Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  The lily’s sweetness also bolstered its growing influence. In a twelfth-century manuscript written in the Byzantine Greek of the Orthodox Church, begun perhaps in the previous century by a Greek monk who loved the solitude of his walled plot, the lily of poverty grew inside a deeply symbolic garden, alongside the lemon tree of purity, the fig of gentleness, the vine of spiritual joy and the pomegranate of courage.

  After the sight of the lemon trees, there is the flowering of the lily bed, giving delight and pleasure to the sight by the beauty of its colour and its rounded shape, breathing forth the most pleasant good cheer of its perfume and furnishing a pattern of greatness of soul. What is more, it is after the practice of incorruptible, peaceful purity that the love of learning, disinterested in money, usually blossoms. Why indeed would he who was striving for simplicity and holiness choose to amass treasure, since he has nowhere to spend it for his own pleasure?

  Throughout the Middle Ages, the lily’s power seemed actually to increase as a signifier of Mary’s virginity, so that by the early Renaissance a lily frond had become an essential prop in scenes of the Annunciation, as in Sandro Botticelli’s The Annunciation (c.1490) in which a kneeling Angel Gabriel carries a single lily stem bearing five flowers in place of the traditional wand or palm frond. In a nineteenth-century reworking by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini! (Behold the Handmaid of the Lord), a wingless Gabriel points a phallic three-budded lily stem at the womb of a cowering Virgin who crouches, barely awake, on her pallet bed. Nearby hangs a lily embroidery from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, which Rossetti had painted the previous year. Rossetti’s lily stem has two opened buds, representing God and the Holy Spirit, and an unopened bud that heralds the unborn Christ.

  Even more complex in their web of Christian allusions are the strange ‘lily crucifixions’ that appeared in England and Wales between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. A rare manuscript example survives in the Llanbeblig Book of Hours, dating from the late fourteenth century, which opens with scenes from the Annunciation. Bearing a palm frond in his right hand, Gabriel kneels before the Virgin, who sits under a green canopy on the opposite page. Beside her stands a large silver pot containing a tall white lily in flower, the crucified Christ nailed to its stalk and leaves.

  Here is Christ as a lily flower born of the lily-like Mary, the flower’s association with purity signifying at once the Virgin and the theme of Christ crucified by the virtues, a late medieval notion that emphasized how Christ, by his dying, had brought to perfection such human virtues as humility, obedience, patience and perseverance. Here, too, is a subtle allusion to the lily’s role in curing women’s ailments, especially those concerned with conception and childbirth. John Gerard believed that white lily flowers steeped in olive oil and set in the sun in a strong glass would soften the womb – as would roasted red lily bulbs pounded with rose oil – while distilled lily water could procure ‘easie and spedie’ childbirth, and rapidly expel the afterbirth.

  Even after the Reformation waged war on ‘papist’ idolatry, the Marian lily lingered on in pockets of Catholic resistance, as in the writings of the English Jesuit Henry Hawkins, who drew on the Church’s long tradition of garden symbolism for his book of meditations on the Virgin Mary, Partheneia Sacra, published in 1633. Hawkins gives the lily its own chapter, alongside the rose, violet, sunflower, iris, olive and palm, musing on the lily’s classical associations but concentrating on the flower’s connection with the Virgin Mary and with notions of purity, virginity and sweetness.

  ‘The Lillie besides is alwayes fragrant,’ wrote Hawkins, ‘and of a most sweet odour: and our Lillie was perfumed with an odiferous oynt-ment, which made her so fragrant and redolent, composed of three odoriferous spices: aromatizing as Balme, Mirrh, and Cinamon.’ Used to adorn the bedchambers of Kings, ‘that they may rest more deliciously among them’, lilies also bedecked the Virgin Mary, ‘not the Chamber only of a KING, but of GOD also’.

  Hawkins ends his lily meditation with reference to the Old Testament’s Song of Songs, which contains some of the loveliest biblical references to the flower. As the Song’s female voice declares: ‘I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys./ As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.’ And later: ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.’

