"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Tag: spring 2024

Lady Banks’ Rose (2 of 2)

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From “Roses of Nature: Origins of the Species” in The Rose: An Illustrated History by Peter Harkness:

“All the roses of the world in their glorious variety descend from wild roses. These naturally occurring species have been recorded in literature and folklore for centuries, but their origins stretch back further beyond written history. Indeed, the very earliest roses known to science are fossils….

“There are at least three different stories explaining how [R. banksiae] came to Europe. One states that seed of R. banksiae alba-plena sown in Italy in 1869 germinated as R. banksiae normalis and was exhibited in Florence in 1874. Another story holds that the species was recorded in China in 1877 and came to Paris in 1884. There is also the tale that in 1796 a plant was taken from China to Megginch Castle in Scotland. It failed to flower due to a combination of unwise pruning and cold springs, but survived, and in 1905 cuttings were taken to the south of France where they proved to be R. banksiae normalis.

“R. banksiae normalis bears sprays of simple white or yellowish white flowers, which appear in great profusion in early summer on stems that can extend 40 feet (13m) or more. The flowers carry the scent of violets, and the effect is such that in its native China it is known as the ‘wood smoke’ rose, or ‘Mu-Hsiang’. Its preferred native habitats are valleys and rocky places near a source of water, and in Yunnan it is grown around paddy fields to help stabilise banks and keep livestock away….

“This ‘aristocratic and altogether splendid rose’ (to quote Graham Thomas) proved rather tender for the British climate, but in 1799 it was sent to the President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who was a keen rose fancier. It was so well suited to the dry south-east states that it became a serious environmental problem there. In Bermuda, where it also suckers freely, it is known as ‘the fried egg’, and the Bermuda Rose Society has issued a special warning to its members: ‘Think twice before planting!!'”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring photos of Lady Banks’ Rose from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post is Lady Banks’ Rose (1 of 2).

If you’d like to read more than I included in the quotation above about Lady Banks’ and other roses at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation, see this article: The China (Rose Revolution) from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s Monticello web site.

Thanks for taking a look!

Lady Banks’ Rose (1 of 2)

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From “Renaissance and Romantic Roses: 1500-1800” in A History of the Fragrant Rose by Allen Paterson:

“[A] late eighteenth-century addition to our complement of roses… came from China and, although the first introduction is quite well documented, it took from 1796 to 1909 to flower. Now, while R. banksiae, for this is it, does take a few years to settle down to flower well, to take over a century is excessive. The story is that Robert Drummond brought it from the Far East whence he had accompanied his brother, Admiral Drummond. The rose was planted at the family home, Megginch Castle in Scotland. There it grew but, lacking hardiness, was so frequently cut down by the frost that it had failed to develop the three-or-more-year-old thornless stems which are necessary for it to flower. Eventually, cuttings from this specimen were grown in a garden in the French Riviera: this, Mr. [Graham] Thomas asserts, was the first time the single wild white form of Lady Banks’ Rose flowered in Europe.

“It obtained its name, however, from another form and another introduction, but close enough to the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make it permissible to mention it here. One of the earliest professional plant collectors was William Kerr, whom the Royal Society sent to China in 1803. He brought from a Canton garden the double white form of this rose. It flowered near Kew in 1807 and was named after the wife of the Royal Gardens’ director, Sir Joseph Banks….

“Subsequently, first double and then single yellow forms were discovered: all are most lovely plants, especially enjoying the warmth of a Mediterranean climate. To see the soft yellow forms cascading out of high olive trees in association with wisteria, in Corfu for instance, is a magnificent sight.”

Hello!

I first discovered this Lady Banks’ Rose plant at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens last year — which means I had either overlooked it previously (this happens more often than you might think) or it was a new planting. Let’s just say it was a new planting, so it sounds more like a discovery than the overcoming of the overlooking of something. To be fair to myself, though, it’s possible I had just missed its showy blooming season, after which it was a rather ordinary looking shrub that didn’t need to be photographed.

In last year’s post, I photographed the plant in its very early blooming stages — see Lady Banks’ Rose (and Rose Mania) — to emphasize how the flowers produced clusters of yellow cone-shaped blooms at the top of single stems. This year, I took some wider photos as well — and you can gather from the images how many branches and flowers the plant produces, especially as it easily doubled in height and ground coverage since it posed for me previously. The flowers at this stage gather in very dense bunches, yet the plant overall still maintains a certain shapeliness that I’ve attempted to highlight by photographing it from different perspectives and adding some light and saturation to emphasize its forms. It occupies the intersection between two of the garden’s pathways and is surrounded by ferns, as well as the hellebores, vinca, and some of the azaleas that I photographed this year.

