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

Tag: summer

Orange Double Daylilies (1 of 2)

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From “Hemerocallis Fulva” in The Heirloom Flower Garden: Rediscovering and Designing with Classic Ornamentals by Jo Ann Gardner:

“The Orange or Tawny Daylily is a vigorous species with large flowers about 5 inches across — orange with darker zones and stripes in shades of red and mahogany — giving the effect of a tawny color, preserved in the Latin epithet fulva….

“In Asia, where Daylilies have been cultivated for thousands of years, they are regarded as a source of food and medicine. The flowers are picked fresh and fried in batter or dried and used to thicken soups. Preparations from the plant are used to relieve jaundice and dropsy and to reduce fever and pain….

“In Europe and the New World, the Daylily has always been cultivated for its beauty alone.
The Lemon Yellow was a special favorite in English cottage gardens. Both the Orange and Yellow Daylily were brought to the New World during the 17th century and widely cultivated across the land. The more vigorous Orange Daylily remains a faithful signpost to many heirloom plant collectors, who know that where it grows, an old garden cannot be far away.

“Until the late 19th century, only these two species were grown in America. By 1860 a double form of the Orange — crowded with petals — was introduced from Japan, where it had been noticed by European travelers since about 1712…. In 1897 a new Orange, ‘Maculata’, was added to the pool of Daylilies, offering later bloom and larger flowers with a deep bronze patch on each petal….

“By the 1920s, America had become the leading center for hybridization, the goal being the creation of ever-new types with larger flowers of diverse forms — wavy, frilled petals, for instance — an expanded color range, and a longer blooming period. The old Orange, naturalized along roadsides across the country, was one of the leading contributors to the breeding process….”

Hello!

This is another one of my favorite daylilies to photograph at Oakland Cemetery — which is probably something I can say about all the daylilies that I’ve ever photographed as well as those I haven’t photographed yet, but will.

It’s been three years since I dwelled with this particular batch of flowers. The last time was in 2022 (see Summer Daylilies (2 of 3): Double-Double Orange-Orange), when I determined that they were a double form of a more common yellow/orange daylily called Hemerocallis fulva.

Here’s where they live:

This is an especially distinctive space among the many distinctive spaces throughout Oakland Cemetery, notable for much more than the orange double daylilies standing tall at the back. When I took this photograph, the steel chain was in place to discourage entry; but in the past, it’s been accessible (note how there’s a rust stain on the top step, where they chain often sets) so I’ve walked up the steps and sat on the stone bench at the right of the photo.

From that position, the space demonstrates how it’s so unique. The use of grass throughout the space is unusual; and that, along with the placement of shrubs and trees around the edges, creates a sense of visual and auditory isolation from the rest of the property. That your sight is contained within its boundaries, and external sounds are effectively muffled to near silence, actually mirrors the design of the entire cemetery, with its acreage surrounded by hefty brick walls that separate you from the busy streets outside. It’s like a microcosm of the rest of the cemetery, one with its own independent architecture. And that architecture includes the use of plants whose appearance will vary with the seasons, since much of the greenery you see here will exhibit rich fall color in October and November.

Many of the designed plots at Oakland Cemetery contain elaborate sculptured memorials — statues, mausoleums, or other structures representing the people memorialized there and aspects of their lives. Note, however, this one contains only a single memorial stone (right in front of the daylilies) — which doesn’t necessarily convert the square into a straightforward garden, but suggests that its designers favored the creation of a contemplative space rather than a simple (or even complex) memorial. From the bench, there’s a sense of peace that unfolds while you sit there — one that is still quite powerful even if you can only observe it from the outside.

Some of the irises I photographed for my iris project made an appearance here a few weeks earlier, their remnants visible among the green leaves surrounding the daylilies. This daylily cultivar may have been bred to increase its height (while doubling its petal production), as some of its stems extend nearly four feet above ground. This was convenient for The Photographer, who — unwilling to jump the chain and invade the space (this time anyway) — used a zoom lens from outside positions to get a closer look at the flowers.

