Flower Drum Song

Several years ago I showed some pictures of our giant squills in bloom. I mentioned that the flowers sway and twist when they're cut and put in a vase. Ever since I got my intervalometer I've been wanting to make a video of the flowers. But, alas, they took a couple of years off.

They finally bloomed again this year. They were sending up their flower stalks just before we took a week-long vacation. I was afraid that they would have all gotten too far along before we got back to make a video. Fortunately one stalk had not yet started opening and another had just started.

I cut those two flowers, put them in a vase in the living room, set my desk lights on the floor in front of them and set up the camera.

I set the intervalometer to take a picture of the squills every five minutes. The camera snapped away for just over seven days. The camera's battery finally died the eighth night. It had taken more than 2100 shots. The pictures are played at a rate of 30 frames per second. We see two and a half hours of action every second. The week flies by in just 70 seconds.

I hope that the video below fits in your screen. You might need to change it to one of the HD resolutions and play it in full screen mode to see the full glory of all the flowers opening, shutting and waving about.


The stalks didn't wave around as much as I remembered they did all those years ago. Perhaps the constant light on them stopped the waving. I don't know. There was some at the beginning so I'm happy with what I ended up with. Maybe I'll try again next time they bloom and put dimmer light on them during the nights.