From “Treasure Hunts in East Asia” in Lily (Botanical) by Marcia Reiss:
“European collectors did not open the treasure chest of lilies in East Asia fully until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the first and most popular discoveries, the tiger lily, L. lancifolium, was sent from Canton (now Guangzhou) to Kew Gardens in London by William Kerr in 1804….
“A Turk’s cap lily, it forms tiny black bulbils in each leaf axis, making it easy to propagate. The Chinese had a charming anthropomorphic description for its downward-facing form and reflexed petals — the ‘Flower that turns its Head to See its Offspring’. But the Japanese saw it quite differently. Its Japanese name is oniyuri, the ogre lily, and while its orange colour may account for the name tiger lily, its speckled petals seem more reminiscent of a leopard, albeit one with purple spots. (There is also a panther lily, L. pardalinum, a Turk’s cap species found in California, but it also has spots.)
“A few orange-coloured lilies had made earlier appearances. L. bulbiferum, native to central Europe, is a remarkably realistic detail in the Portinari Altarpiece, of the Adoration of the Shepherds, commissioned by the Medici from the south Netherlandish painter Hugo van der Goes in 1475. It gets its name from the bulbils in its leaf axis, like those of the tiger lily….”
From “The Lily” in The Collected Earlier Poems by William Carlos Williams:
The branching head of
tiger-lilies through the window
in the air —
A humming bird
is still on whirring wings
above the flowers —
By spotted petals curling back
and tongues that hang
the air is seen —
It’s raining —
water’s caught
among the curled-back petals
Caught and held
and there’s a fly —
are blossoming
Hello!
The mid- to late-summer floral displays at Oakland Cemetery feature various collections of lilies, amaryllis, and crinum — collections that, as a whole, rival the diversity of their seasonal predecessors (irises and daylilies) and their seasonal successors (asters and mums). Over the next several weeks, we’ll take a look at some of these species — flowers and plants whose scientific identification is often challenging, as many of them have multiple shared common names stemming from similar visual characteristics, but have botanical stories that are very different.
I decided to start this next post run with Tiger Lilies (Lilium lancifolium), because this is the first summer in three years that I managed to catch them in bloom. The bloom time of amaryllis, crinum, and many other lilies is quite predictable, but the Tiger seems to slide its blooming by several earlier or later weeks depending on weather conditions preceding the plant’s emergence from the soil. In those years I’ve gotten it to pose for photoshoots, we’ve held those shoots as early as the first week of June and as late as mid-July. This year — when I was out still photographing daylilies — I noticed the Tiger Lilies just starting to produce flower buds on June 7, so went back exactly two weeks later to find this nice grouping of flowers ready to capture.
The quotation from the book Lily (Botanical) by Marcia Reiss above serves as a useful way to kick off these lily posts. The author introduces the Tiger Lily’s official name, Lilium lancifolium — a replacement name for Lilium tigrinum, from which the Tiger Lily common name was derived. She also mentions the Japanese name “ogre lily” — which I had not heard before, though I’ve seen in my research that the Tiger Lily has also been referred to as a Leopard Lily, Devil Lily, Orange Lily, and Pine Lily, depending on the resource I’ve come across and its connection to a particular region or vernacular. While we don’t need to be too concerned about these variations, it can be fun to observe how they’re used when we humans encounter plants in different historical eras or contexts. Here we’ll stick with Lilium lancifolium and Tiger Lily as the most accurate and prevalent current usage.
Reiss describes the Tiger Lily as a “Turk’s cap lily” — a phrase that is often used to describe some specific lily cultivars, including the Tiger Lily. Most accurately, though, “Turk’s cap” is best used as a description of a lily form rather than a specific lily. “Turk’s cap” describes the way the flower petals of some lilies curve upward and meet at the center, reminiscent of the way a turban is assembled. While people — including me — often call some lily variants by the name “Turk’s Cap Lily,” we’ve learned more about the subtle distinctions in plant naming conventions so will no longer do that.
