“The most popular of the spring growers is Lycoris squamigera, an old garden selection known as the magic lily. One rarely finds a more beautiful flower possessed of such an undemanding disposition. It’s nearly ideal for gardens in the middle and upper South, and even into the cold climates of the Midwest. On both sandy acid soils and heavy alkaline clays, L. squamigera thrives.
“Sometime after the Fourth of July, rainfall triggers the thick scapes of surprise lilies to bolt upward from the ground. They rise swiftly, in four or five days expanding to crowns of succulent, lilac-pink buds. The clustered blossoms open to look like small amaryllises, shimmering with lavender highlights on their broad rounded petals.
“Like the triploid Lycoris radiata, this strong-growing species enjoys an extra set of chromosomes, which fuel unusual vigor. Genetic evidence suggests that these were acquired through hybridization….
“Lycoris squamigera reportedly came to America with a certain Dr. Hall of Bristol, Rhode Island, who grew the flowers in his garden in Shanghai, China, prior to the American Civil War. Several other spring-growing lycoris have made their way to North America, but none approach Lycoris squamigera in prominence or widespread adaptability….
“Lycoris incarnata is occasionally offered as well; its rose blooms are accented by electric-blue petals…. [They] have gray-green spring foliage and produce flowers in late summer along with Lycoris squamigera….”
It was late in September when you took me To that amazing garden, hidden in the city, Tranquil and complicated as an open hand, There among green pleasances and descant of fountains, Through walled paths and dappled loggias Opening to distant trees, We went conversing, smoking, often silent, Our feet cool in sandals, nonchalant as the air.
It was at the end of September, warm for the season. Nothing had fallen yet to bruise the grass. Ripeness was all suspended, The air aromatic and fresh over sun-drenched box.
Critical as Chinese philosophers, We performed the garden by easy stages: Should we move toward shade or toward sunlight, The closed dark pool or the panoplied fountain?
Clearly each path had a metaphysical meaning, Those rustic steps, that marble balustrade. It was late in September when time, Time that is not ours, Hid itself away.…
I’m posting this on the last day of September, so I was glad to find a poem — “The Metaphysical Garden” by May Sarton — that seems to capture the sense of exploring a historical garden on one of those days marking the transition from summer to fall. I excerpted just the opening four stanzas; but it’s much longer than that and you can read the whole poem here, if you’d like.
“Lycoris are becoming fashionable and more popular with every succeeding season.
“For years Lycoris Squamigera has been a lovely garden flower in the North, blooming before the leaves appear in late summer, and marked by an exotic beauty of violet-rose Amaryllis-like blooms in good-sized umbels.
“In the lower South, Lycoris Radiata, which… is commonly known as the ‘Red Spider Lily,’ is a well-known plant in every dooryard through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. It does well in North Florida, but seems to like an alkaline soil, so usually has to be replaced in Peninsular Florida every few years.
“One of our fortunate achievements of the past year is the importation of a modest stock of the handsome Lycoris aurea, long grown in old gardens around St. Augustine, where it is called the Golden Hurricane Lily and blooms in early Fall, during the Caribbean ‘tropical storm’ season. It is a rich golden yellow, with crinkled petals in a strangely enchanting and exotic umbel which opens practically all of its 5 to 10 flowers at the same time or in rapid succession. This is one of the choicest bulbs of all horticulture and was painted by Redoute, floral artist to the Empress Josephine, and it appears in his famous ‘Liliacees,’ of 1815 or so, although it really belongs to the Amaryllis family….
“We also offer three rarities, Lycoris alba, a creamy white and pinkish novelty, not yet positively identified, L. squamigera var. purpurea, a lovely thing for the North and Lower South as well, being quite hardy, and Lycoris incarnata, as received from China.
“We are not sure what this last will turn out to be.”
“Hall’s amaryllis, Lycoris squamigera, is a hardy bulb from Japan. The naked scapes come up in summer, and the wide, grey, narcissus-like leaves do not follow until January. The spot where the bulbs are planted should be marked so that they will not be disturbed when nothing shows above ground. The clumps should be left alone until they cease to bloom, and then lifted and divided after the foliage dies away in late spring. They bloom indefinitely in poor soil, increasing very slowly in the borders. From four to seven fragrant, opalescent flowers are borne in umbels on tapering, thirty-inch scapes.
“The first fades as the last opens so that as many as six may be out at a time. The petals are like a changeable silk in Persian lilac with tints of violet, tints that are repeated in the drooping flowers of the wild bleeding-heart. The lacy foliage of the bleeding-heart softens the effect of the bare scapes. The scapes appear about the middle of July and last into August.
