Tag: summer

From “The Flowery Land” in Gifts from the Gardens of China by Jane Kilpatrick:

“It was during the peace and prosperity of the Tang period (AD 618-907) that the Chinese people first really had the security and leisure to devote themselves to gardens and to the cultivation of an expanding range of ornamental plants. In addition to the peach and the apricot, several other flowering trees became popular, although this was probably as much due to their mythological attributes and practical uses, as to their flowers and handsome shapes….

“Shrubs seem to have been uncommon in gardens before the seventh century, although Weigela florida was sometimes used as a hedge plant, but references to the beauty and flowering season of magnolias, daphnes and hibiscus indicate that these very attractive plants were being brought into cultivation by this time. Herbaceous peonies (Paeonia lactiflora) were already favourite ornamentals, as were annuals such as the Chinese Pink and the Chinese Aster (Dianthus chinensis and Callistephus chinensis); but many plants grown as ornamentals today, such as the Tiger Lily (Lilium lancifolium), the Leopard or Blackberry Lily (Belamcanda chinensis) and daylilies, were still principally grown for their medicinal rather than their decorative qualities.”

From “The Story of the Fire Lily” in Someone Cares: The Collected Poems of Helen Steiner Rice by Helen Steiner Rice:

The crackling flames rise skyward
as the waving grass is burned,
But from the fire on the veld
a great truth can be learned…
For the green and living hillside
becomes a funeral pyre
As all the grass across the veld
is swallowed by the fire…
What yesterday was living,
today is dead and still,
But soon a breathless miracle
takes place upon the hill…
For, from the blackened ruins
there arises life anew
And scarlet lilies lift their heads
where once the veld grass grew
And so again the mystery
of life and death is wrought,
And man can find assurance
in this soul-inspiring thought,
That from a bed of ashes
the fire lilies grew….

Hello!

This is the fourth of four posts with photos of Iris domestica, and the second post with photos of Iris domestica ‘Hello Yellow’. The previous posts are Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (1 of 4), Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (2 of 4), and Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (3 of 4).

I took the photos in the galleries below at Oakland Cemetery on June 21 and July 17, so they show the plant’s transition from its primary blooming period to the second phase where it produces seed capsules. You can see this transition about halfway through the galleries, starting with the photographs of the capsules, which show how this cultivar maintains quite a few flowers even as it starts generating seeds. When I went back in October to photograph the blackberries Iris domestica typically produces that I showed in the first post, however, only the orange-spotted variety had blackberries; those of Hello Yellow had already been dispersed. Together these characteristics suggest that Hello Yellow may have a more condensed reproductive cycle — moving from flower to capsule, blackberry development, and seed dispersal over a shorter time frame — but that could also reflect different environmental conditions, or simply that Hello Yellow was new to Oakland this year and may still be establishing its own rhythms.

The two varieties’ overall growth pattern is also quite different. The first two photos below show a typical group of orange-spotted Iris domestica, which produces fewer plants in any given location that tend to be spread up to a foot apart. This more solitary arrangement may indicate that the plant has evolved to disperse over wider areas — something that’s closer to its wild or native origins — which I observe by finding these orange flowers scattered throughout Oakland. Hello Yellow, on the other hand — as shown in the second two photos — has been bred to produce plants that grow in compact masses: the number of flowers and leaves in any square foot of the garden leaves little space between them as each plant produces crowded clusters of flowers. While both plants will present opened and unopened flowers while they’re blooming, these photos illustrate how differently they’re arranged, from a handful of flowers on each orange Iris domestica stem to Hello Yellow having so many flowers per stem that it’s hard to count them individually.

Because of these distinct growth patterns, the orange Iris domestica appear throughout Oakland as transitional plants marking the boundaries of roadways and blending among other plants, where their bright orange flowers draw your eye toward them and their immediate surroundings. But as we can see from this photo, Hello Yellow, by contrast, produces densely packed leaves topped with bright yellow flowers that are visible from a long distance, making them integral components of a memorial scene:

These Hello Yellow cultivars are growing in one of the many raised sections of the cemetery, about three feet above the roadways that surround it (a very handy position for photographers), and constrained on all sides by a stone wall. When you face that particular plot, you first see the low, soft textures and colors of Lamb’s Ear, which allow shorter memorial markers to remain visible even as Hello Yellow consumes more territory but doesn’t displace the smaller plants. Hello Yellows grow abundantly behind the Lamb’s Ear bunches, where they come close to matching the height of taller gravestones, as well as those in the background, but don’t detract from them visually.

Arrangements like these are not accidental: it’s apparent from their visual characteristics that Oakland’s landscape designers chose these plants intentionally, to provide different visual layers to the scene as time passes and to blend these plants with the immovable parts of their surroundings — like the memorial stones and even the remains of an old tree trunk whose dark colors provide additional contrast for the scene. Given its origins in seventh-century China (as explained in the excerpt from Gifts from the Gardens of China above), Iris domestica (in all its forms) seems especially appropriate for historical garden settings like this, but we’ll have to wait until next year to see if Hello Yellow takes after its orange relative and ventures beyond its present borders.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

From “Belamcanda” in Perennial Gardening by Michael Ruggiero: 

“Both species in this genus (also called leopard flowers) are native to China and Japan. B. chinensis is becoming popular in this country as an ornamental, for its shiny blackberrylike fruits as much as for its orange-spotted flowers; once finished, the flowers twist up tightly….

