“In cottage-style gardens, lilies are glorious when combined with roses and sweet peas, clematis and honeysuckle. In the border they complement the other colourful herbaceous plants, and they can play a part in tropical schemes as well. Planting taller varieties into a mixed or shrub border is often successful as the twiggy stems support the lily flowers and provide ongoing interest….
“In naturalistic gardens, the elegant Turk’s caps excel…. If they are happy, they may spread to spectacular effect.”
Hello! This is the fifth of ten posts in my “Lilies on Black Backgrounds” series.
“My mother recorded the weather and the date of the first flower of every plant as it came into bloom. At intervals, such as high spring, midsummer and Thanksgiving, she would take a census of everything in bloom at that time. She was very systematic about her daily records. Each morning she would go out with her little black book and write down the names of the flowers that had bloomed since the day before. This is the way records should be kept….
“Mine are not as well done, for one day I may go my rounds in the morning, and the next I may go in the afternoon. Then I may skip a few days, and when I do, it is hard to remember whether the lily bloomed on Monday or on Tuesday.”
“Though introduced from China not much more than a hundred years ago, the Tiger Lily is among those that we cherish as old English garden flowers, so familiar is it, not only in our gardens, but in old pictures and in the samplers and embroideries of our great-grandmothers….
“[The] Tiger is the latest flowering of our Lilies, being in full bloom in September. Its bold, turn-cap form is so well known that it can want no description, except to draw attention to its remarkable colour, a soft salmon-orange, that can be matched by but few other flowers…. The black spots and dark stems and deep-brown, rust-coloured anthers combine to make a grand garden flower. “
Hello!
Continuing my “Lilies on Black Backgrounds” project, here are some new galleries featuring deep-orange daylilies and a batch of tiger lilies.
Here are before-and-after versions of three of the tiger lilies.
Some of the magic tricks I described in my first post for this series — Lilies on Black Backgrounds: A Photo Project (1 of 10) — worked especially well with these images. As you can see from the before versions below, the backgrounds contained a lot of extra “information” that I covered with my black brush. Despite the intricate structure of these flowers — including the tiny anthers (you know, like antlers, but for flowers) — the increased depth of field I got with a higher ISO and narrower apertures (f/22 or f/27, for example) made it (relatively) easy to remove the backgrounds while keeping the details intact.
Select the first image if you would like to compare the before and after versions in a slideshow.