“Lycoris incarnata comes from central China. It blooms a little later than Hall’s amaryllis, the first scapes usually making their appearance late in July, but sometimes not until August. The flowers are smaller, the scapes shorter (to two feet) than those of the Japanese species, and the bulbs multiply faster and bloom more freely. There are from six to eight (mostly eight) flowers to an umbel. The segments are very narrow, very pale (almost white), keeled with tourmaline pink and tipped with blue. The edges are crisped. The filaments and style are daphne red. The striped buds open in succession, the first flower lasting until all are out. An umbel in full bloom is very lovely.”
Hello!
This is the third of four posts with photos of members of the Amaryllis family that I took during the summer. The first post is An Amaryllis Family Gathering (1 of 4) and the second post is An Amaryllis Family Gathering (2 of 4). For this four-part series, I photographed Crinum bulbispermum, Lycoris squamigera, and Lycoris incarnata. The last two — commonly known as Surprise Lillies and Peppermint Surprise Lilies — were plants I was previously unfamiliar with, that made their debuts at Oakland Cemetery only recently. This third post, and the next one, include photos of the Peppermint version of the Surprise — whose striped appearance is even evident in the unopened flowers, where they look a lot like pieces of Christmas candy.
It’s always fun to come across a new-to-me species or genus of plants. The Lycoris plant that I see most often in the southeast, one you can typically buy at local garden centers and see at public gardens, is the richly colored and complex-looking Lycoris radiata, usually called the Red Spider Lily. Oakland also has some of the Red Spider Lilies, which can be challenging to photograph creatively because of the large number of anthers that emerge from the base of its fist-sized flower, curve outward toward the center, and make it difficult to find a good focal point. The saturated red color doesn’t help, especially in bright light (which they prefer), contributing to the camera’s inability to find a combination of exposure and depth of field that doesn’t just create a flat, two-dimensional image. But as one of the most frequently planted members of the Lycoris genus, it’s easy to find information about Red Spider Lilies, which I’ll take advantage of if I find some in bloom and photograph them this fall.
Surprise Lilies (like those in the first and second post) are also relatively easy to research, as they’ve been known and used in gardens for over a century. Peppermint Surprise Lilies, on the other hand, are much harder to find in botanical literature. As an unscientific indicator of the difference, there are about 700 references to Surprise Lilies (by either their botanical or common names) among the Internet Archive’s 3.7 million Books to Borrow, but only about 20 for the Peppermint version.
Among my own gardening and botany books, the only author who mentioned the Peppermint Surprise Lily at all was Elizabeth Lawrence, which is why I included an excerpt from her book A Southern Garden: A Handbook for the Middle South at the top of this post. It also seems to be true that the genetics of the Peppermint Surprise Lily have not been well-studied, nor has the genetic relationship between the two been fully researched. Surprise Lilies hail from Japan and Peppermint Surprise Lilies hail from China — which doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not close relatives; they still could be, despite the geographic distance between their natural origins. My first excerpt above — from a flower distributor’s flyer that was produced in 1948 — hints at the mystery surrounding the Peppermint Surprise Lily and its bulbs, describing them as rarities and noting: “We are not sure what this last will turn out to be.”
So perhaps it’s also a mystery how it came about that Oakland’s horticulturalists chose the Peppermint Surprise Lily to add color to some bland spaces between shrubs and trees, for late summer and early fall when many other flowers have blown away. While Lycoris (and Crinum) are both plants whose variants have appeared in historical or heritage gardens for many decades, this specific plant’s appearance here is unusual. It will be interesting to see how they progress over the next couple of years — most Lycoris are quite hardy and environmentally adaptable — since they will likely propagate and create even larger spreads of striped color that contrasts beautifully with the more muted tones of the Lycoris squamigera.
“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.”
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.
“The most prolific and abundant crinum in Southern gardens is a distinctive species with tapered, blue-green foliage. Each leaf reaches as much as two feet in length and three or four inches in width at the base. These wrap around each other to form a thick column topped with gracefully arching fountains of foliage. In the center of the rosettes, there are usually a few thin, wispy, blue leaves just emerging; this unique appearance makes this crinum easy to distinguish wherever it grows….
“All crinums bear peculiarly large, fleshy seeds, which makes most varieties easy to raise. If left on the surface of the soil in a humid, shady position, the thick, green embryos germinate and form perfect miniature bulbs. These usually send down long roots, which pull the young plants deeply into the soil. Three or four years’ growth on rich earth will mature the fledgling bulbs enough to begin flowering. Because of its prolific seed bearing, Crinum bulbispermum has sired numerous hybrids: this species is the forerunner of many of the old garden flowers of the South.
“The succulent leaves of Crinum bulbispermum stand more frost than most other crinums, and this is the best species to plant where freezes regularly penetrate the ground. The bulbs thrive anywhere in the South and are hardy in protected situations as far north as Denver and Long Island. Blossoms are most prolific in April and May but come almost any season if stimulated by rains. In sheltered gardens C. bulbispermum flowers welcomely through December and January.”
