This, this! Is Beauty; cast, I pray, your eyes On this my Glory! See the Grace, the Size! Was ever Stem so tall, so stout, so strong, Exact in breadth, in just proportion, long; These brilliant Hues are all distinct and clean, No kindred Tint, no blending Streaks between….
“[If] a pink flower crosses with a white one, the progeny may show a variety of shades of pink.”
Hello!
This supercalifragilisticexpialidocious lily is a newcomer to my garden this year, it having been adopted by The Gardener to replace one of last year’s Tiny Epic Asiatic Lilies that fell asleep during the winter and never woke up. “Summer Sky Pink” is a really good name for this variety: its pinkness is certainly reminiscent of that kind of pink-purple-magenta color that surrounds clouds at the horizon this time of year, especially before or after summertime thunderstorms.
Fresh from the garden center, it produced quite a few big blooms for about two weeks in early June. I learned it’s a cross between white Longliflorum (or Easter Lily) and pink or red asiatic lilies. It clearly retains the large, thick-to-the-touch blossom petals of the Easter Lily and, toward the center, yellow and orange highlights. You can see some Longliflorum in one of my earlier posts, Easter Sunday 2021: Yellow Daffodils and White Lilies.
“Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants, to suspect that they do it to annoy. One knows, after all, that they lead lives of their own: plant the lily bulb in the center of the bed and watch it come up under a brick near the edge; pull up a sick little bush and throw it on the compost heap, and ten to one, it will obstinately revive.”
Hello!
Here are a few more photos of my Tiny Epic Asiatic Lilies — some from the previous post along with a small handful of new ones (those whose backgrounds were very cluttered in the originals), all reprocessed on black.
“Some lilies are more vigorous than others. The June-flowering Asiatics don’t care what you do to them. They can be cut quite close to the ground and still return in full force the following year. The others seem to know they are more beautiful and expensive… and to cut them severely is to court their oblivion.”
“You would know by the scent of the lilies that summer was here.”
The lilies in the galleries below — a variation of Tiny Epic Asiatic Lilies — are not actually tiny but they’re definitely epic. The flower petals unfold to the size of the open hand of a small person (me!), and with their striking colors and textures, they make great subjects for close-up photography. The petals are quite thick and silky to the touch, and you can almost feel tiny bumps where it looks like they’ve been sprinkled with cinnamon radiating from the center.
Unlike some lilies, these blooms lasted nearly a week — which gave me plenty of time to aim a macro lens at them and try different combinations of light and different camera settings before I settled on these photos. I’ve featured them here before (see, from last year, Epic Lilies (1 of 3), Epic Lilies (2 of 3), Epic Lilies (3 of 3)), so this time I concentrated on photographing just one or two isolated blooms and getting the focus, color, and textures as accurate as they appeared to me in the garden.
“Begonias are named for Michel Bégon, a French colonial governor, by botanist Charles Plumier (1646–1704), probably to thank him for giving him a post as an official plant collector in the colonies. They have been used medicinally, while one Chinese species, Begonia fimbristipula, is commercially available as a herb tea….
“Botanical classification is complex and the subject of several recent research projects. These are very much enthusiast plants: currently 66 sections are recognised and some 10,000 cultivars have been raised over time.”
“There are some 750 species of Hibiscus, whose name is derived from the Greek for the closely related mallow. Overwhelmingly they are found in the world’s tropical regions, both Old and New Worlds, and include trees, shrubs, perennials, and annuals….
“In those temperate regions with warm and humid summers, the range in cultivation is boosted by a number of herbaceous perennial species from the U.S. Southeast, which have enormous flowers….”
Hello!
Here we are at the end of the first week of November, and a bit of fall color is finally starting to paint its way into my neighborhood.
Over the past few days, this Japanese Maple in front of my living room window has turned dark red, its leaves casting a red-orange glow over everything in that room. I’m fascinated by the color, because of its unusual intensity and something else: this maple has lived for years in the shade of a gigantic street-side Bradford Pear tree that has made several previous appearances here, but that Pear is no more. It split in two a few months ago during an intense summer thunderstorm, falling against a telephone pole at the sidewalk in front of my house, then last week the remaining half-tree was cut down by city workers. So now the Japanese Maple is no longer hidden in the shade, and when early morning sun lights up this window, it’s gorgeous! The wild-n-crazy begonia growing there looks pretty cool too!
These two galleries show the last of my late summer/early autumn photos.
The first three pictures are blooms from a begonia called “Senator IQ” — one of three I have in pots on a patio table under an umbrella, where it grows well in the moderate light and sends its tiny flowers over the edge of the table to seek out the sun (as plants like to do). I prefer this kind of begonia because its leaves are very dark green — and that with the shade from the patio umbrella makes it easier to highlight the white blooms with minimal background darkening in Lightroom.
Here are some flowers from an “Orange Hibiscus” — which was the name on the handwritten plant tag in the pot I purchased it in. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be its actual name, or someone just went for the obvious moniker. Anyway, I’ve renamed it OrangeOrangeOrange Hibiscus, because that seems to fit at least as well. The plant was mixed in with other annuals and perennials at the garden center, so I’m not sure if it will hold out through the winter and produce new blooms next year — but it’s still going strong and has added several inches to its leaves and stems despite cooler temperatures and darker days.
Here you see some of the blooms at various focal lengths through a macro lens. In several of the photos you’ll also see little swatches of pink or magenta near the center of the flower. At first I thought these were artifacts and started removing them in Lightroom, then realized (after a little research) that these magenta/pink highlights are colors in wavelengths intended to attract pollinators and direct them toward … the pollinating spot! Smart plant!