With a zoom lens and limited sight lines, I had to take whatever lighting conditions I could get, which meant that some of the flowers had a lot of sunlight on them when I took their pictures. The effect — which I didn’t notice until I got home — was that the saturated orange from the flowers combined with the yellow that is natural to sunlight caused the flower petals to act like reflectors casting yellow and orange throughout the entire scene. The effect is similar to results you could intentionally achieve in a photography studio, using a yellow or gold reflector to bounce light from the reflector onto your subject.

This level of warmth in an image of orange flowers isn’t necessarily wrong, nor is it uncommon. See, for example, all these images of double orange daylilies that display similar colors throughout the subjects and backgrounds. But I knew — from what we like to call “real life” — that while the stone behind the flower could have been that sandy brown color, it wasn’t. Much of the stone near these flowers was typical of Oakland Cemetery’s stonework: it’s gray to very light blue, with textures that alternate between the two colors. The leaves, too, didn’t seem quite correct; they should have been a more unadulterated green than the yellow-green in this image.

So these two characteristics of the image told me that some color correction was appropriate, to more accurately represent the colors that I saw. In this case, only a simple white balance adjustment coupled with reducing orange and yellow saturation a smite or two was necessary to remove the color cast, clarify the colors, and create better contrast between the blue-gray stone, the green leaves, and the star of the scene: the daylily’s rich orange.

When I last photographed these daylilies in 2022, this was the only family of them on the property. This year, however, I subsequently stumbled across another colony whose flowers were close to eye level and weren’t visitor-inhibited. That enabled me to get some much closer shots of individual flower blossoms and a few photogenic groupings, which I’ll feature in the next post.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Pink Daylilies and Magenta Colors

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From “Color in the Daylily Flower” in The Illustrated Guide to Daylilies by Oliver Billingslea:

“Color is evaluated by the visual sense of light reflected or transmitted by the flower. The term hue is the specific or family name of a color; value is the lightness or darkness of a color; and intensity refers to the brightness or dullness of a color.

“Modern hybrid daylilies have a remarkably diverse color range, especially considering that the wild types from which they have been bred were found only in shades of yellow, orange, fulvous (dull reddish-yellow), and rosy-fulvous. Today, the only colors notably lacking are pure white and pure blue — colors which hybridizers are avidly pursuing.

“The outer portion of the segments, excluding any contrasting edging, is considered the basic color of the flower. The present color range of daylilies includes yellow in all shades from palest lemon, through bright yellow and gold, to orange; red in diverse shades of scarlet, carmine, tomato red, maroon, wine reds, and blackish reds; pink from pale pink through rose pink to rose red; purple from pale lavender and lilac to deep grape or violet; and melon, from palest cream shades to peach to deep cantaloupe.

“Some colors appear to require the presence of genes for two basic colors; for examples, shades of buff, brown, apricot, and peach are thought to be variations of pink + yellow. Near-whites are found among the palest tints of yellow, pink, lavender, or melon. The actual pigments which produce the colors still need research, as does color inheritance.

“The center area of the flower is called the throat. In most daylilies the throat area differs in color from the rest of the flower. Usually it is a shade of green, yellow, gold, orange, apricot, or melon. It can be very small and narrow or it can reach far up on the segments. The very center of the throat is sometimes referred to as the heart and may be a different color; for example, a yellow-throated daylily may have a green heart.”

Hello!

This is one of my favorite daylilies to photograph at Oakland Cemetery, and I’ve gone back every late May or early June for several years to hunt down this particular variety just to take pictures of it again. “Hunt down” may be a slight exaggeration, since it’s easy to find — it’s one of the first flowers to be seen just inside the cemetery’s main gate.

This daylily contains one of the purest examples of the color magenta that I’ve found among those flowers I photograph, many of which appear to be magenta but are actually variations of light red (trending toward pink), or blends of orange and red. When editing photos of magenta flowers like this in Lightroom, you have very little magenta color saturation to work with, partly because it’s not a primary color (like red or blue) with a large number of varying shades or hues. If you try to decrease magenta saturation directly, the magenta will quickly turn nearly white; and if you try to increase its saturation, you’ll end up with a garish pink color that nobody wants to see. To effect accurate perceptual saturation of magenta, you instead alter the primary red and/or primary blue color channels, using Lightroom’s Color Calibration function. Similar (yet less subtle) results can be achieved by increasing contrast, increasing blacks, or decreasing whites — all of which make the image darker overall but also yield the illusion that magenta has become more saturated, with some loss of smooth transitions between shades of magenta, pink, and red.