“One of our overlooked hardy Amaryllids, Lycoris squamigera, sometimes listed as Amaryllis Halli, would well repay more attention from discriminating gardeners. The name Lycoris refers to some unknown Greek lady. The species Squamigera was introduced to American gardens from China by Dr. G. R. Hall, a New England physician who spent considerable time collecting plants in China and Japan.
“Dr. Hall stated that the dainty pink trumpet flowers were highly regarded by the Chinese. Several other species are included in the genus, among them L. sanguinea, with reddish orange flowers.
“Lycoris sends forth strap-shaped foliage in early spring, which matures and disappears in early summer, only to be followed by naked stems, which often rise three feet, producing, in August, small clusters of soft pink lily-like blossoms that are delightfully fragrant…. Lycoris will thrive in partial shade and has been naturalized in woodlands.”
Hello!
We’re going to spend this post and the next three looking at photographs of plants in the Amaryllidaceae family, more commonly referred to as the “Amaryllis family” since some of its most prominent, well-known members are in the genus Amaryllis. The family encompasses about 1600 species of plants, including plants in the Crinum genus and Lycoris genus.
This first post includes images of Crinum bulbispermum — a large flowering plant often referred to by names containing “Swamp Lily” or “River Lily” — along with half of my photographs of Lycoris squamigera, also known as Resurrection Lily, Surprise Lily, or Naked Lady after its habit of blooming on tall slender stalks only upon dropping all its leaves (and appearing to be dormant) weeks earlier. The second post will contain the second half of my Lycoris squamigera photos, and the third and fourth posts will show one of its close relatives, Lycoris incarnata, whose candy-cane stripes have earned it the common name Peppermint Surprise Lily.
The Crinum bulbispermum — the first eighteen photos below — is a long-time Oakland resident that I’ve seen for at least a decade. It grows as a mass of numerous individual plants between sidewalks, in the sun, not far from the entrance to the property. As such it’s an eye catcher, drawing your gaze to one garden area that is surrounded by hydrangeas, daffodils, tulips, and flowering vines like quince and wisteria. Its later spring to early summer bloom period means that its colors and shapes replace many of those other flowers, ensuring that color endures through seasonal change.
The last fifteen photos below show Lycoris squamigera — whose name sounds a bit like an Italian casserole. It’s a much smaller and more compact plant than Crinum bulbispermum, and one that I encountered for the first time in June, so it must have been planted either late last year or early this year. The second quotation at the top of this post — from Garden Bulbs in Color by J. Horace McFarland — describes this plant’s Oakland environment accurately (“Lycoris will thrive in partial shade and has been naturalized in woodlands“) in that it was planted in the shade of numerous trees and shrubs, filling in previously empty spaces and catching filtered sunlight. As this may be its first blooming season, some plants appeared quite isolated from each other, while others — typically those that got more sunlight — managed to produce multiple stems and overlapping, bouquet-style collections of blooms. Either way, though, I found them fun and interesting to photograph, as the filtered sun produced some nice side-lighting and back-lighting, showing off the wide range of colors the flowers can reveal.
From “A Bulb I Can’t Resist” in One Man’s Garden by Henry Mitchell:
“I never met a crinum I didn’t like, though I know these handsome bulbous creatures with tall stems crowned by lilylike flowers are not hardy much north of Washington. Still, many of them will stand occasional freezes to zero. Once in Memphis the temperature dropped to twelve below zero and I feared for the crinums, just sitting out there unprotected, without even a mulch or a nearby wall for shelter, but they bloomed as well as ever the following summer….
“Crinum leaves tend to be long and floppy. The white ‘Carolina Beauty’, a free-blooming small white with clusters of fragrant trumpets on eighteen-inch stems, good for cutting, has neat leaves that stand up, and they are narrow. But most other crinums can soon occupy a circle five feet in diameter. The leaves may flop flat on the ground. If they are near a path, the gardener will trip over them twenty times a summer, and if well back in a garden border, the leaves will lounge happily over any plant within hollering distance, and the gardener will wonder what ever happened to those phlox or irises or whatever it was that used to be there….
“I often saw the white flowers, somewhat drooping, the central rib stained deep madder, in fat clumps in old parts of southern towns, and the sight of them (they bloom off and on from May to October when they feel like it) used to reassure me that winter was a long way off.
“Most crinums are fragrant, though I do not much like the smell. It suggests thin sugar syrup to me, though I notice specialist growers of crinums keep insisting that it is the headiest perfume in the world. It is nothing like the tuberose or night jasmine or gardenia, so don’t count on it too much. Still, it gives the nose something to do.”
Hello!
