“The Tamar Valley is a long, branching fjord of an estuary whose tidal branches penetrate deep into Cornwall, its main course acting as the boundary between Devon and Cornwall….
“[Its] slopes were once very intensively cultivated, with workers tending fruit, flowers, and vegetables in plots which they called gardens…. The area was so densely cultivated that it was said that even the railway lines were edged with rhubarb….
“The reason for the intense cultivation of the Tamar Valley, which really lasted less than a hundred years, was its combination of warm south- and west-facing slopes and the water, which moderates temperatures. Frosts were rare and light, and spring came early, almost earlier than anywhere else in Britain. This climate had been exploited for fruit growing since the 1700s, but in the late nineteenth century, local growers began to try other crops…. “Strawberries came first, then daffodils, and finally a great many other flower and florist crops, such as anemones and irises, along with rhubarb and other speciality crops. Daffodils really got going in the early years of the twentieth century with ‘Van Sion’ (now called ‘Telamonius Plenus’), a messy double dating back to the seventeenth century; ‘Maximus’, a Trumpet variety with an even longer history; ‘Ornatus’, a Poeticus type of recent French origin; and ‘Golden Spur’, a Trumpet discovered in a Dutch garden in the 1880s.
“What really launched the daffodil trade, however, was the discovery, allegedly by a local farmer, Septimus Jackson, of a new variety in a hedge, sometime in the 1880s. A double Poeticus type, white and with a heavy scent, the late-flowering plant was quickly dubbed ‘Tamar Double White’….
“By modern standards it is not a particularly attractive flower, but the scent was clearly something special. It also had a reputation for being difficult outside the valley. It took until the 1920s for there to be enough of it to become a worthwhile crop, but then it really took off and became a mainstay for the valley’s growers. Perhaps what made it really popular was its popularity as church decoration for the Whitsun festival, on the cusp of spring and summer….”
Then winter vanished in a mist of rain, And the world smiled to see the spring again: Then first of all the flowers on the hill The violet came, and soon the daffodil, And in the valley by the torrent bed One morning you might find the drooping head Of a white narcissus-star above the grass Till in a little while you dared not pass For fear of trampling them, and you would see The crimson cup of that anemone….
“Along Mediterranean shorelines paperwhites and Chinese sacred lilies often occur together. Although closely related, they maintain separate populations because their genetic structures isolate them from one another. The paperwhite has a standard diploid (double) set of chromosomes. Its large cousin inherits a tetraploid (quadruple) complement. This accounts for the tremendous vigor of the Chinese sacred lily, and also suggests that hybrids between the two varieties will be sterile mules with a triploid set of genes. As we have already seen, such plants often make fine garden flowers.
“Crosses between Narcissus tazetta and N. papyraceus have, in fact, occurred, and several have been cultivated since the 1600s. These mules possess a number of distinctive characters making them unlike either parent. Instead of gray-green leaves like paperwhites, or fountains of light green foliage like Chinese sacred lilies, these hybrids often produce lush groups of dark green leaves. Their foliage and flowers emerge later and withstand more cold than their parents. In the South they are among the most cherished garden heirlooms.
“The first to bloom is a striking plant with slender petals the color of old linen and small citron cups. If the winter is mild, as is often the case, dark green leaves emerge in November and bear flowering stems around the first of February. The effect of the starry blossoms with their cheerful yellow cups is charming, especially when the narcissi are growing around an old homestead nestled under pines.”
You know those daffodils that are white That gleam iridescent They have them In a garden In Worthing. All the gold of Herrick washed away, Dancing like splendid ghosts, That painting by Anne Redpath The blue background with the jagged edges Round the white space Coming up all green and yellowy, Delicate white daffodils From a wood. All this colour contained In white daffodils.
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of white double daffodils from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, that I took a few weeks ago while it was still sort of winter around here.
I’ve photographed these flowers before (see Twelve Dozen Daffodils (8 of 8)) — though later in the spring. I actually wasn’t aware that this variant — probably Narcissus papyraceus (often called Paperwhites — bloomed as early as it did; the growth in these photos took place in mid- to late-February, despite some very cold days that punctuated that month. So on this trip I was able to capture their new buds, along with a few of the fully bloomed plants. I picked the quotation at the top of this post because I think the author was referring to this daffodil variant, given he’s writing about southern gardens, early blooming daffodils, white doubles, Paperwhites, and their late winter/early spring bloom time.
This is where these daffodils were growing…
… or, more accurately, here:
You see, the asymmetrical placement of the grave markers bothered me — so I took them out with Lightroom. As it turns out, though, a memorial section with no other plants but a couple of batches of daffodils and no actual memorial markers just looked like a small field — so I put those markers back! The ghosts who live under them were pleased, too, and they stopped nagging me about “doing AI” on photos of their home — though I was supposed to keep that a secret.
Flowers that get the “double daffodil” label are interesting to me: other than the rows of flower petals that overlap and look a bit like piled tissue, the flowers have been bred to diminish or eliminate one of the daffodil’s most distinctive features: the trumpet. As you look at these photos, notice that what remains of the trumpet is but a few swatches of yellow color around those petals at the center of each flower, which disappears entirely as you move toward the flower stems. I’m learning a little about how that genetic variation was engineered throughout the daffodil’s history, which I’ll share in the next post.