It’s a fascinating flower to photograph and edit because of these special characteristics of magenta, given its petals are almost entirely magenta with some red tones, especially at each petal’s edges. This combination is one that our cameras and processing programs detect quite precisely, but we tend to interpret more simply, as the color pink. This shorthand approach serves us well, since magenta is a blend of equal parts blue and red, yet there’s no visible color wavelength called “magenta” in the physics of color. These two principles are observable in Lightroom: if you increase either the saturation of primary red or primary blue, the magenta color in these petals intensifies by about the same amount. And if you decrease primary red saturation and increase primary blue saturation by the same relative amounts (say -100% red and +100% blue), you arrive at exactly the same magenta color you started with.

Yet in natural light, even magenta’s limited saturation range responds quite differently to sunlight versus shade. Note how the left image below — taken when the sun was out — looks so different from the image on the right, taken when the sun went behind the clouds. The effect of additional sunlight actually mimics decreasing saturation in Lightroom: some of the magenta color shifts toward very light pink or even white because of the floodlighting effect of the sun, while the shaded version retains the saturation that was evident in the flowers in real life.

This is not to say that the version on the left is more accurate than the one on the right. Both are correct but reflect different lighting conditions, even if one version might be more appealing to some people than the other. I typically prefer images like the one on the right — taken in the shade — because I like the color rendition better, but, more importantly, limited sunlight reveals all the color and texture variations the flower presents. The flower’s minute details aren’t overpowered by the sun and color contrasts (like those of the yellow throat and the green heart) are much more precise. Especially with daylilies, though, you can’t wait too long for your favored lighting conditions, because the plant always lives up to its name, and its flowers disappear in a day!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Mophead Hydrangeas (3 of 3)

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From “Some Garden Pictures” in Colour in the Flower Garden by Gertrude Jekyll:

“There is a place near my house where a path leads down through a nut-walk to the further garden. It is crossed by a shorter path that ends at a Birch tree with a tall silvered trunk. It seemed desirable to accentuate the point where the paths cross; I therefore put down four square platforms of stone ‘pitching’ as a place for the standing of four Hydrangeas in tubs….

“Just before the tree is a solid wooden seat and a shallow wide step done with the same stone pitching. Tree and seat are surrounded on three sides by a rectangular planting of yews. The tender greys of the rugged lower bark of the Birch and the silvering of its upper stem tell finely against the dark velvet-like richness of the Yew and the leaf-mass of other trees beyond; the pink flowers and fresh green foliage of the Hydrangeas are also brilliant against the dusky green. It is just one simple picture that makes one glad for three months of the later summer and early autumn. The longer cross-path, which on the right leads in a few yards to steps up to the paved court on the north side of the house, on the left passes down the nut-walk… The Birch tree and seat are immediately to the right….

“Standing a little way down the shaded nut-walk and looking back, the Hydrangeas are seen in another aspect, with the steps and house behind them in shade, and the sun shining through their pale green leaves. Sitting on the seat, the eye, passing between the pink Hydrangea flowers, sees a short straight path bounded by a wall of Tree Box to right and left, and at the far end one tub of pale blue Hydrangea in shade, backed by a repetition of the screen of Yews such as enclose the Birch tree.”

From “Reading the Paper” in Ecstasy Among Ghosts: Poems by John L. Stanizzi:

Here, now, the days are long
and the leaves of the hydrangea are supple and leathery,
with raised veins like the back of a hand.
A stick-woman in an old brown dress and floppy hat
stands in the garden
and frightens the birds.
The sun dazzles away the early fog.

Hello!

This is the last of three posts featuring “hydrangibles” — an amusable I invented to describe hydrangeas with fat floaty flowers as well as fanciful imaginary sky vessels — from my garden. The previous two posts are Mophead Hydrangeas (1 of 3) and Mophead Hydrangeas (2 of 3).

