This Giant White Fawn Lily was growing alongside a trail in the lower Elwha Valley in the Olympic National Park. I was puzzled by identification at first. It looked like an avalanche lily, but that lily doesn’t have the mottled leaves. It also reminded me of a yellow fawn lily, but obviously, the color was wrong. A first flower for me… and a fairly rare one.
I was really delighted when I found it and wished I had carried my 100mm macro lens and a tripod. I used my 80-400mm zoom and stayed back and it worked out okay. I had to bump the ISO up to 3200 to get the shutter speed up high enough to avoid vibration and movement from the slight breeze… on a cloudy day.
Camera: Nikon D850 Lens: Nikkor 80-400mm set at 300mm ISO 3200 1/1250 sec f/5.6
Enjoyed seeing this unusual bloom. Reminds me of the lovely trilliums I was fortunate enough to come across yesterday when I wandered among a group of several moss-covered boulders (erratics) on my property. Yet again I was in awe of their triad symmetry from leaf to petal to stamens. (Just learned the plural of stamen can also be stamina. Hey, maybe trilliums can also be trillia. Why not? Rather like the sound of that.)
Trillia, huh? sounds about right. I was at the photo club meeting on Monday night at the Community Center. There were wildflower photos on the wall … including a couple of the white fawn lilies (they didn’t use “giant”). And Maurice said that they grew in Beacon Park … which is right across the Strait from the Elwha.