  Think of lilies in the Bible and these are the lines you will probably remember, together with Christ’s ‘lilies of the field’ in the Sermon on the Mount. But the original Hebrew word is ‘sosannah’, and neither botanists nor Hebrew commentators can agree which flower is actually meant; lily, hyacinth, narcissus, sternbergia, even a lotus have all been proposed. The same is true of the biblical ‘rose’ (in Hebrew, ‘habasselet’), also called a tulip, crocus, lily or simply a wildflower. Yet most versions opt for the lily and the rose, so resonantly joined by W. B. Yeats in his poem, ‘The White Birds’:

  I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,

  Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;

  Soon far from the rose and the lily, and fret of the flames would we be,

  Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!

  THE GENESIS OF the heraldic fleur-de-lis reveals a similar confusion over floral identities. Literally ‘flower of the lily’, it is much closer to the common flag iris, Iris pseudacorus, than to any true lily. Used as a stylized emblem or motif in both the Old and New Worlds, it is found on countless objects: Mesopotamian cylinder seals; Egyptian bas-reliefs and Mycenaean pottery; Greek, Roman and Gallic coins; Sassanid fabrics from the old Persian Empire; Amerindian clothing; and Japanese arms. Its meaning shifts from culture to culture, appearing sometimes as a symbol of purity or virginity, sometimes as a mark of fertility and fecundity, and sometimes as an insignia of power or sovereignty.

  In medieval Europe, the motif acquired a Christian gloss with increasingly Marian overtones. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Virgin is often portrayed surrounded by lilies and occasionally by genuinely heraldic fleurs-de-lis, a fashion that peaked in the thirteenth century when the rose usurped the lily in Christian iconography, the flower of love apparently taking precedence over the flower of virginity.

  While the rose was gaining the ascendancy in matters of religion, so the fleur-de-lis was transforming itself into the heraldic emblem of the kings of France. The Valois kings of the fourteenth century seized on the device to legitimize their claim to the French throne, proclaiming the fleur-de-lis as a sign of the Trinity and reinforcing the legend that it came directly from the angel of God to Clovis, whose conversion to Christianity had made him the first Catholic king of the Franks. According to this version of the legend, the angel told Clovis to replace the three diabolical frogs on his shield with three fleurs-de-lis, whose three petals could be viewed as the three virtues of faith, wisdom and chivalry, or as an actual symbol of the Trinity.

  The legend makes no historical sense, of course. Clovis reigned in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, many hundreds of years before armorial badges appeared in Europe, but the Valois kings had cleverly chosen a heraldic device that was already in royal use. Under Marian influence, two earlier Capetian kings, Louis VI and Louis VII, had introduced it into their repertory of symbols, and the upstart Valois – from a cadet branch of the Capetian clan – were well advised to capitalize on a symbol that linked them to France’s ruling dynasty, and to their Mother Church.

  THUS FAR, THE story of the lily has focused on European varieties. From the late sixteenth century onwards, new varieties arriving from East and West created enormous excitement among gardeners and artists.

  We gain a hint already in the lilies John Gerard grew in his famous garden in Holborn, and the ones he described so admiringly in four separate chapters of his great Herball of 1597. He wrote about white lilies first, both the ordinary ones and the white lily of Constantinople, then wild red lilies from Italy and the Lang
uedoc, already common in English gardens and in Germany. Among these he included a ‘Gold red Lillie’, not in his garden, its flowers similar to those of a white lily but coloured saffron red and speckled with black like the inkblots on ‘rude unperfect draughts of certaine letters’. Next came the greater and lesser mountain lilies from Syria, Italy and hot countries beyond the borders of Greece and the Peloponnese; among these, he obtained the greater mountain lily from his ‘loving friend’, the London apothecary Master James Garrett.

  Gerard’s fourth sort was the red lily of Constantinople, which he called Lilium Byzantinum, shaped like a mountain lily with petals of a deep sealing-wax red. It grew wild in fields and mountains, he explained, many days’ journey from Constantinople, where it was brought by ‘poore pesants’, to be sold for ‘the decking up of gardens. From thence it was sent among many other bulbs of rare & daintie flowers, by master Harbran ambassador there, unto my honorable good Lord and master, the Lord Treasurer of England, who bestowed them upon me for my garden.’ Gerard’s ‘good Lord and master’ was William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth I’s trusted adviser, whose gardens Gerard tended in the Strand, London, and at Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire. In the days before organized plant hunting, this is how new plant varieties arrived in Europe’s gardens, carried by travelling diplomats, merchants, sea captains and ships’ doctors and passed to enthusiastic collectors at home.

