Tag: summer

From Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery: An Illustrated History and Guide by Ren and Helen Davis:

“In nineteenth-century New York, Boston, and Atlanta, the provision of burial places was another new municipal service that local governments were forced to provide as a result of their burgeoning populations. The dead became too numerous to be buried in the churchyards that had served colonial-era towns….

“Boston, whose population topped seventy thousand in 1830, created a model for addressing the burial needs of its citizens. The city government did not establish a city cemetery; rather, it delegated the task to the not-for-profit sector. Like most large urban centers, Boston had its share of voluntary associations dedicated to promoting the common good, one of which was the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The society decided to combine its interest in flora with the city’s need to bury the dead, so it created a ‘garden cemetery,’ a place where the dead would be surrounded with trees, shrubs, and flowers. The place envisioned by society members was to be not just a burial ground visited by the families of the dead, but also a destination for the living of Boston, a place where its residents could come to see a landscaped garden….

“In his 1831 address at the dedication of the cemetery, named Mount Auburn, Joseph Story explained that the crowded conditions in Boston, which is surrounded by a harbor and tidal waters, necessitated the location of the cemetery in the countryside, well beyond the city limits. Because of this, he called Mount Auburn a ‘rural’ cemetery, a descriptive that was applied to garden cemeteries in other cities….

“Other cities quickly adopted the Mount Auburn model, establishing private societies that purchased rural land, landscaped it, and sold the first lots to a wealthy elite. Philadelphia established Laurel Hill in 1836; Baltimore, Green Mount in 1838; and New York City, Greenwood in 1839. The multiple functions of the rural cemetery fit into an emerging consensus among progressive thinkers about the need for civic improvements in American cities….

“Established as a burial ground, the Atlanta City Cemetery acquired greater cultural and material significance because of its hilly location and the course of its development. Twenty-two years after its establishment, with expansions, the erection of monuments, and the growth of a cover of oak trees, the cemetery was renamed Oakland. It had become a garden cemetery with artistic monuments…. America’s larger urban centers incorporated the garden qualities of the cemetery, park, and suburb into their expanding perimeters from the 1820s to the 1870s. It was in the 1880s that Atlanta became large enough to support these developments, and Oakland Cemetery led the way…. “

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Hello!

This is the third of three posts with photographs of the Oriental lily Lilium speciosum — also known by the names Japanese Lily and Japanese Show (or Showy) Lily. The first post is Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (1 of 3), and the second post is Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (2 of 3).

In my last post, I introduced these three photos, which show where the Japanese Lilies are located:

The photos show the kind of integration — across history, culture, landscape design, botany, and historical memory — that was common during the rise of Victorian garden cemeteries in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century. The entire plot is bounded by a short concrete wall on all sides, one that separates the space from those surrounding it yet still provides visual and physical access to the family memorial from any direction. More than one structure is present within the plot’s boundaries, a common occurrence in spaces like this. In this case, though, the bell-shaped monument has a ragged break at the top — one that wasn’t caused by aging but was sculpted that way, probably to represent a life cut short. The presence of grass, ferns, shrubs, and flowers within the same space softens the appearance of the monument’s more harsh stone structures, creating calming shadows while adding contrasting colors to its other visual characteristics. These elements all come together as staging for a story and a history, one that is simultaneously a narrative containing family memory while potentially indicating a family tragedy.

This space actually memorializes members of two families related by marriage — that of Daniel Dougherty and Patrick Connely, who both died in 1851, so it’s likely that the tall monument was constructed and erected around that time. The Dougherty name is inscribed on one side of the monument; the Connely name on another. Connely died of natural causes but Dougherty was murdered by a perpetrator who was never identified — an event that lends credence to the idea that the broken monument represents a tragic circumstance. The inscriptions on the broken monument are no longer legible, so this may be speculation on my part; but even if I’m wrong, you can see how interpreting a historical space while recognizing the symbolism of something like a broken structure can lead to reasonable conclusions about its original intended meaning.

You can read a bit more about Dougherty here, and Connely here; and read about the family relationship on Oakland’s Irish Resident’s page. The square building to the right of the monument is not part of the Dougherty-Connely memorial, but is that of Timothy Burke, another Irish immigrant to Atlanta who’s also mentioned on the same Irish resident’s page. It’s quite common — especially in this old section of the cemetery, its Original Six Acres established in 1850 — for memorial spaces to appear to merge from certain angles simply because they’re so close to each other, which was perhaps another reason the Dougherty-Connely section has boundaries defined with a wall.

These three photos also illustrate another defining principle of garden or rural cemeteries: their blend of constructed and natural elements that were intentionally planned to combine the two. The movements that created this element blending — which started with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston — evolved from a confluence of several emergent nineteenth-century concerns: rapidly growing populations in U.S. cities and the resulting need to expand cemeteries; backlash towards the unrelenting effects of capitalist progress and its effects on the environment; and rising worries about how urban centers detached human beings from the natural world.