Its history is fascinating, though somewhat confusing — but I’ve represented a little about its introduction to Europe in the quotation above. In the second of two posts featuring this plant, I’ll include a few more historical tidbits, and describe one of the ways Lady Banks’ Rose made its way from Great Britain to the colonial United States.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Blooming Bluebells

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From “Jottings in the Churchyard at Ragaz” in Poems 1906-1926 by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by J. B. Leishman:

Think of brightness through the foliage streaming
down into the shade where breezes blow…:
how in that strange light’s ethereal gleaming,
scarcely swung, will stand some single-seeming,
tall-grown bluebell, far below….

From “Derbyshire Bluebells” in Selected Poems by Sacheverell Sitwell:

The wood is one blue flame of love,
It trembles with the thrush and dove;
Who is this honey beacon for,
That burns this once, then never more?
Whose lutes hide in the young green leaves?
Who sorrows here when no one grieves?

The misty spaces in the boughs,
No shouts will fill, no stone will rouse
If at those panes we beat in vain
Why hope to quench that fire with rain?
Why beat the bluebells down to find
How fire and honey are combined?

There is no space for foot to tread
Unless you bruise the flower head,
No corner where you cannot hear
The dove’s long croon, the thrush sing near,
Like bells out of the trees’ tall spires
These songs above the bluebell fires….

From “English Bluebells” in The Story of Flowers and How They Changed the Way We Live by Noel Kingsbury:

“Going to visit the bluebells has been a tradition for many [British] families for more than a century, mainly in their stronghold of southeastern England. Starting just as spring is turning into summer, the flowers can turn woodlands into lakes of blue that in some cases seem to reach as far as the density of tree growth allows us to see….

“Historical records of bluebells are relatively few and far between, and the plant was known to our ancestors more as a source of starch for stiffening the ruffs worn by the wealthy of Elizabethan England than as something to admire. It was not until the nineteenth century that writers took much notice of it, and gardeners too. Small patches of bluebells are rather unimpressive, and it is no surprise that the larger, and paler, Spanish bluebell, H. hispanica, makes a better garden plant. Finally, it is worth noting that the common name is an English designation. For the Scots the bluebell is Campanula rotundifolia; for the Americans it is Mertensia virginica; and Nigerians and New Zealanders have their own, totally unrelated, ‘bluebells’ too.”

Hello!

Below is a small collection of bluebell photographs, taken at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens last month. While not as impressive a display as those of the English woodlands that Noel Kingsbury describes above, they were still quite adorable growing in sandy soil at the base of an ancient oak tree near the garden entrance, with a few peeking through the seat of an old wrought iron bench nearby.

Thanks for taking a look!

Cherry Blossoms and Dogwood Blooms

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From “Petals from Heaven” by Kobayashi Issa in The Penguin Book of Haiku by Adam L. Kern:

petals from heaven
         flurrying down it seems
oh cherry trees!

From “On Windless Days” by Miura Chora in The Penguin Book of Haiku by Adam L. Kern:

on windless days
         scattering that much more…
cherry blossoms

From “Spring Snow” in The Windbreak Pine: New and Collected Haiku 1985-2015 by Wally Swist:

spring snow —
                  an unopened bud at the end
of each branch of the dogwood

From “Down to Dark Leaf-Mold” by O. Southard in A Haiku Path by The Haiku Society of America:

Down to dark leaf-mold
         the falling dogwood-petal
                  carries its moonlight

Hello!

Here we have some photographs of cherry blossoms and dogwood blooms, taken at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens last month. Funny that the phrase “cherry blossoms and dogwood blooms” sounds better than “cherry blooms and dogwood blossoms” — though I have no idea why. Words are just amusing like that, I guess.

Both kinds of trees were blooming bounteously — the volume of blossoms was actually quite stunning. I would’ve liked to have taken even more cherry blossom photos — but the trees had so carefully scattered spent flowers on all the surrounding sidewalks (as in the first four photos below), I kept my distance and did some zooming closeups instead. Somehow it just seemed wrong to trample on that mass of scentually intoxicating (buzzzzz!) pink petals. I also thought I might get stuck in a blossom-drift; you know, I’m quite short and they’re piled pretty high. (This may or may not be true.)

