The Regal Lilies in my antique bowl Reveal a song, I see them etched upon an ancient scroll With leaf and prong. A simple altar and a sculptured tomb Display their grace… I find them stitched upon an old heirloom Of fragile lace, They crown the Virgin, babe, and fireside shrine With halos bright, And in each human heart they are divine Symbols of light.
And peace they bring into an aching breast Sweet as the lilies are, so sweet the rest.
Regal lilies in a bowl Whose fragrance feeds my soul, Blend with two waxen candles Tipped with gold. And I compare The ivory pages of an open book That lay serenely there. Close by, A Buddha calmly sits With desire in his mystic eyes, He gazes at the waxen candles Because no light flames From their golden tips. All this is light to me! Born of earthly fire…
As you proceed through these photos, you may notice how I varied the lighting — from backlighting, to sunlight from above, to mostly shade, to bright sun with shady backgrounds, and finally to light filtered through nearby trees. Pause for a moment and consider how different kinds of lighting alter your perception of the flowers’ colors and shadows, but also how the texture of the flower petals looks different in each of these conditions.
“It took the young Wilson six months to journey from England to China via the United States; here he took the opportunity to visit the Arnold Arboretum to learn about the latest techniques in plant collection, packaging and transportation….
“Wilson’s first journey was such a success and he returned with so many excellent garden-worthy plants that in 1903 he was engaged a second time by the Veitch Nursery for a further two years. In 1907 and again in 1910 he returned to China, collecting this time on behalf of the Arnold Arboretum. He became so identified with the area and was such a successful plant collector that he was often referred to as ‘Chinese’ Wilson, but his last journey to China nearly cost him his life and left him with a permanent limp….
“It has been estimated that Wilson introduced into Britain between 2,000 and 3,000 different species of seed, and many more herbarium specimens; from the seeds, at least 1,000 new plants have been introduced into cultivation…. “Possibly the most gorgeous is the Regal Lily, Lilium regale, the plant which was the indirect cause of Wilson’s ‘lily limp’. This amiable and accommodating lily, as the writer Alice Coats called his introduction, was first grown in 1905 under the name L. myriophyllum (meaning ‘many leaves’), but even though it was easy to cultivate and sweetly scented, it did not become as popular as Wilson thought it should.
“He was so keen for people to share his enthusiasm for this splendid lily that on his fourth expedition to China, in 1910, he travelled yet again from Shanghai to the borders of Tibet, where he had first found the flower, a trek of over 3,200 km (2,000 miles). The site was a remote mountain valley, and the journey to it was through some of the most difficult and desolate country….
“As Wilson himself said of the route undertaken, it was ‘absolute terra-incognita’. It is a mark of his enthusiasm that he braved this arduous journey again just so that the western world could share in the delights of the Regal Lily. Its gentle beauty and graceful habit absolutely defy its natural home; Wilson recorded in his diary that ‘no more barren and repelling country could be imagined’, but when the lovely lily burst into flower, the landscape was transformed, as he then noted, from ‘a lonely semi-desert region into a veritable fairyland’….
“It was on the return journey that, in trying to escape one of the frequent landslides, Wilson broke his leg. The remaining rigours of the journey, the delay in treatment and the subsequent infection setting in resulted in his almost having to have his leg amputated; in fact, he nearly died. In due course, he returned to America where the infection was finally cured and the leg saved, but Wilson was left, for the rest of his life, with his ‘lily limp’.”
Eighty-seven and ninety-two sat together listening to old songs songs from youth memories of dancing with long lost mates.
Eighty-seven tall and stately dark hair turning gray crinkled laughter lines dressed in muted orchid amethysts and diamonds singing the words to every remembered melody.
Ninety-two tiny and erect white hair closely waved complexion lightly etched neatly dressed in gray enhanced by white singing softly cheeks slightly flushed.
Eighty-seven and ninety-two an original bouquet not seniors, not aged, a royal, regal lily and delicate, dainty rose.
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of Regal Lilies (Lilium regale) from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. As you might be able to tell from the first three photos below, these lilies displayed an exuberant mass of flowers, stems, and leaves, so much so that it was a challenge to isolate a few individual flowers for close-up photography.
I had photographed these Regals a couple of times before (see, for example, Summer 2020: Lily Variations (1 of 10) and Lilies on Black Backgrounds (8 of 10)) — where I took the photos from some distance, since these lilies are in a terraced section of the garden, on a grassy stretch above a four-foot stone wall and set back about twenty feet from the public walkway. I hadn’t previously thought about climbing up to get a closer look — one is sometimes unsure about stomping too close to the flowers — but this time I made myself invisible (as Photographers sometimes do) and sneaked up onto the terrace to push my camera into the lilies.
With so many opened flowers, their perfume filled the air and was intoxicating, almost dizzying… and I spent about an hour photographing these beauties, until I saw one of the garden caretakers coming into view and thought I should maybe scram. I felt a wee bit like Ernest Henry Wilson — whose dangerous explorations, excerpted above, led to the introduction of Lilium regale to Britain — but I didn’t get stuck in a landslide or come home with a limp.
“The technology and conventions of photography have given a particular look to each generation’s images, while history, fashion, and food have left their impressions on each body, so that nearly everyone in a given era has a kind of kinship to each other they don’t to other generations….
