
“After the pretty flowers have faded, the capsules grow on and enlarge, and when quite ripe the walls of the capsules break away and curl up, leaving a central column of shining, black-coated seed, looking so much like a well developed, ripe blackberry, that the fruit, if not so handsome as the flower, is quite as interesting, and shows that in this instance it does not require any effort of the imagination to see the applicability of perhaps its most common name — the Blackberry Lily….
“The plant is now botanically known as Belamcanda chinensis.”
“ Iris domestica, commonly known as leopard lily, blackberry lily, and leopard flower, is an ornamental plant in the family Iridaceae. In 2005, based on molecular DNA sequence evidence, Belamcanda chinensis, the sole species in the genus Belamcanda, was transferred to the genus Iris and renamed Iris domestica.”
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I went on a “safari” recently, hunting for tiger lilies at my favorite local nearby garden cemetery. I found several streaks of tiger lilies, many in full bloom and resting comfortably at the boundaries between sunny and shady sections of the garden. Those photos are currently being wrangled by my Post-Processing Department and will be out soon (though it’s hard to get a commitment from those people more precise than “soon”).
Whilst wandering around that hot and humid morning, I also stumpled across the delightful creatures featured in the galleries below: not tiger lilies, but leopard flowers. The leopard flower, as it turns out, is not a lily but is an iris officially known as Iris domestica — despite being also dubiously known as blackberry lily or leopard lily (and is distinct from a Liliumleopard lily, which looks a lot like a tiger lily). Ok, uh… no wonder it can be so difficult to keep plant names straight, when people do such things as randomly calling irises lilies. So substantial might be lily/iris confusion that Wikipedia has a separate page listing plants commonly called lilies that are, in real life, not lilies. See List of plants known as lily — where you might learn (at least, I did) that, among others, the plants and flowers colloquially referred to as “day lilies” are not even lilies… because they aren’t members of the Lilium genus. WTF!
Ah, well, I guess I got it sorted out: the plant originally known as “Pardanthus chinensis” was later given the botanical name “Belamcanda chinensis” — by which is was known for decades and decades — until its DNA was analyzed, its iris roots (haha!) confirmed, and it was slipped from its place as the single flower in a genus to being yet another Iridaceae. This is quite interesting, when you think about it, since — despite having leaves that resemble iris leaves once you know it’s an iris — it has a flower with few if any visible characteristics we would typically associate with irises. Plants are a hoot!
“During warm weather the blooms of most of the varieties of hibiscus last for only a day. They open in the morning and cannot normally be used for decorative purposes that night. The time of opening varies somewhat with different varieties. Hibiscus flowers can be used the night following the morning they open if they are removed from the plants as soon as they are fully open and stored at temperatures [of 35 to 45 degrees Fahrenheit]. They may be kept in a home refrigerator….
“The plants are not damaged by removing the blooms if no leaves are removed. Even though the blooms last but a day, free blooming varieties will furnish an abundance of flowers during the normal blooming season.”
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I took the photos in the galleries below in sequence one day in mid-June. The first three photos are from late morning as the flowers were just opening, and the rest were taken between golden hour and blue hour, as I mentioned in my previous post (see Hibiscus in the Morning).
While it’s certainly true (as noted in the quotation above) that hibiscus flowers typically only last one day, it’s also true that the texture of the flower petals change as the day wears on: they get thinner and become more translucent with evening’s approach. In all the photos after the first three, then, you can see two things happening: the flower petals are thinning so more light appears to pass through them (the eye and the camera see that as less intense reflected color saturation); and different colors become more apparent as the sunlight changes from late-day warmth to the cooler blue and purple glow that accompanies early evening light. There is a marked shift from warm to cool colors between the seventh and eight photo below, taken just a few minutes apart.
“The hibiscus is one of the most popular flowering plants grown in tropical and subtropical areas…. It belongs to the mallow family, which contains several well-known plants such as cotton, hollyhock, turks cap, and the mallows. The genus Hibiscus also includes the shrub althea, confederate rose, and okra. The fringed hibiscus from Africa, the species schizopetalus, also belongs to this genus.
“There are several reasons for the increased popularity of the hibiscus. Improved varieties, especially some of the doubles, that attract attention are an important one. The fact that hibiscus bloom at a time of year when other flowers are not too plentiful, or are of poor quality, is of considerable importance. The realization that hibiscus may be grown successfully in many areas where it had not been grown has been helpful. The personal interest of some nurserymen in hibiscus and their making plants of good varieties available at reasonable prices has given impetus to the popularity of the plant.”
“In those temperate regions with warm and humid summers, the range in [hibiscus] cultivation is boosted by a number of herbaceous perennial species from the U.S. Southeast, which have enormous flowers, e.g., Hibiscus moscheutos. In the tropics, H. rosa-sinensis is the most popular species in cultivation, with many varieties in a wide range of colours. A native of eastern Asia it has been in cultivation for many centuries — it is not clear how many. It is a polyploid, which adds much complexity and indeed unpredictability to its genetics; it is a very popular plant for both commercial and amateur breeding across the tropics, with many local societies promoting the plant and encouraging breeding.”
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In an earlier post (see Bearded Iris Motley Mix (1 of 2)), I mentioned that I bought a couple of new hibiscus plants for two pots in my garden, but had no idea what kind or color the flowers would be since they only had a generic “Hello My Name is Hibiscus” plant tag. They started blooming a couple of weeks later, and while I initially thought they would be orange because of the color of their flower buds, the orange faded away as they opened and was replaced by dark red centers and saturated pink petals.
This is the first of two posts featuring these hibiscus, showing photos taken mid-morning. In the next post, I’ll show photos of these same hibiscus flowers taken in the early evening, between the late-day golden hour and blue hour around sunset. It was fun to see how the representation of color changed later in the day, when fading sun highlighted some of the blue, purple, and magenta in the flowers over the pinks and reds. Neat how that happens, don’t you think?
“Lilies are familiar because they are ancient. Evolving before the very dawn of mankind, they were poised at our own birth to catch, embrace and captivate us. Despite the innocent blooms that dance in the wilderness, they tend to be portentous rather than frivolous, and they are never cosy. Adopted by religion, death and politics, the lily is a plant of ritual significance and multifaceted symbolism.”
I’m out of lily photos from those in my own garden, though I’ve accumulated several batches from elsewhere in the neighborhood that I’ve just started processing, including more than a dozen different varieties (which is just amazing!) and about 400 photos. It will take some time to organize them (the first few days with a large collection of photos is like sorting a mountain of paper clips by color) and jazz them up, so next — from my garden — will be a set of hibiscus photos from a couple of new plants I bought back in April. Stay tuned!
