From “Lilium myriophyllum” in Flowers from the Royal Gardens of Kew: Two Centuries of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine by Ruth L. A. Stiff:
“Now known as Lilium regale, this handsome lily was collected in 1903 by Ernest Henry Wilson (1876-1930), who found it growing in the semi-arid valley of the Min River in northwest Sichuan. This Chinese species is considered one of the ten best garden plants in the world. It is easy to grow, is deeply fragrant, with many funnel-shaped flowers of creamy white, and has slender stems, each from two to four feet tall. Thriving in moist but well-drained soil and requiring many hours of direct sunlight, the regal lily has been grown for over one thousand years in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean gardens.
“E. H. Wilson is considered the most famous of all the plant collectors who traveled to China. His first voyage there in 1899 was for the Veitch family, the best-known of the nineteenth-century British nurserymen. He hunted chiefly for the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University from 1907 to 1919 and eventually was appointed Keeper of that institution. It is estimated that as many as six hundred of his one thousand or so introductions are still in cultivation.
“During Wilson’s celebrated return trip to the valley of the Min in the fall of 1910, when he and twenty accompanying porters and collectors harvested over six thousand regal lily bulbs for distribution throughout North America and the British Isles, his caravan was struck by a disastrous rock slide on a narrow mountain pass. Wilson, whose leg was broken in two places, was forced to lie still while pack mules walked over him in an attempt to vacate the path.
“Recalling this episode in his book Plant Hunting (1927), Wilson later wrote: ‘How many people know the size of a mule’s hoof? Quite a number have felt the strength of a mule’s leg and the sharpness of his teeth; his obstinacy is a proverb. But the size of his hoof is another matter. Frankly, I do not know with mathematical exactness but, as I lay on the ground and more than forty of these animals stepped over my prostrate form, the hoof seemed enormous, blotting out my view of the heavens.’ Miraculously, Wilson sustained no further injury, but the limp that was to plague him for the rest of his life became affectionately known as his ‘lily limp.'”
From “Enumeration of Species: Lilium regale” in The Lilies of Eastern Asia by Ernest Henry Wilson:
“This Lily has a surprisingly limited distribution being confined to about fifty miles of the narrow semi-arid valley of the Min River in extreme western Szech’uan between 2,500 and 6,000 feet altitude — a region where the summers are hot and the winters severely cold and where strong winds prevail at all seasons of the year. I never saw it wild outside of this valley, which is walled in by steep mountain slopes culminating in perpetual snows. There it grows in great plenty among grasses and low shrubs and in niches on the bare cliffs. From the last week in May to the first in July, according to altitude, the blossoms of this Lily transform a desolate lonely region into a veritable garden of beauty. Its fragrance fills the air and ’tis good to travel there when the Regal Lily is in bloom, though the path is hard and dangerous as personal experience and notices in Chinese characters carved in the rocks, urging all not to loiter save beneath the shelter of hard cliffs, testify.
“It was my privilege to discover this Lily in August, 1903, and in the autumn of the year following sent about three hundred bulbs to Messrs. Veitch. These arrived safely in the spring of 1905, flowered that summer and were afterwards distributed under the erroneous name of “Lilium myriophyllum.” In 1908 I shipped with indifferent success bulbs of this Lily to the Arnold Arboretum and to some friends, but in 1910 I succeeded in introducing it in quantity to America and the stock passed from the Arnold Arboretum to Messrs. R. and J. Farquhar and Co., Boston, Mass….
“Under cultivation in Europe and America the Regal Lily has behaved royally, being equally indifferent to winter colds, summer droughts and deluges and has flowered and fruited annually. It is the only Lily of its class that ripens seeds in the climate of New England. The seeds germinate freely and many millions of bulbs have been raised. It forces well even after cold storage and there seems no reason why it should not become the ‘Easter Lily’ of the future….
“The pollen is very cohesive, which makes shipping the plants in flower a comparatively easy matter, and the fragrance of the blossoms is pleasant, being not so strong as that of related species. The canary-yellow of the inside of the funnel contrasts well with the lustrous and translucent, marble-white upper part of the segments, and often the rose-purple is pleasingly tinted through, more especially if the flowers are allowed to open indoors or in light shade as under cheese-cloth. Some critics object to the coloured flowers, some to the narrow leaves, but in adding it to western gardens the discoverer would proudly rest his reputation with the Regal Lily….”
Hello!
This is the first of two posts with photographs of Lilium regale, a historically and botanically significant plant and flower whose common names include Regal Lily, Royal Lily, and King’s Lily — names that emerged during imperial British explorations of Asian countries such as China and Japan, and reflect the sense that this lily was both opulent in appearance and impressive in its ability to conquer its environment.