I noticed Reiss’s mention of “bulbils” because Wikipedia’s article about Lilium lancifolium describes the Tiger Lily like this:
“L. lancifolium produces aerial bulblets, known as bulbils, in the leaf axils. These bulbils are uncommon in Lilium species and they produce new plants that are clones of the original plant. The flowers are odorless. Each lasts a few days and if pollinated produce capsules with many thin seeds.”
This excerpt is only four sentences, but there’s actually a lot going on here that is fascinating to learn about once you uncover how significant it is that “bulbils are uncommon in Lilium species” and that the bulbils “produce new plants that are clones of the original plant.” This means that Tiger Lilies — along with a consequential minority of other lilies — employ dual natural reproduction strategies: reproduction aided by pollination, which, as one might expect, would produce related but genetically different plants; and the production and dispersal of bulbils, which produce exact clones of the plant that distributed them. And while you may encounter sources referring to these berry-looking globes as seeds, they’re not seeds at all. They are, in effect, mini-me versions of the original plant, whose escapades — described here — go like this:
“Two of the best-known bulbiliferous plants are Lilium bulbiferum of Europe and L. lancifolium of Asia. The latter species is common in cultivation and has naturalized in North America and Europe. Both species form bulbils in the axils of the leaves. In Lilium lanceolatum, the margins of the leaves are turned up slightly where the leaves join the stem. Raindrops landing on the leaves are channeled toward the stem and dislodge bulbils (ombrohydrochory), causing them to fall to the ground. Bulbils dispersed by raindrops land near the parent plant and might be carried farther by sheet flow or runoff. If not dislodged by rain, the bulbils eventually fall when the stem senesces at the end of the growing season.”
Since I captured these Tiger Lilies early in their blooming cycle — when most of the plants had one flower in bloom, with one waiting on the side to bloom later — their bulbil production was also in its early stages. Here’s one of the plants in a tight closeup, where you can see two bulbils positioned exactly as described above, with the leaves slightly folded and angled to catch and channel raindrops to help detach the bulbils.
The bulbil on the right demonstrates yet another feature of their production: those half-dozen black dots just below the red circle are not spots; they’re bulbils that didn’t form fully and so were pushed down the leaf in favor of one bulbil growing to maturity. This pattern illustrates how the plant allocates its energy resources: since it must divide that energy between flower and bulbil production in its two-part reproductive strategy — and respond to environmental conditions at the same time — it may produce some bulbils that don’t fully form while working on developing its spectacular flowers.
That bulbil-making plants like the Tiger Lily produced exact clones of their source plant would have been a twentieth-century discovery, requiring the scientific methods and tools to analyze plant DNA. Earlier botanists might have observed, by contrast, that the bulbils produced new plants — by a method similar to that of seed or bulb distribution — but would not have understood the natural cloning or clonal reproduction that would be proven much later. As I discussed in several of my iris project posts, these botanists often relied on evidence presented in botanical drawings and combined that with their fieldwork to theorize about plant behavior. So it’s not surprising to find drawings or watercolors of Tiger Lilies with their bulbils in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries — like this pair by Pierre-Joseph Redouté (from Volume 7 and Volume 8 of his book about lilies Les Liliacées [The Lilies]), where the bulbils are as prominently featured as the flower blossoms themselves:
These accurate renderings served both artistic and scientific purposes, especially in the eras of botanical exploration that preceded pervasive use of photography. Both drawings show exactly the positioning of bulbils discussed earlier: each bulbil emerges near the connection of leaves to the stems, with each leaf slightly curved and angled downward to enable the bulbils to slide from the plant to the ground, especially during a rain. Botanists working with such Tiger Lilies likely would have observed and drawn conclusions about how this natural behavior enabled Tiger Lilies to spread, with those observations and conclusions providing the basis from which later discoveries would determine that the new plants were duplicates of the originals.
In the next post, I’ll explore the visual characteristics of these flowers, and what else — besides bulbils — photographs of them can reveal, well beyond how photogenic they are to the camera and how delightful they are to see (and re-discover) in real life.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
