Into the wild: Hunting the regal lily

The famed regal lily, hunted down in China in 1903. — sheena bizarre/Creative Commons

I don’t need to trek down to the garden to know that my regal lilies have come into bloom.

Their intensely sweet fragrance wafted across the yard and found me on the back porch where I was perched with my morning coffee. Like many lilies, Lilium regale has a scent that can be overwhelming close at hand, but rich and intriguing at a distance.

It certainly got me to my feet to trek the 60-odd feet down to the spot where a host of these big trumpet lilies overhangs my garden bench. The tall stems put the flowers at eye level, where I can admire the beautiful golden throat of these two-toned blossoms, white on the inside and maroon on the outside.

Impressive in stature and rising above commoner plants, lilies are the aristocrats of the garden. In fact, they have enjoyed an exalted status through much in human history.

The pharaohs of ancient Egypt were fond of a fragrant ointment made of lily blossoms. Lily images turn up in the artwork and friezes of ancient Crete, Greece and Rome, and the early Christians later adopted the flower as a symbol of purity. Lilies were favorites of Tudor monarchs and French kings, prophets and poets.

Still, in ancient gardens the range of familiar lilies wasn’t wide. Lilium candidum (also known as madonna lily) and martagon lilies, wildflowers of the European mountains, were among the few known in Western cultivation until traders of the 17th century began seeking treasure in the Far East.

They hit the lily motherlode in Asia where half the world’s 100 or so lily species are found including Oriental lilies, tiger lilies, trumpets and Asiatics — the chief types in our gardens today. To narrow the field even further, nearly a third of the Asian species occur on the steep mountainsides of just three Chinese provinces.

Of course, plant breeders have stirred the pot in modern times, conjuring up more than 7,000 hybrid cultivars, including exotic inter-species crosses like the "orienpets," marrying Oriental and trumpet lilies. I confess I've failed miserably with all the Oriental types and find the Asiatics variable and often short-lived.

E.H. Wilson’s famous episode. — Arnold Arboretum Historical Collection.

Regal lilies, on the other hand, grow like weeds for me with no special attention other than sequestering them inside my fenced garden, safe from the bunnies and deer. I can't see these impressive plants in bloom without thinking fondly of E. H. "Chinese" Wilson, one of the most renowned plant hunters of the early 20th century.

In 1910, then working for the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, he was persuaded to return to China in pursuit of more regal lily bulbs. Something like 95 percent of his first haul collected in 1903 had rotted on the trip home, so the lily, while known, was extremely rare. It is indigenous to just a 30-mile stretch of the Min Valley in the Hengduan Mountains of Szechwan Province, no easy place to reach.

It was there that Wilson again spotted and bagged his quarry. Returning through the wild landscape, he and his bearers were traveling a narrow mountain track in avalanche country when a boulder came thundering down the slope. Wilson bailed out of his sedan chair and nearly made it to the safety of an overhanging ledge when a rock struck his leg, tearing flesh and shattering bone.

Our intrepid hero had his men fashion a splint from his camera tripod and ordered them to carry him to the nearest village. But on the horizon, new trouble loomed: a mule train traveling in the opposite direction on a pass too narrow to turn aside.

Cool as Indiana Jones, Wilson had his men place him on the ground where he lay in anxious immobility while every mule in the team stepped over him, one by one. After a three-day march, the party found a medical mission where a doctor delivered more bad news. The leg was infected and gangrene had set in.

Stubbornly and at the risk of his life, Wilson resisted amputation. His broken leg eventually healed, but was twisted and a hair shorter than the other. For the remainder of his life, Wilson walked with what he referred to as his "lily limp," a souvenir of his successful collection of another 6,000 bulbs. It is from these that most of the regal lilies we grow today are descended.

Wilson declared his limp worth it and said it was this plant (among more than a thousand he introduced) for which he wanted to be remembered. Britain's Royal Horticulture Society has voted the regal lily one of the top plants of the last 200 years.

See? No need to gild this lily — it already has a reputation good as gold and a history of legendary derring-do.