Thanks for taking a look!

Azalea Blooms Aplenty

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From “Azaleas and Rhododendrons” in Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden by Eleanor Perenyi:

“Most of us think [azaleas and rhododendrons] are different plants. Catalogues list them separately, and gardening journalists clearly distinguish between them, with reason. Rhododendrons are evergreen with large, leathery leaves; azaleas are mostly deciduous and have finer foliage. Rhododendrons like shade, azaleas don’t. Even the pests and diseases that attack them aren’t the same. Such distinctions don’t impress botanists — they count stamens. Azaleas were once thought to have five, rhododendrons ten or more. When this criterion was found not to be invariable, azaleas were summarily moved into the genus rhododendron….

“Classification aside, no gardener is going to confuse the somehow eminently Victorian rhododendron with shiny leaves that roll up like cigars when the cold strikes them and big, globular flowers, with the airier, more fragile-looking azaleas that seem to belong on a Japanese screen. Even the color ranges are different, indeed opposed, as Gertrude Jekyll long ago pointed out…. Rhododendrons are at the blue end of the red spectrum — mauve, purple, blush pink — azaleas at the yellow: peach and copper, hot reds and oranges….

“America has beautiful native varieties of both: R. catawbiense that lights up the forest primeval in the Great Smokies, the scented azaleas called arborescens and viscosum, and many more. But the most spectacular come from China and Japan. They are magnificent shrubs in their way….”

From “Japanese Azalea in the Tropics” in Out of Darkness Blossoming: Poems by Edward A. Watson:

Beneath the crumbling verandah
a single azalea bloomed.
Against what and for whom
we concluded nothing,
for in the fifteenth year
and after the fifteenth flower,
their presence mystified us.
And as I tended the seasonal rhythms
of that underworld, I knew, finally,
that bees indeed were a kind of myth
for the one bloom strutted its promiscuity
in the clear presence of toads.

From “Cardinals Mate for Life” in Touching Shadows: Poems by Bonny Barry Sanders:

While I am still locked in the tender cage
of your arms and legs, I hear the cardinal call from the oak
beside the deck. I go out with my gourmet blend:
black oil sunflower, raw peanuts, thistle and safflower.
I rattle the seed container and echo
his raspy chipping. I pitch him the same slur
of notes every day. You might think it has to do
with recognition, but it’s more

than that. Back and forth he and I toss
our greeting like a game of catch.
With each response, he comes closer
until he is in a locust tree by the front door.
I hear the clicking lisp of his mate
ahead of him in the azalea bush next to me.
He is guarding her from above.
He will watch until I go in….

Hello!

I don’t usually photograph azaleas, mainly because in the spring and early summer they’re So Everywhere around Atlanta that I don’t really notice them — the very definition of ubiquitous, a word I like a lot but hardly ever get a chance to use. Then a few weeks ago I came across some azaleas with blooms in very unusual orange or salmon shades that I’d never seen before — which you can see in large formation in the first three photographs below.

At first I thought it was a trick of the morning light — morning light is like that sometimes! — or a color variation cause by reflected white from the building behind them. But those in the foreground of the photo are more salmony orange-pink than those in the background (which are the more common dark pink or red azalea color), and the color change occurs right in the middle of the cluster of shrubs — suggesting that two different varieties were originally planted here and each one spread laterally.

The next nine photos show the color transitions I found on the foreground plants. The unopened buds are mostly orange; the partially opened flowers are a mix of orange and pink; and by the time they’re fully opened, the pink and orange blend together into a salmon color.

After I spent some time photographing these (which are located just outside one of Oakland Cemetery’s notable structures, the 1899-built Bell Tower), a frequency illusion kicked in and I started noticing all the other azaleas I usually ignored. While none of the others exhibited the same unique color scheme, they were all quite striking on their own, showing off shades of pink, purple, red, and white. I took the remaining series of wide-angle photos in several locations where their big bloom-spans created a nice contrast with the fresh greens of various shrubs, as well as the reds of Japanese Maples and flowering Dogwood trees. Perhaps you can also get a sense from photos like these how pleasant a strolling-place Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens can be.

Thanks for taking a look!