“Before the 1960s, light and air themselves seem to have had an almost undersea depth and luminosity, in which skin glowed opalescently and everything seemed to have a faint aura slaughtered by the newer black-and-white films made with less silver in the emulsion. I think most Americans who didn’t live through it think the Depression took place in a world of rough-hewn but secretly seductive black-and-white surfaces, as though texture itself could be a wealth to counter all that poverty. And the early part of the last century, when light was harsh and came from high above, was full of hollow-socketed stern faces above bodybelying clothes….
“There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.”
There was a high majestic fooling Day before yesterday in the yellow corn.
And day after tomorrow in the yellow corn There will be high majestic fooling.
The ears ripen in late summer And come on with a conquering laughter, Come on with a high and conquering laughter….
Some of the ears are bursting. A white juice works inside. Cornsilk creeps in the end and dangles in the wind. Always — I never knew it any other way — The wind and the corn talk things over together. And the rain and the corn and the sun and the corn Talk things over together.
Over the road is the farmhouse. The siding is white and a green blind is slung loose. It will not be fixed till the corn is husked. The farmer and his wife talk things over together.
Hello!
This is the third of five posts where I’ve taken this summer’s daylily, lily, and amaryllis photographs, and recreated them on black backgrounds. This post features a second batch of lilies.
“Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. It is not seeing itself.
“It is the ineluctably ‘modern’ way of seeing….
“This way of seeing, which now has a long history, shapes what we look for and are used to noticing in photographs.
“The modern way of seeing is to see in fragments. It is felt that reality is essentially unlimited, and knowledge is open-ended. It follows that all boundaries, all unifying ideas have to be misleading, demagogic; at best, provisional; almost always, in the long run, untrue. To see reality in the light of certain unifying ideas has the undeniable advantage of giving shape and form to our experience. But it also — so the modern way of seeing instructs us — denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real. Thereby it represses our energy, indeed our right, to remake what we wish to remake — our society, our selves. What is liberating, we are told, is to notice more and more.
“In a modern society, images made by cameras are the principal access to realities of which we have no direct experience. And we are expected to receive and to register an unlimited number of images of what we don’t directly experience. The camera defines for us what we allow to be ‘real’ — and it continually pushes forward the boundary of the real….”
Many an afternoon Of the summer day Dreaming here I lay; And I know how soon, Idly at its hour, First the deep bell hums From the minster tower, And then evening comes, Creeping up the glade, With her lengthening shade, And the tardy boon Of her brightening moon.
Hello!
This is the second of five posts where I’ve taken this summer’s daylily, lily, and amaryllis photographs, and recreated them on black backgrounds. This post features lilies, and the first post (of daylilies) is Daylilies, Lilies, and Amaryllis on Black (1 of 5).
One of my favorites is the fifth photo of the unopened flowers, where you see a single bud with a tiny vine twisted around its stem and growing toward the upper right corner of the photo. I wrote about that vine before — see Vines on Black / Vines in Films — where I described it as a creeper variation that quite successfully wraps itself around any other plant it encounters and shoots toward the sun, while rapidly invading the space it starts growing in. This was the first time I’d encountered it at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, where I caught it in the act of “attacking” one of the lilies. With the photo converted to one with a black background, the presence of the tiny vine exerts additional prominence, whereas it might have gone largely unnoticed in the original photo.
While On Photography is Sontag’s well-known book on photography and images, she takes up the subjects in most of her other nonfiction books and essays as well — one of the few writers I’ve read who embeds cultural analysis of images in writing on so many other subjects. Throughout her writing she attempts to address — often leaving us with more questions than answers — how images alter our understanding of reality, across the realms of documentary photography, art, and media information. She also regards images as always-manipulated — even those from the earliest history of photography — because at minimum they represent the photographer’s subject choice of what will be seen versus what will remain unseen; and, for documentary-style photography, she examines how the interpreted meaning of a photograph may change based on the words used to describe it. After reading this section of At the Same Time, I couldn’t help but wonder what she might think of our emerging AI capabilities, where images can be generated from text and have no necessary correspondence to any existing reality.
One of these days, I’d like to take on Benjamin Moser’s Sontag biography — Sontag: Her Life and Work — though I’ll admit that its 800-page length is a little intimidating. Still, I’d like to better understand how photography came to be such a gripping subject that she addressed it so often in her non-fiction writing, which I imagine the book will explain. I did recently learn that the biography is being adapted into a film, so maybe I’ll wait for the movie…. 🙂
“For the authors of the Middle Ages, the color white had three referents: snow, milk, and lily….
“The lily is the white flower par excellence, the one opposed to or associated with the rose, the archetypal red flower, even though roses and lilies of different colors exist in nature. It was already the case in Roman antiquity that these two flowers dominated over all others….
“Among the ancients, admiration for the lily dates back very far. In various forms — true flower, simple floret, stylized plant motif — it can be seen represented on Mesopotamian cylinder seals, Egyptian bas-reliefs, Mycenaean pottery, Gallic coins, and Eastern fabrics. Not only does it play a decorative role, but it also often adds a strong symbolic dimension….
“Sometimes it is a matter of a nurturing fertility figure, sometimes a sign of purity or virginity, sometimes an attribute of power and sovereignty. These three symbolic meanings seem to merge in the medieval lily, simultaneously fertile, virginal, and sovereign.”
“The rose, though a queen, is a friendly queen; but about her rival, the lily, there is always an atmosphere of isolation. Lilies do not reign like the roses, they live apart. There is some indefinable enchantment which puts the whole lily tribe in an altitude so far above other flowers that they are more than regal. How conscious one was in childhood of this strange sweet aloofness of the lilies….
”The rose sleeps in her beauty, but the lily seems unaware of her own exceeding loveliness.”