The quotation at the top — from Colour in the Flower Garden by Gertrude Jekyll — is one of Jekyll’s descriptions not only of hydrangeas in her garden, but of her own photographs of hydrangeas. Jekyll — well-known as a horticulturalist, gardener, and garden writer — was an early adopter of photography and energetically embraced this emerging technology. According to the biography Gertrude Jekyll: A Vision of Garden and Wood by Judith B. Tankard, Jekyll progressed from her initial interest in photography through photographing gardens for her books, like this:

“In 1885, she took up photography, which enabled her to bring together a number of interests. After she quickly mastered the cumbersome process and set up a dark room at Munstead House, she set out to record those elements indigenous to her native Surrey that were rapidly disappearing. She was fascinated by cottage gardens and their cottagers, and by the special construction trades that gave ordinary rural buildings their local character. In addition to these vernacular traditions, she also photographed her own garden as well as specific plants and tree forms, garden design elements, and the local landscape….

“Gertrude Jekyll’s favorite brother, Sir Herbert Jekyll (1846-1932), who shared many interests and friends with her, was an art patron and engineer as well as an amateur photographer. He assembled several carefully labeled family photograph albums and was interested in the preservation of rural buildings, so it is possible that he taught her the art of photography….

“Jekyll kept prints of most of her photographs in a series of personal photograph albums similar to her brother’s. Gertrude Jekyll’s earliest attempts at photographing and processing were closely supervised by her instructor, as the back of some of the earliest prints are critiqued in a handwriting different from her own. Some are marked ‘little over exposed,’ ‘bad light,’ ‘more pyro — more bromide,’ and ‘keep the camera level.’

“Starting in 1899, with the publication of Wood and Garden, Jekyll used her photographs to illustrate her books, probably using a stock of photographs she had already taken….  [As] Jekyll began to publish books on a regular basis, she now regarded each book that she illustrated as a photo assignment….”

If you would like to view the photographs Jekyll is describing up-top (and see how well she renders the words explaining the photographs), you can find three of them at these links from a Gutenberg edition of Colour in the Flower Garden:

Steps and Hydrangeas
Hydrangea Tubs and Birch-Tree Seat
Hydrangea Tubs and Nut Walk

If you page backward a bit from the last link (to the chapter title “Some Garden Pictures”), you’ll also encounter what could certainly be considered Jekyll’s artist statement, one which combines art, gardening, and the color, light, and compositional characteristics of photography:

“When the eye is trained to perceive pictorial effect, it is frequently struck by something — some combination of grouping, lighting and colour — that is seen to have that complete aspect of unity and beauty that to the artist’s eye forms a picture. Such are the impressions that the artist-gardener endeavours to produce in every portion of the garden…. [There] are some days during the summer when the quality of light seems to tend to an extraordinary beauty of effect. I have never been able to find out how the light on these occasions differs from that of ordinary fine summer days, but, when these days come, I know them and am filled with gladness.”

What a delightful way to describe how we see — and photograph — gardens, and I especially like how Jekyll blends sensory elements of art, botany, and photography in her writing. Now, imagine: if she’d been writing and taking garden photographs a hundred years later, she might have ended out with a blog, just like this!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Mophead Hydrangeas (2 of 3)

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From “Stourton House” in Other People’s Gardens by Christopher Lloyd:

“Stourton House, near to Mere in Wiltshire, is next to the car-park serving the famous National Trust property of Stourhead. It couldn’t be more different: warm, personal, sometimes verging on the chaotic, but entirely lovable…. The garden is largely geared to the production of material for [Elizabeth Bullivant’s] dried flower (and fruit) business. I am told that you can hardly move, in the house, for the quantities of drying and dried flowers hanging up….

“Across the lawn is the woodland garden. From the outside you are chiefly aware of large old rhododendron bushes and a frieze of hydrangeas, somewhat jostled, in front. Hydrangeas are a principal theme at Stourton House, being greatly valued for drying. In her book, Elizabeth is at pains to describe exactly the right stage at which to cull them for this purpose. Half this garden — the half I have so far been describing — is on neutral or alkaline soil, which tends to produce pink or red hydrangea flowers (those that are not white), while the other half, mainly comprising the woodland, with its rhododendrons and azaleas and the bulk of the hydrangea collection, gives rise to blue or purple hydrangea flowers.