  North America, too, was sending her first lilies to Europe, as the continent slowly opened up to European settlement. As early as 1629, the royal apothecary John Parkinson could count Canada’s elegant spotted Martagon (L. canadense) among his lily stock, joining others from Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Macedonia and Turkey; ‘this strange Lilly’, he called it. Gerard’s red-spotted Martagon remained a rarity, while the ‘red Martagon of Constantinople is become so common every where, and so well knowne to all lovers of these delights, that I shall seeme unto them to lose time, to bestow many lines upon it’. Parkinson nonetheless judged it worthy of praise, ‘because it is so faire a flower, and was at first so highly esteemed’.

  According to Parkinson, the white lily was still used in medicine although quack doctors or ‘Empericks’ had previously used red lilies as well. Even the white lily seemed to have experienced a loss of potency. While only thirty years earlier John Gerard had vaunted its efficacy for curing a string of ailments from plague sores to dropsy, Parkinson’s summary of its virtues is noticeably brief. The white lily had, he said, a mollifying, digesting and cleansing quality, helping to suppurate tumours, and to digest them, ‘for which purpose the roote is much used. The water of the flowers distilled, is of excellent vertue for women in travell of childe bearing, to procure an easie delivery . . . It is used also of divers women outwardly, for their faces to cleanse the skin, and make it white and fresh.’

  Were the lily’s powers generally beginning to fade? In contrast to the rose, it played only a muted role in Shakespeare’s floral imagination, usually as a stock referent for elegance and beauty without any real focus on the flower. Only rarely does the dramatist give it real power, condemning as ‘wasteful and ridiculous excess’ any attempt ‘To gild refined gold, to paint the lily’; and proposing, in his lovely Sonnet 94, that the gift of beauty confers an obligation to behave virtuously:

  For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

  Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

  IF THE SYMBOLIC lily was losing ground, garden lilies were multiplying fast, as new varieties from North America continued to dazzle European eyes. Travelling to New England in the 1630s and again in the 1660s, Kentish gentleman John Josselyn found red lilies growing all over the country, ‘innumerably amongst the small Bushes’, as well as the later-flowering mountain lilies, ‘bearing many yellow Flowers, turning up their Leaves like the Martigon, or Turks Cap, spotted with small spots as deep as Safforn [saffron]’.

  Josselyn noted no medicinal uses by Native Americans of true lilies, although they ate the roots of yellow-flowered water lilies, ‘which are long a boiling’, he said, adding that ‘they tast like the Liver of a Sheep’. America’s great apologist of outdoor living, Henry David Thoreau, would later describe the taste of what he thought were L. superbum bulbs as being ‘somewhat like raw green corn on the ear’; according to his native guide, they were used for thickening soups and stews.

  This same Virginian swamp lily (L. superbum) had reached Britain by the mid-seventeenth century – ‘yet scarce to bee had’ – where it was painted by gentleman-gardener Alexander Marshal for his fine florilegium, the only English flower book to survive from this time. Another early arrival from further north was the red-spotted Flame lily, also known as the ‘dwarf lily of Acadie’, eventually named by Linnaeus as L. philadelphicum. Acadie was in fact a French colony in Nova Scotia, hundreds of miles north of Philadelphia, but Linnaeus was better at botany than he was at geography. It was later sent by the indefatigable plant collector, John Bartram of Philadelphia, to his Quaker English contact, Peter Collinson of Mill Hill, and to the gardener Philip Miller, who grew it in the Society of Apothecaries’ garden at Chelsea.

