London Essay
For the Love of Lilies
The English as you already know, are different from Americans. Particularly the gardening English, which is bloody well nearly all of them, including King Charles. For one thing, they can’t just putter around in the garden like Americans do, putting in plants as the fancy strikes them. Great Scott, no.
They collect.
They’ve always been like that, and the gardening world is the better for it. English plant explorers brought us many splendid plants. Take Ernest Henry Wilson who might be described as a tad overly enthusiastic about lilies. He almost died because of them. In his later years, he suffered from what was known as his "lily limp."
Wilson (1879-1930) was one of the great plants hunters, sort of like a hired gun. He worked first for the renowned English nursery, Veitch, and later for the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. He specialized in collecting plants from China.
One day, Wilson and his Chinese guides were winding their way down a narrow tract high in the wild, hilly province of Szechuan when an avalanche set loose a boulder from the hillside above them. It broke Wilson’s leg in two places. Wilson quickly had a splint improvised from his sturdy camera tripod, and the party continued. Judging from a stream of falling pebbles, another avalanche seemed inevitable. They hurried along the steep and narrow track only to encounter a mule train of fifty animals. The narrow track prevented the mules from turning around or giving Wilson safe passage alongside them. Wilson ordered his men to lay him across the trail, and one-by-one fifty mules stepped over him.
Before the relatively modern craze for ornamental lilies, the flowers were grown as a food and medicinal crop. Even today, the dried unopened buds of the tiger lily (Lilium lancifolium) are an essential ingredient in popular Chinese dishes such a mu-shu pork and hot-and-sour soup, where they give an interesting texture.
America’s Henry David Thoreau is said to have made a soup from lily bulbs, which he though palatable enough, but the soup rather reminded him of the Irishman’s limestone soup.
There is one more quality of lilies that should be mentioned. You have to be careful where you plant them in the garden, lest their fragrance overwhelm you. Colette’s mother used to cry out to her when the lilies were in full bloom in the kitchen garden, "Close the gate a little, the lilies are making the drawing room uninhabitable!"
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle
Belgrave Square Garden, London