From “The Surprise Lily” in Beautiful at All Seasons: Southern Gardening and Beyond by Elizabeth Lawrence:
“In midsummer, when heat and drought have drained all color from leaf and blossom — in spite of all of the city water that is poured on them — the surprise lily rises mysteriously from the ground. One day there is nothing, and the next there is a tall, pale stem that grows to about three feet and then produces, at the top, a circle of flowers of the most luminous and delicate pink….
“The surprise lily is not really a lily. It is a Lycoris, as lovely as the nymph it was named for, and it belongs to the amaryllis family. It is sometimes called Hall’s amaryllis for the New England doctor who brought it back from a Japanese garden nearly one hundred years ago….
“Although it has been in gardens so long, and is one of the easiest bulbs to grow, the surprise lily has never become common…. The bulbs do their growing in late winter when the wide, gray-green leaves come up. The time to plant new ones, or to dig and divide old clumps, is when the leaves die. The bulbs need not be dug unless you want to increase the supply. They will go on blooming indefinitely in the same spot. The flowers bloom whether they are watered or not, even in the driest season, and no spraying is required….
“I think the other reason that surprise lilies are so little known is that their specific name, squamigera, is so long and so ugly. It means scaly, which sounds equally unattractive, and means that with a hand lens small scales can be seen in the throat of the flower — a fact of no interest to the gardener. Nevertheless the Latin name will be needed when the bulbs are bought, for they will be listed by the bulb growers as Lycoris squamigera.”
Hello!
This is the second of four posts with photos of an Amaryllis family gathering that I attended during the summer. The first post is An Amaryllis Family Gathering (1 of 4) where I introduced the three plants I photographed for this four-part series: Crinum bulbispermum, Lycoris squamigera, and Lycoris incarnata.
In this post, we see a second planting of Lycoris squamigera, located in a separate area of Oakland Cemetery than those I showed you previously. While the environmental conditions were similar — filtered sunlight for plants growing among larger greens — these either got more sun or were a little older, as most of the plants had produced multiple stems topped with flowers in bunches. They are, however, otherwise identical — and they were mixed among plantings of Lycoris incarnata, which you can see in the backgrounds of the first three photos. This landscape of pine bark and stubs of grass — which in previous years was mostly barren — is now punctuated with the alternating colors of the Surprise Lily and the Peppermint Surprise Lily, creating a fine, fetching scene.
While I was working on the Lycoris squamigera photos, I noticed that many of the flower petals had a bit of blue at their tips, almost as if someone had dabbed the edges with a watercolor brush dipped in blue. Because I took the photos in low light, I thought it might be an artifact present in the image, something that I see occasionally with low light and any Sony camera I’ve used. I ended up leaving the blue color intact rather than trying to remove it, though, when I discovered this botanical drawing by Matilda Smith (who I wrote about in an earlier post about Regal Lilies), which shows the same blue color in similar locations.
I cropped the drawing a little to make it fit in this post better, but you can see the full version on Flickr, or see it in a Curtis’s Botanical Magazine issue from 1897 here. I thought it was fun to confirm that my color choices were accurate using an image published 128 years ago from one of that era’s preeminent botanical artists.
As I mentioned in the previous post, Surprise Lily is one of this plant’s common names, a name that recognizes how the plant drops all its leaves and becomes a dormant stalk before it produces any flowers. But it apparently it has other surprises, as the excerpt above suggests: unlike most bulb plants that are typically divided and transplanted at the end of their blooming season, Surprise Lilies should actually be split up between the time they drop their leaves and the time they start blooming. I had never encountered this unusual maintenance sequence before, which made me wonder if Lycoris has still more surprises in store.
Thanks for taking a look!