  Many other North American lilies commemorate the great names in American plant exploration. Described as a ‘rare beauty’ with spotted, spidery, pinkish-orange flowers and a golden throat, L. catesbaei honours Mark Catesby, the English naturalist who described it first in The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands under the name ‘L. carolinianum’. What we now call the Carolina lily, L. michauxii, commemorates another naturalist, the Frenchman André Michaux, who compiled North America’s first flora. This tall spotted Turkscap lily received its name posthumously in 1813 from a fellow French botanist, Jean Louis Marie Poiret.

  When the Rockies were finally conquered, surprisingly late in America’s slow push west, the Pacific coast offered up many fine lilies. These included L. humboldtii, the Tiger lily of the west coast, named to commemorate the centenary of the birth of the German explorer and naturalist Baron Alexander von Humboldt; and L. parryi, the Lemon lily from the San Bernardino Mountains in southern California, discovered growing in the boggy soil of a settler’s potato patch in 1876 but slow in reaching Britain.

  WHILE GARDEN LOVERS throughout Europe continued to welcome new lilies from North America, real excitement was reserved for the Asiatic lilies from China, Japan and Korea, which began to arrive in the early nineteenth century to immediate acclaim. The two great centres of Asiatic lilies – China and Japan – had virtually closed their doors to the West for hundreds of years, leaving gardeners ill prepared for the astonishing beauty of their many lily varieties.

  The Chinese are known to have grown three sorts of lily since ancient times: the dainty Morning star lily (Lilium concolor); the sweet-scented Musk lily (L. brownii), considered by many gardeners as ‘the perfection of lily form’; and the Tiger lily (L. lancifolium), the oldest of them all and in cultivation for at least two thousand years. Yet despite their beauty, these lilies were valued by the Chinese not as ornamental plants but for their contribution to medicine and diet. Lily bulbs first appeared in a classic of Chinese medicine, the Divine Husbandman’s Materia Medica, believed to date from the first century and so roughly contemporary with Dioscorides; the bulbs were said to moisten the lungs, stop dry coughs, clear the heart and calm the spirits. One of the lilies used has been named as L. brownii var. colchesteri, which was still employed in the 1970s, according to a herbal pharmacology of the People’s Republic of China. Known collectively as Pai Ho (Hundred Together), lily bulbs are considered a purifying tonic; peeled and cooked with water and sugar, they are eaten in large quantities in the summer.

  Early reports of Chinese lilies filtered back to Europe with one of the first dedicated plant collectors to visit China, ship’s surgeon Dr James Cunningham, who was appointed resident surgeon at Amoy (Xiamen) in Fujian in the late 1690s. Travelling on to Chusan Island, he found white-flowered lilies smelling of jasmine and woodland roses, although it
would be a hundred years or more before living lily plants reached Britain. Two came in the first consignments of plants despatched to London by William Kerr, Kew’s first resident plant collector in Canton, sent out by Sir Joseph Banks in 1803. One of these, Chinese medicine’s L. brownii var. colchesteri, struggled into flower in 1812 and then died out, only to be reintroduced a few years later. But the second of Kerr’s lilies was the much loved Tiger lily, L. lancifolium, which was propagated so successfully at Kew that within six years some ten thousand plants had entered cultivation. As Gertrude Jekyll commented a century later, the Tiger lily became cherished as an old English garden flower, ‘so familiar is it, not only in our gardens, but in old pictures and in the samplers and embroideries of our great-grandmothers’. Much used by American lily breeders to develop new lily hybrids, it also played a starring role in Lewis Carroll’s garden of live flowers in Through the Looking-glass, And What Alice Found There:

  8. John Tenniel’s engraving of Alice’s encounter with the Tiger-lily in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-glass (1872), his sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  ‘O Tiger-lily,’ said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, ‘I wish you could talk!’

  ‘We can talk,’ said the Tiger-lily: ‘when there’s anybody worth talking to.’

  The third of the early China arrivals was the little Morning star lily from central China, L. concolor, introduced in 1805 by the Hon. Charles Greville, a friend of Sir Joseph Banks and one of the founders of the Horticultural Society of London. A spotted variety – sometimes called L. concolor var. pulchellum – is the more usual form from northern China; this was the variety brought back by plant collector Robert Fortune in 1850, after the first of the Opium Wars had forced China to open more ports to foreign trade (see Chapter 4).