To wrap up October, here we have photographs of another member of the Amaryllis family: Crinum, one of the Amaryllis varieties that’s often called “Swamp Lily” (because in the wild, it often grows at the edges of wetlands), but may also get tagged with the names River Lily, Milk Lily, Cape Lily, or Cemetery Lily. That “lily” is in all these common names is a hoot, since they’re not lilies (I guess we’re getting used to that, aren’t we?). Cemetery Lily is a nice fit — since that’s where I photographed them — and you probably can imagine these growing near the edges of a spooky swamp.
I was hoping “Ghost Lily” was one of the common names, since tomorrow is Halloween and I found this one that actually does look like a ghost…
… but, alas, even with that costume, I can only pretend.
“The natural order, Amaryllidaceae, composed of about fifty genera, is a beautiful tribe of plants, and seems to be very generally and very deservedly admired…. Their brilliancy of colors combined with delightful fragrance have excited admiration from the days of Solomon, who called them the Lilies of the Field, to the present time.
“They are all bulbous-rooted, and with but few exceptions, they differ but little in figure and general outline; their flower-spikes are usually one to two feet in height, those of the Doryanthus, and some species of Crinum, however, far exceed that height. In foliage they possess a uniformity of figure which is very singular; in color they vary from white and yellow to deep scarlet and azure blue, some beautifully striped and marked; in fragrance some are delicious, others entirely free….
“Some of the species are natives of the cooler provinces of Europe and Asia; others are found deep-rooted in the burning shores of islands where scarcely a blade of grass interposes itself between them and the torrid rays of a tropical sun. Many are found in the damp and sultry woods of equinoctial America; others are found scattered throughout the states, while another group intermingle with the Ixias and the Gladiolus of Southern Africa….
“It is only to be expected that plants found so widely scattered, and growing under such varied conditions of temperature and soil, should require in many cases, special treatment. We shall notice each of the genera, as they are respectively entitled, estimating their value simply as flowering plants, and their adaptation to the open border, window garden, conservatory and green-house. Some of the genera we should not notice at all, if it were not that there is an earnest and increasing demand for all the information that can be obtained of any plant belonging to this noble family.”
For this post, we’ll take a close look at some of the flowers from a pair of tall Amaryllis — shown in the first three photos in the galleries below — by photographing them from different angles and then diving inside the blossoms.
The first time I photographed these flowers was in 2020, when I identified them as lilies because… well, they looked like lilies to me and I hadn’t yet discovered PlantNet. A couple of years later, I identified them correctly, and remained fascinated by the structures inside the flower.
Let’s, for example, zoom in on this one…
… where you can see that there are two pairs of three anthers each inside the flower. Those toward the front of the flower are lighter in color — almost white — while the three anthers deeper in the blossom’s throat are darker, the color of light brown sugar. In any of the photos where the anthers are visible, you can see the same pattern: three lighter-colored anthers toward the front and three darker-colored anthers toward the back.
These anthers are loosely attached to the ends of six filaments, where even the slightest breeze causes them to wiggle back and forth. That first time I saw them, the movement led me to believe I was looking at grubs or worms until I realized they were part of the flower’s structure. But they do look a little like grubs, don’t they?
Perhaps I spend too much time puzzling about the way flowers are constructed, but I couldn’t help asking my imaginary research assistant ClaudeAI a couple of questions about these (what I thought were incidental) observations: Why does an amaryllis have three light-colored anthers and three dark colored anthers? And: Why do the anthers wiggle like worms?
Claude’s answers were quite long, but here’s part of its answer to the first question about the anther colors:
This dimorphic (two-form) anther coloration in Amaryllis is a real and consistent feature. The three lower/front anthers are typically paler (often whitish or cream-colored) while the three upper/back anthers are usually darker (tan to light brown).
This feature combines with the slightly downward-pointing orientation of the flowers and the arrangement of the stamens to create an organized landing platform for pollinators. The color difference might help make the reproductive structures more visible to approaching pollinators, particularly in low light conditions when these flowers are often visited by moths.
And here’s part of its answer to my question about why the anthers wiggle like worms:
The wobbling movement of the anthers enhances pollen dispersal. When the anthers shake, they release pollen more effectively than if they were rigidly attached. This movement also helps ensure that visiting pollinators get dusted with pollen as the anthers brush against them. The loose attachment allows the anthers to make contact with different parts of a pollinator’s body as it moves around the flower.
Their resemblance to small worms or grubs is particularly interesting from an evolutionary perspective. This might serve as a form of visual attraction for certain pollinators, especially moths and other insects that are attracted to moving prey. The combination of the wiggling motion and grub-like appearance could create what’s called a “dummy pollinator reward” — a visual signal that tricks insects into investigating the flower, thereby facilitating pollination even though there isn’t actually a prey item present.
In other words, the Amaryllis has evolved this way as a pollination strategy — part of which optimizes pollinator attraction and part of which enhances seed dispersal. Plants are so much smarter than I ever imagined!