“At an RHS autumn show, quite recently, Elizabeth brought up a vase of ‘Hamburg’ hydrangea heads. This is a large-flowered, bun-headed hortensia. In colour, according to the age of the inflorescence, whether it grew on acid or alkaline soil and whether in sun or in shade, the flowers ranged from green to purple and deep bricky red, through deep blue and deep pink. All the colours were intense, but they varied to this amazing degree….

“Truly the hydrangea is versatile, especially when you add to its variability the differences between a bun-shaped inflorescence or a conical, and a head packed with sterile florets or a flat-topped lacecap wherein the sterile florets are arranged in an outer ring, while the central disc consists entirely of tiny fertile flowers.”

From “Hydrangea” in The Japanese Haiku by Kenneth Yasuda:

Underneath the eaves
A blooming large hydrangea
Overbrims its leaves.

Hello!

This is the second of three posts featuring hydrangibles from my garden. You do not know what is a hydrangible, you say? Then you should read the first post in this series, Mophead Hydrangeas (1 of 3).

Thanks for taking a look!

Mophead Hydrangeas (1 of 3)

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From “Hydrangea” in Ornamental Shrubs by Jaroslav Hofman:

“The name of this plant originated from the Greek words ‘hydor’ meaning water and ‘angeion’ meaning vessel, with reference to the fact that the shrub requires adequate water for successful growth. It is known as the Hortensia, the name having been conferred by the discoverer of the shrub in China in 1767, namely the French physician and botanist Filibert Commerson. The Hydrangea was brought to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for the first time by Sir Joseph Banks in 1789….

“The Hydrangea has been cultivated since ancient times in China and Japan. The first shrub of this species to be brought to Great Britain was apparently also a cultivated and not a wild type. Its flowers were red, its umbels composed mainly of sterile flowers. The new shrub aroused great interest at that time with its outstanding beauty. Through cultivation and cross-breeding new forms were produced, but at first the growers were unable to attain much diversity of colour, dull, pinkish-red or pale pink predominating….

“Indeed the Hydrangea resisted all attempts to improve it for a long time. It was only after the importing of a glowing-red variety from Japan (the ‘Rosea’ variety) and its cross-breeding with ‘Otaksa’ [that] French horticulturists… succeeded from 1910 onwards in breeding a large number of new forms differing not only in colour, but also in shape, which surprised visitors to the horticultural exhibition taking place in Paris at the time. Further progress was achieved when it was discovered that the Hydrangea reacted strongly to certain chemicals in the soil by a sudden change of colour in its flowers. For example, it was found that iron or ammonia in the soil fostered the growth of blue flower-heads, formerly a very rare phenomenon in this flower.”

From “Hydrangea” in Tremulous Hinge: Poems by Adam Giannelli:

Water vessel — patina of summer —
its zeppelins soar all the way
into September, the heads colored
like the flavored ice atop snow cones….

Beside a driveway and a house,
a few orbs, flamingo-like, float
on thin stalks. Others, laden
with bloom, rest, like tails of tired poodles, on the ground.

Each mophead is a bevy, a beveled blue,
a standing ovation,
that fumes with lattices of spume, solid but fretful, like sleep.
I never knew that ecstasy
could arrive at
so many angles….

Hello!

When I moved into my house in 2004, there were two batches of hydrangeas in the back yard, one on each side of the steps leading to the courtyard. All of them produced flowers in the “mophead” shape, a descriptor used to differentiate them from hydrangea flowers of the “lacecap” style, like the Bluebird Hydrangeas I added to the garden myself. “Mophead hydrangea” is also a common stand-in name for hydrangea varieties that produce flowers like this.

The came-with-the-house hydrangeas were a mix of several varieties (probably Hydrangea paniculata, Hydrangea arborescens, and Hydrangea macrophylla) but since I wasn’t sure of their identities, I got into the habit of calling them all “hydrangibles” — a word I made up that combines “hydrangea” and “dirigible” in honor of their large, floppy blooms that seem to float above the leaves. Imagine my surprise to find the poem I excerpted above, where the poet describes hydrangeas as “zeppelins” — since zeppelins are a kind of dirigible and the poem evokes the same “floating above the garden” imagery I was going for with “hydrangible.”