“B. flabellata ‘Hello Yellow’ is a wonderful smaller (10-inch) cultivar with the typical blackberrylike fruit….

“Both are fairly easy to grow and are unusual additions to summer and early fall flower borders. Group several plants together to get a telling display. Blackberry lily grows best in full sun positions, in well-drained, reasonably fertile soil…. Planting may be done in spring or fall, but newly planted stock should be protected with a winter mulch. Propagation is most satisfactory by seed sown in spring, either out of doors or indoors at about 70-80° F. Germination will take 2-4 weeks….

“Some gardeners prefer to divide the rhizomes in spring or early summer. Iris borer may attack the rhizomes with devastating effect; dig and destroy as soon as damage is seen; do not compost the foliage to prevent overwintering of borers. Leaf scorch causes an unsightly browning of the irislike leaves. Do not deadhead, or the attractive black glossy fruits will not form. Self-seeding is not a problem.”

From “Lodestone” in Of This World: New and Selected Poems 1966-2006 by Joseph Stroud:

I lie in a hammock in the slow hours
of a summer day, summer at last
in the high country, summer in the air,
in the light, in the poems I’m reading,
poems like deep jade pools of snowmelt
under a summer sun, poems like
whorls of agate. There’s a drift of pollen
through the forest, sifting through
the pines and cedars, a fine gold powder
drifting like the crushed ash of sunlight.
In the seep on the hillside the first
rein orchids appear, the night-blue larkspur,
leopard lilies….

Hello!

This is the third of four posts with photos of Iris domestica, where we’ll spend some time looking at one of its cultivars, whose appearance and growth patterns are quite different from the plants I shared in the first two posts, Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (1 of 4) and Iris domestica: From Summer to Fall (2 of 4).

Since the origins of this cultivar’s name — Iris domestica ‘Hello Yellow’ — are hard to pin down, we can just enjoy the fact that the plant was given this happy little moniker. The excerpt I included at the top of this post — from the book Perennial Gardening by Michael Ruggiero, published in 1994 — refers to Leopard Lilies by their earlier name Belamcanda, calling the yellow cultivar Belamcanda flabellata ‘Hello Yellow’ and calling the more frequently planted orange cultivar Belamcanda chinensis. So we know that ‘Hello Yellow’ has been around for at least thirty years, before the two plants were subsequently determined to be variants of the same species and their names were changed to Iris domestica and Iris domestica ‘Hello Yellow’. The original Belamcanda names actually strike me as more precise than the newer ones — since Iris domestica could now be used to include both cultivars — but these things sometimes happen when plant names change over the years. Belamcanda flabellata ‘Hello Yellow’ even captures more of the yellow cultivar’s physical characteristics by not only including the color of the flowers, but also including its fan-shaped leaves — that’s what “flabellata” means — whose distinctive appearance you can observe in the first five photos in the galleries below.

In my first post in this series, I mentioned that Hello Yellow appeared to have been bred to eliminate the spots that had given rise to the plant’s “Leopard Lily” common name, a name that crossed the boundaries between plant life and animal life. Since then, I got to puzzling about that — as one does — which led me to wonder if there were cat-leopards that originally had spots but those spots had disappeared over generations and time. Researching that led me to this interesting article The Black Leopard Has Secret Spots, which describes how the ancestral remnants of spots on this cat’s sleek black coat can be revealed by photography, especially infrared photography.

If you look at the lead photo in that article, however, you can see that it doesn’t actually require infrared photography to reveal the hidden spots. Instead, the right lighting conditions — in that case, sunlight filtered through surrounding trees and shrubs — achieve a similar effect. With that in mind, I knew that I took some of my Hello Yellow photographs when the sun was behind clouds, which would have resulted in lighting a lot like that of the leopard photograph. Here, for example, is one of those photos…

… where you can find Hello Yellow’s spots if you look closely. Follow the petals of the frontmost flower from their edges to the center, and you’ll encounter what may look like bits of pollen, but these are actually spots whose color has been altered from Iris domestica’s original deep purple or black to a shade of yellow-orange that’s slightly darker than the rest of the petals. These color variations are only evident in filtered sunlight like this; you won’t see them in the photos that I took when the sun was out.

But there’s more! Here we compare Hello Yellow to the orange spotted cultivar and can see something else. Notice how spots are distributed among the flower petals on the orange blossoms, then take a look at those same sections of the petals on the yellow variant:

You will see, in this comparison, pale yellow circles and circular texture variations among Hello Yellow petals that are distributed in the same patterns as the dark spots on the orange flowers. These, too, are remnants of the plant’s original spotted appearance, where the plant’s colors have been altered through selective breeding to shift the overall petal color from orange to yellow, and simultaneously reduce the dark spots to shades of yellow. So, as it turns out, the common names Leopard Lily or Leopard flower still work for Hello Yellow after all!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!