The flowers of the Regal Lily are among the largest of those produced by any lily, in a recurved trumpet or funnel shape extending five to six inches across. Strong, densely-leaved plant stems may stretch six feet, with multiple flowers emerging on any given stem. Here you can see what I often find when photographing these lilies at Oakland Cemetery, where the volume and weight of the flowers — especially after a windy thunderstorm — pushes the mass of plants into a horizontal position, yet with nearly all of the flowers intact and the stems bent but not a single one broken.
This sort of presentation might not seem ideal, aesthetically and photographically speaking — but that doesn’t matter to the lily, whose growth, flower production, and pollination strategies are only minimally impacted despite tipping over. And as you can see from the photos below — and those in the next post — for the photographer it’s just a matter of slinking among the leaves to get a satisfactory point of view on the plant’s stunning blooms.
The introduction of Lilium regale to British (and United States) horticulture began with the Chinese expeditions of Ernest Henry Wilson in the early twentieth century. Wilson — a botanical explorer and avid photographer — made several trips to China during which he encountered the Regal Lily and collected hundreds of bulbs to expatriate. Any research you encounter on Wilson — like the first excerpt I included at the top of this post — will undoubtedly mention the injury he suffered on the fourth China expedition, where he broke his leg after slipping between some rocks and used parts of his camera tripod as a splint so he could be carried from the accident scene. Wilson subsequently coined the phrase “lily limp” to describe the permanent injury he suffered, and that phrase remains linked to Wilson, Regal Lilies, and his China expeditions to this day. The chapter Advent of the Lily Royal in his book Plant Hunting (Volume 2) contains his elaborate and occasionally self-deprecating description of the events, and you can learn more about Wilson’s China trips and see some of his photographs at these links:
1907 – 1909: First Expedition to China
1910 – 1911: Expedition to China
E. H. Wilson China Expedition Photographs
I hit briefly on the significance of the introduction of Lilium regale to European and American botany in one of my posts about Lilium speciosum — Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (2 of 3) — where I quoted from Naomi Slade’s book Lilies: Beautiful Varieties for the Home and Garden:
“While fabulous, lilies had gained a reputation for being challenging and capricious to cultivate. They were exciting; they were expensive; and they were quite likely to die on you after a couple of years. Inevitably, they attracted a certain type of well-heeled horticultural brinksmanship, right up until amenable Lilium regale emerged, bringing down both prices and the level of skill required to cultivate this most desirable of flowers.”
The other lilies I’ve photographed this year — such as Tiger Lilies, Japanese Show Lilies, and Formosa Lilies — were well known to early twentieth-century botanists, as they had all been encountered and transitioned to Western horticulture in the nineteenth century. Each species was being actively and broadly studied, hybridized, and sometimes naturalized in new environments for decades before Wilson’s Asian expeditions. But each transplanted lily species also presented often futile growing challenges for gardeners — as Slade describes above — until Wilson fetched the previously unknown Regal Lily from China, first in 1903.
As Wilson describes it — in the second excerpt above, from his book The Lilies of Eastern Asia — this hardy Regal Lily, found in remote and difficult-to-explore locations in China’s mountains, adapted well to European and North American gardens, as it “behaved royally, being equally indifferent to winter colds, summer droughts and deluges and has flowered and fruited annually.” This single statement helps us see how gardening with lilies moved from a specialized activity of horticultural experts, to something gardeners of any level of expertise could do — and how it can happen that, over 120 years later, we find a large batch of Regal Lilies at Oakland Cemetery producing robust, colorful, and fully intact flowers despite having been nearly knocked to the ground by the wind.
As a primary source for research, Wilson’s firsthand and comprehensive account — from which I excerpted just three paragraphs — also tells us a lot about this pivotal moment in the botanical history of lily distribution from Asian regions to the West. We can derive from his account how Liliium regale’s geographic presence was originally quite limited, contributing to its absence from Western lily culture until Wilson’s expeditions. The narrative gives us insight into the physical difficulties plant explorers faced and how they overcame them — often only over multiple expeditions — to redistribute their specimens to their home countries and foster subsequent propagation and commercial development. The excerpt even demonstrates how botanical naming conventions evolve: Lilium regale was initially marketed and sold under the name “Lilium myriophyllum” — a name that you will still find in historical resources — and Wilson’s suggestion that the Regal Lily might become the “Easter lily of the future” was applied to a different lily entirely, Lilium longiflorum rather than Lilium regale. Yet Wilson’s preference for describing this lily as “behaving royally” — or elsewhere describing it with numerous monarchy-adjacent terms — did stick throughout subsequent decades, which is why this lily’s most common nicknames Regal Lily, Royal Lily, and King’s Lily sound like they were anointed by The Crown rather than this intrepid, determined explorer.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