About half of the hydrangibles got frozen out a couple of years ago, during two weeks of plant-destroying deep-freezes we had around the winter holidays. When spring came, those that didn’t die behaved very badly, producing only a handful of new stems pointing in all sorts of odd directions (as hydrangeas often do), and developing only a few anemic flowers. This year, though, they did quite a bit better — so I got them to pose for a couple of photo-shoots and their flowers were big and floppy enough that I could refer to them as hydrangibles once again.

While working on the photographs, I wondered if I could pretend there was a real-life people-moving vessel that might be called a “hydrangible” — since, you know, it’s quite common that our plant names (even imaginary ones) are based on something else. So I went to Adobe Firefly (which I wrote about here and here, and haven’t used since) and asked it to generate “a photograph of a dirigible that’s covered with hydrangea flowers, flying over the city of Atlanta” — and it produced for me these five images…

… which obviously prove that hydrangibles capable of flying people around in the clouds actually do exist, because, hey, the internet “knows” about them. Now I just need to figure out where these hydrangibles take off from so I can go for a ride, and would especially like to fly over (and hang out at) the fanciful lake and park in the last image, as I didn’t even know about that lovely body of water and greenspace smack-dab in the middle of downtown Atlanta.

🙂

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Hydrangea serrata ‘Bluebird’ (2 of 2)

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From “H. Serrata ‘Bluebird'” in 1001 Plants to Dream of Growing, edited by Liz Dobbs:

“A delightful summer-flowering shrub, H. serrata ‘Bluebird’ is the perfect choice for any garden that does not have the space for one of the larger lacecap hydrangea varieties. ‘Bluebird’ is a slender shrub, with upright tan-colored stems and painted dark-green leaves flushed purple red. In midsummer the delicate lacecap flower heads appear; these are purple-pink on alkaline soils, but bright gentian-blue on acidic soils. Each flower head consists of a flattened cluster of tiny fertile florets surrounded by larger, showier, sterile or ray florets. ‘Bluebird, along with other H. serrata varieties, has smaller, more refined flower heads than familiar lacecap hydrangeas. As the season progresses, the color of the flowers changes to purple-green, and the wine-red color of the foliage becomes more intense toward fall.

“‘Bluebird’ is a lovely hydrangea to grow in sun or in light shade with perennials and roses. Its compact habit makes it suitable for narrow borders…. H. serrata ‘Tiara’ is similar in habit to ‘Bluebird, but it has more sterile florets in each flower head. The flower color is more mauve, and the fall foliage more intensely crimson in the sun. H. serrata ‘Rosalba’ has fewer, large sterile florets, which are initially white but soon change to crimson. Its fall foliage is rich purple-red. H. serrata ‘Miranda’ has very dome-shaped flower heads, which turn a vibrant shade of blue in acidic conditions.”

From Seasons of Light: A Collection of Haiku by Dermot O’Brien:

The withered blossom
on a bedraggled hydrangea
surprised by purple buds

Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of Hydrangea serrata ‘Bluebird’ — from my garden. The first post is Hydrangea serrata ‘Bluebird’ (1 of 2).

I took most of these photos a little later in the season than those in the previous post, and — as is described in the quotation at the top — you can see how many of the tiny flowers have shifted color from mostly-blue toward a mix of purple, pink, and light green. I had actually thought the color-shift was from soil variations (as hydrangeas are known for their fascinating color changes), but this may be a late-summer seasonal change, since mine are all planted together.

If you’d like to see the color variations presented by some of the Bluebird’s close relatives (those mentioned in 1001 Plants to Dream of Growing above), click these links:

H. serrata ‘Tiara’
H. serrata ‘Rosalba’
H. serrata ‘Miranda’

Rosalba looks especially scrumptious: that mix of red and pink among the flowers and the florets (which are white or very light blue in the Bluebird hydrangea) may just earn them a place in my garden next year.

Thanks for taking a look!