Garden cemeteries like Mount Auburn or Oakland — often called “rural cemeteries” to reflect their design rather than their location — were proposed and developed with these concerns in mind. They were created as memorial spaces that served multiple purposes simultaneously, including that of providing a resource for living residents to explore history, architecture, and nature not far from their homes. The compressed history I excerpted from Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery: An Illustrated History and Guide at the top of this post connects Mount Auburn’s development to Oakland’s; and the book Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition by Aaron Sachs takes up their representation of nature and the environment, starting with an evocative description of Mount Auburn and leading us to its nationwide influence:

Many Americans came to see Mount Auburn as a new paradise. Their experiences of the cemetery, though, suggest a garden not of carelessness but of caring — not of gratification but of gratitude. It was a grounded, earthly Eden. Within just a few years, Mount Auburn became perhaps the leading tourist attraction of the young republic, often mentioned in the same breath as Niagara Falls and George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon….

The cemetery offered serenity but also excitement — a sense of seclusion in sheltered dells, but also the confusion of labyrinthine trails and the stimulation of broad views…. It taught the ravishing beauty of autumnal decay, the Romantic pleasure of melancholy. It suggested that the fullness of life could be tasted only through a constant awareness of death. It offered the consolation of regeneration even as it reinforced the pain and anxiety of limitation. It was an asylum, a sanctuary, but not necessarily an evasion. Visitors sometimes came to the cemetery not just to recuperate from modernity, but to rethink their role in it….

Both men and women spent their leisure time at Mount Auburn…. The cemetery clearly cultivated a spectrum of emotions, and it was large enough to accommodate expressions of both joy and grief, but most people at Mount Auburn seem to have experienced a reverent, satisfying mixture of the two….

This embrace of social unity, of a public spirit manifested in environmental terms, of wild nature as a tonic and a countervailing force against a hubristic Progress, was expressed by civic leaders again and again, in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Rochester, Albany, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Providence, Louisville, Savannah, Charleston, Richmond, Buffalo, Detroit, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis, and Cleveland — each of which consecrated a nonprofit rural cemetery between 1836 and 1853.

Taken together, these developments show us how garden cemeteries have evolved to embrace so many cross-cultural characteristics. Grounded in both history and nature, we see why it happens that a place like Oakland contains such a mixture of often-exotic plants and flowers, while simultaneously representing Georgia-native and naturalized flora and fauna within the same physical space. And much of its architecture takes all this into account: it’s common for monuments like that of the Dougherty-Connely families to mirror the landscaping around it. Here, for example, we can see how the monument’s carvings are not incidental or accidental: from top to bottom, fleur-de-lis that resemble the lilies planted at its base are sculpted in stone…

… likely proscribed in the initial design of the memorial, then maintained in historical continuity for the next 175 years. The monuments reflect the landscape, and the landscape is constantly being developed and revitalized to reflect the art and symbolism in the monuments, throughout that entire time.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “Lilies: The Next Generation” in Lilies: Beautiful Varieties for the Home and Garden by Naomi Slade:

“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.

“The backroom boys of experimental horticulture were already on the case, however, and as early as 1869, Francis Parkman, a hobby horticulturist in Boston, had successfully crossed L. auratum and L. speciosum….. Progress accelerated and by the Second World War the hunt for better, brighter, more glamorous and, crucially, more reliable flowers was well underway.

“The man who really kick-started the lily revolution was Jan De Graaff. In the late 1930s he gathered the best forms of the species and the available hybrids of the time and began a largescale programme of hybridization at his nursery, Oregon Bulb Farms. In 1941 he struck gold with ‘Enchantment’, a variety that is still with us today. The legions of plants that followed were a revelation: a reliable, spectacular and versatile legacy that has been taking the world by storm ever since.”

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Hello!

This is the second of three posts with photographs of the Oriental lily Lilium speciosum — also known by the names Japanese Lily and Japanese Show (or Showy) Lily. The first post is Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (1 of 3). As with the previous post, my photographs show this lily in a variety of lighting conditions, where fast-moving clouds switched the sun on and off, or I took photographs near the sides of their monument where they were shaded by nearby trees or by the monument itself.

Here are three photographs of that monument — one of the oldest in Oakland Cemetery, located in its nineteenth-century Original Six Acres — from a set of images we’ll explore in the third post. As you can see from the photos, approaching the monument from different sides can mean taking advantage of varying kinds of light, to produce photographs that demonstrate the effects of full sun, full shade, side-lighting, or backlighting on this lily species. These conditions provide different micro-climates for observing the lily’s growth and flowering, and also let photographers experiment with the effects of different environments on images and color reproduction.