“Acanthus includes around 30 species of shrubby and herbaceous plants from the Mediterranean region, down into northern and eastern Africa and across into western Asia. The name is from the Greek for ‘spiny’; Acantha was a minor figure in Greek mythology, a nymph who got turned into a plant by Apollo after she fought off one of the unwanted sexual advances of which ancient mythology is so full….
“Acanthus is most famous as being the model for the ornamental leaves found on the capitals (pillar tops) of the so-called Corinthian order of ancient Greek architecture. Given the popularity of Classical architecture, the acanthus leaf has reappeared ever since as carved or printed ornament, in both buildings and paintings….
“The rather odd common name of bears’ breeches is obscure in origin, without any recorded explanation.”
“[Theophrastus] is the first to recognise, in the 500 plants that he includes in his Enquiry, many of the characteristics which eventually helped to determine how plants were to be classified. He notes that some plants are annual, completing the whole of their cycle of growth in a single year; others are perennial, springing up each year from the same rootstock, and dying down to the ground in winter. He sees how some plants seem to fall into natural groups or families, especially those plants which have tiny white flowers arranged in wide flat heads on top of hollow stems.
“Later, when a more specialised language began to emerge to serve this demanding new discipline, flowerheads of this kind became known as umbels….
“The term was then used to label all plants that had this characteristic flat head of flowers – the Umbelliferae: angelica, carrot, celery, dill, fennel, parsley, parsnip, cow parsley, hogweed, Queen Anne’s lace, sweet cicely, alexanders, ground elder. And the deadly poisonous hemlock. There was a clear and pressing incentive to understand the difference between this plant and its similar wild cousins.”
Hello!
Dig into the names of plants for a while, and you’ll invariably encounter characters from Greek mythology, and, as I recently learned, Greek philosophers. Actual human beings! The philosophers that is.
My knowledge of Greek mythology never advanced much beyond watching The Mighty Hercules cartoons as a tyke (my favorite character was Daedelus, portrayed as an evil wizard); but I did spend a couple years dabbling in philosophy back in the twentieth century. I eventually switched my studies from philosophy to history, after discovering how dwelling in the minds of philosophers was a bit too much like never getting out of my own head… and history, at least, led me to explore the world around me and try to connect the past with the present, even in my own neighborhood and at historical sites like The Atlanta History Center and Oakland Cemetery.
The Greek philosophers were especially fond of sorting things — their mythology also reflects that — in the sense that they were compelled to observe the external world and try to classify and organize what they saw. Pummeled with all sorts of information the way us “moderns” are, we easily forget that those oak trees or dandelions encountered on a walk through our ‘hood once had no names, and, as important, no explicit differentiation from each other.
“Theophrastus is the first in the long list of men who fought to find the order they believed must exist in the dizzying variety of the natural world. He lays out the puzzle, nudges together a few pieces that he thinks might fit. Fitfully, over the next 2,000 years, the puzzle is taken up by a series of philosophers, doctors, apothecaries, each of whom adds to the picture, links a few more pieces together, until finally, by the end of the seventeenth century, the whole picture begins to make sense….
“We now have written descriptions of 422,000 plant species. Theophrastus knew about 500, half of which had already appeared in Greek poetry, plays, essays…. But Theophrastus was the first person to devote serious attention to the business of naming plant names….
“He was the first person to discuss plants in relationship to each other, not just in terms of their usefulness to man. Magic and medicine both provided powerful practical incentives to know more about plants, but Theophrastus wanted to know them in a different way, just for the sake of knowing. From that knowledge, connections between plants gradually emerged which helped to make sense of the natural world….”
If you’ve ever tried to explain a plant’s parts — the leaves, the stems, the flowers, the parts of a flower, as you (or I) might do when writing about a photograph, or painting, or drawing one — you’re pulling from a philosophical tradition that goes back at least to the Greek philosophers and creatives, and probably even further into Eastern traditions of regions like China and India that had an equally vibrant culture of learning about and making use of the things growing from the ground around them. That “oak tree” and “dandelion” look a little different now, don’t they?
The photos below have been hanging around in my Lightroom catalog for a while; I took them while hunting down other flowers at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens — especially the lilies and irises. It wasn’t until I found out what they were called — and how far their botanical names went back historically — that I decided to post my photos of the Bears’ Breeches and Angelica. I mean, who can resist those names, especially “Bears’ Breeches”! And “umbel” by the way — which is a description of the Angelica flower’s form, connects it to the plant family Umbelliferae, and whose word history gives us “umbrella” — also describes the flower structure of lantana in photos I previously posted.
Here are the Bears’ Breeches, growing at the border between a shaded and sunlit area next to some old urns… enough breeches for several (very small) bears!
The Angelica stood tall in a large bunch near the base of an oak tree, looking like two different plants depending on the age of the flowers. The older flowers — like these two and the three immediately following — were dry to the touch and lively with dozens of tiny bees flitting among the red or rust-colored buds. I couldn’t quite get a sharp shot of the bees in motion — they wouldn’t stay still! — but here you can see three of them coming in for a landing, and then… landed.
From the same plant, here are some younger blooms, just beginning to open. A bit of the red color that will eventually appear as the plant ages and dries out is visible on some of the tops of the blooms. The bees, for whatever reason, seemed uninterested in the white blooms, a little something that might be worth learning more about on its own.
There were only a few fully opened flowers, since it was late in the summer season when I took these photos. Here’s one of them; the detail is quite fantastic. Select the picture to view it in a slide show and then choose Info/View Full Size (or click here) if you’d like to get a closer look.