“Vibrant fields of yellow and orange daffodils stretch across the foreground of this dramatically composed view of the plains of Gennevilliers across the river from Argenteuil….
“Their proximity to one another makes their bold colors and the impasto of their petals particularly pungent. Shimmering with light, they recede sharply into the distance between fresh green fields on either side. Prefiguring abstract shapes that Kazimir Malevich would devise thirty years later, these assertive geometric forms rise high on the picture plane to end considerably above the midpoint of the scene.
“At the horizon we encounter the only vertical accents in the landscape: a band of trees that proceed from the left edge of the canvas to a point above the junction of the orange and yellow fields. There the trees become more distinguishable as a series of poplars that continues out of view on the right. Above this orderly arrangement of forms hangs a sky that has been subjected to an equally rigorous geometric sensibility and made into a strict, virtually uninterrupted rectangle. No cloud disturbs its surface, extending the expansiveness that the fields suggest.”
This fevers me, this sun on green, On grass glowing, this young spring. The secret hallowing is come, Regenerate sudden incarnation, Mystery made visible In growth, yet subtly veiled in all, Ununderstandable in grass, In flowers, and in the human heart, This lyric mortal loveliness, The earth breathing, and the sun. The young lambs sport, none udderless. Rabbits dash beneath the brush. Crocuses have come; wind flowers Tremble against quick April. Violets put on the night’s blue, Primroses wear the pale dawn, The gold daffodils have stolen From the sun….
Hello!
This is the second of two posts featuring daffodils with yellow flower petals and rich red-orange trumpets. The first post — where I also explain the use of “red” to describe daffodil trumpets — is Yellow Daffodils with Red and Orange Trumpets (1 of 2).
These photos were all taken in the same general area, where fringe flower bushes provided background to the daffodils. Since the shrubs hadn’t started revealing their pink or purple fringies yet, the tiny oval leaves — in shades of dark blue-green — created a uniform color and texture that contrasted nicely with the yellow and orange (or do I mean “red”?) of the daffodils.
Whilst slinking around on the internet looking for some preambles for this post, I came across the quotation above about the painting “The Yellow Fields at Gennevilliers” by Impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte (image borrowed from List of Paintings by Gustave Caillebotte) — which, conveniently for me, is a painting of yellow and orange daffodils:
The quotation introduced me to the term impasto — where paint is piled on thickly to create physical textures on the canvas, so that someone looking at the painting will see both the raised textures and the shadows beneath them, whose intensity will vary depending on their viewing angle or the available light. To get a better look at the texture Caillebotte created, click the image to see a larger version.
I liked this painting because it seems to represent the natural conditions I prefer for taking photos of flowers: overcast days with plenty of bright light filtered through the clouds, creating consistent shadow detail across the scene while still enabling the saturated, often glowing, colors to catch the eye. I also think the impasto effect combined with separate ramps of color leading from the painting’s foreground simulates how we would see this scene in real life: rich with color, emphasized with texture, and enhanced to simulate depth by the lines that converge at the horizon. Just like a photograph, a painting like this is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional scene: the artist uses different techniques and effects to trigger our brains to transition from two to three dimensions and lead us to consider the painting as symbolic of something real. We don’t normally think through these things when observing a painting or photograph; but we can still deconstruct them to understand the techniques that have been used.
When processing photographs — whether done in the camera, using presets or filters on photo sharing sites, or through enhancements made with photo-editing software — we try to blend both the documentary nature of photography with our sense of an experience that the photograph represents. Here, for example, is one of the photographs from the galleries below, before I’ve made any adjustments (other than removing dust or spots)…
… where, as you can see, the dynamic (or tonal) range of the image is narrow, leading — most apparently — to very little color differentiation between the yellow flower petals and the orange trumpets.
A photograph taken with a modern camera may start like this, as a relatively flat representation of a scene — something that roughly corresponds to the negatives produced by film cameras in terms of the potential for a finished image. This is even more true if the camera is set to take RAW images (where additional image detail is captured but you would seldom consider the image finished as taken); and is still true with image formats like JPG, where the camera tries to balance the colors and tones for you, resulting in a rather bland appearance overall. To state this as a stretched analogy to Caillebotte’s painting: it’s like the first layer of color the painter lays down, before painting additional layers and colors to simulate greater texture and depth.
Here we have the finished version of this image…
… where I’ve created more depth by: reducing color and texture in the background; adding a bit of color to the blue-green daffodil leaves in the foreground; and — most importantly — adding contrast, color, and texture to the flower petals, since the flowers are the subject of the photograph and the difference in color between the petals and the trumpets is a distinctive feature.
Here are the two images side-by-side, for comparison.
Gustave Caillebotte and his brother Martial were both interested in photography, so it’s likely true that their relationship influenced both Gustave’s paintings and Martial’s photography — a fascinating subject on its own that might lead towards a better understanding of how the two art forms blended in photography’s early history. If you’d like to read more about that, see In the Private World of the Caillebotte Brothers, Painter and Photographer — which describes an exhibition featuring art from each brother, and speculates on this two-way influence.