The excerpt from Lilies: Beautiful Varieties for the Home and Garden above introduces two important contributors to early and modern lily breeding, Francis Parkman and Jan De Graaff. Parkman — more commonly identified as an adventurer, historian, and author of The Oregon Trail — was also an avid horticulturalist. De Graaff — a member of the De Graaff family whose horticultural and flower breeding businesses extended from the 1720s in the Netherlands to the mid-twentieth century in Oregon — was noted for his lily expertise, and the family business was involved in breeding and selling not only lilies, but also daffodils, irises, and tulips for more than three centuries. De Graaff’s lily expertise led him to an appreciation of one of Parkman’s singular contributions to lily hybridization, crossing the two botanically significant species Lilium auratum and Lilium speciosum — both of which contained substantial genetic material that has informed much subsequent lily development.

In his book Lilies, De Graaff describes Parkman’s contribution like this:

“Crosses between auratum and speciosum are among the most important and are the loveliest of the new garden lilies. Some have been produced in New Zealand, others in Australia, and many in Oregon….

“But it is of considerable historical interest that this cross was one of the first ever made between two species of lilies. Francis Parkman, the American historian, growing both species in Boston, pollinated a number of L. speciosum flowers with pollen from L. auratum. The cross must have been made about 1864 or 1865, for the seedlings flowered in 1869….

“Of these seedlings all but one looked exactly like L. speciosum. The one exception was spectacular, a plant with scented foot-wide flowers having segments crimson on the inside, with a white edge. Parkman increased the stock of bulbs by offsets, and then sold them, about fifty, to the great English nurseryman, Anthony Waterer. The lily was named L. X parkmanni. It became infected with virus disease and was totally lost. The cross was repeated, or one very like it, in England by P. S. Hayward in 1914 and by other gardeners elsewhere, but all these earlier auratum X speciosum lilies were lost, owing to virus disease or to some other accident. Real stocks of bulbs of such fine garden lilies were not propagated until the last decade or two.”

This excerpt acknowledges Parkman’s accomplishments, while elsewhere in the book, its cultural importance is recognized. The book’s introduction describes how “the cultivation of LL. auratum and speciosum in mid-nineteenth-century England, [created] an horticultural furore and a craze for these flowers which thus displaced the old lilies and became the lilies par excellence.”

This history, then, not only gives us a short tour through the ups and downs of lily hybridization, but also locates their cultural impact. Parkman’s original crosses were produced, then lost, then resurrected in different forms, and along the way a hybrid was produced — Lilium x parkmanni — that was distinctive enough to be treated as a separate cultivar and named after its progenitor. At the same time, subsequent expectations for lily hybrids were permanently altered from earlier, less dramatic forms to forms and colors like those of Oakland’s Lilium speciosum descendants — large, multicolored, complex, and vibrant plants that now adorn our memorial and personal gardens. That the botanical history of this turn towards more striking lilies coincided with the early development and landscape planning of Victorian garden cemeteries is something we’ll explore in the next post in this series.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From “The Journey of the True Lily” in Lily (Botanical) by Marcia Reiss:

“Hybridization has produced an astonishing variety of lilies in nearly every colour, shape and size. More than 15,000 have been listed on the International Lily Register and just as many unregistered hybrids are believed to exist….

“Beginning in 1963, two standard-bearers of the lily world, the Royal Horticultural Society and the North American Lily Society, established an internationally accepted system of nine different divisions. Like the hybrids, the number of divisions kept increasing, but the eighth conveniently includes those not accounted for in any of the others…. The divisions are based on the species used to create the hybrids, distinctions that can be confusing to the average gardener. There are separate divisions, for example, called Asiatic and Oriental — a division that appears to be redundant….

“Asiatics, largely the hybrids produced at the Oregon Bulb Farms and their descendants, are beautiful, virtually pest-free and amazingly hardy. Their only drawback is that, for the most part, they are also fragrance-free. Orientals, mainly derived from the two Japanese stars of the nineteenth century, L. auratum and L. speciosum, are very fragrant and flamboyant in size and colour. These two species had been crossed as early as 1869 by Francis Parkman….

“One of the most successful Oriental hybrids, the colourful and fragrant ‘Stargazer’, was finally created a century after Parkman’s milestone. A cross between L. henryi and L. speciosum rubrum, it is a show-stopping beauty with crimson petals edged in white and sprinkled with dark red spots.”

From “The Lily Plant” in Lilies for American Gardens by George L. Slate:

“The flowers of lilies are diverse in form and color and it is this diversity which contributes to the charm of the genus. On this diversity of form and the position of the flower is based the classification of lilies.

“The parts of the flowers are in sixes. The outer part consists of three petals and three sepals which together are called segments and make up the perianth. Within are six stamens or the male part of the flower. These are composed of slender filaments at the top of which are the anthers or pollen-bearing organs. The pollen varies in color with the different species from yellow to dark brown and is of some taxonomic value. In the center of the flower is the pistil, or female part of the flower. At the base of each segment is a narrow groove, the nectariferous furrow which secretes nectar….”

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Hello!

This is the first of three posts with photographs of Lilium speciosum — an Oriental lily whose common names include Japanese Lily and Japanese Show (or Showy) Lily. It does live up to its “showy” moniker: the plant blooms profusely over several weeks, often with a dozen flowers per plant, each flower showing rich and reflective shades of red, purple, or magenta colors that vary depending on the lighting provided by the sun or the way light bounces off their surroundings.

As you progress through the photos below (and those in the next two posts), you’ll see the effects of those varying lighting conditions: note how the petals of those photographed when the sun was out are redder than those taken in the shade, those taken in the shade shift more towards purple, and those with gray stone backgrounds shift from warmer red or purple tones to shades of magenta. Unlike the Tiger Lilies (Lilium lancifolium) that I presented in previous posts (see Capturing the Elusive Tiger Lily (1 of 2) and Capturing the Elusive Tiger Lily (2 of 2)) — which demonstrate a consistent, saturated orange color largely unaffected by lighting variations — the more translucent petals of Lilium speciosum may look completely different as conditions (or your standing positions when photographing them) change.

I identified this flower by uploading about 20 of my photos to PlantNet, which reported a 60- to 80-percent likelihood that Lilium speciosum was the correct species. Those are actually very high percentages; most flowers I identify that way are not nearly as recognizable, and I’ll use additional sources to try and get them right. Even so, though, the quotation at the top of this post suggests how complicated the genetics of any one lily plant can be, and this Lilium speciosum — one of the most important lily variants, whose botanical history we’ll explore in the next post — shows evidence of potentially having the spots, colors, and petal shapes of many of its predecessors, in its own distinct package.

I initially discovered these plants producing flower buds on June 21, where they surround the base of one of Oakland Cemetery’s prestigious monuments, which we’ll take a closer look at in the third post in this series. I took only three photographs that day, capturing the plant in its budding stage, where one of its distinguishing characteristics — the large number of blooms it can potentially produce — is evident.

Three weeks later, we see how that potential plays out in these photos showing one of the plants with four flowers in full bloom (Lilium Flowers describes how the blooms unfold), along with six styles that have previously shed their flower petals. So this plant was capable of producing ten flowers from a single stem emanating from the ground, each flower balanced on branching “tributaries” (just as the buds were) and positioned to offer pollinators opportunities to approach from varying directions. The flowers also demonstrate the typical staggered blooming strategy of many lily plants, a strategy that extends the plants’ accessibility to those pollinators from several days to several weeks.

Its extended blooming period gave me a chance to observe this Oriental lily in more than one stage of its lifecycle, even though I took most of the photographs on a single day. Below, in this image, we get a closer look at what happens after the flowers have finished blooming, where the styles to the left and right of the stem curve upward as a reminder of the original positioning of the flowers. We can’t tell from looking at this photo if pollination actually occurred; but if it had, then the stigma at the end of these styles would have been brushed with pollen by some fly-by bugs or the wind, beginning the next reproductive stage where the flower’s seeds get fertilized in the seedpod closer to the stem. We often see styles like this in our gardens; the fact that we may visually tune them out (or, as I have often done in the past, remove them from photos) suggests that we may not realize their significance, but I think we should — especially when they’re as artistically placed as they are in this photo.

This Japanese Show Lily shares the same Turk’s Cap form with Tiger Lilies, yet also demonstrates important differences. The two plants appear to take divergent approaches to managing their reproductive energies, with the Tiger Lily emphasizing large, heavy blooms to attract bigger pollinators, fewer flowers per plant, and a backup method of cloning itself with bulbils. The Show Lily doesn’t generate bulbils, but instead produces many more blooms on each plant, any one of which is smaller than that of a typical Tiger Lily. This larger quantity of blooms also introduces architectural differences between the two plants, with the Show Lily building an array of stems constructed like a scaffold to help distribute mechanical stress and send nutrients to the flowers and leaves.

The Show Lily’s flowers are also not only smaller than the Tiger’s, but — as you can see from most of the photos — their recurve is not as tight as that of the Tiger Lily. This keeps the interior of the flower — where nectar resides — open to many small pollinators, like the wasp you can see approaching a flower’s anterior in the first three photos below. The wasp would likely have been attracted to the flower’s varying colors, including the bright green ribbing — which not only supports the flower’s curved petal structure (as I explained in this Tiger Lily post), but also distributes nutrients to the flower petals. With the more open form of the curved petals, the wasp can easily alight between the petals, and its movements might generate enough vibration to facilitate pollen transfer from the anthers — which are much closer to each other and to the stigma than the Tiger Lily’s — even if it doesn’t fly near them, with bonus pollen awarded to the flower if it does.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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