Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  One of the finest Chinese lilies of all arrived in Britain some fifty years later with another of the great plant hunters, Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson, after an earlier sighting by the French missionary and assiduous plant explorer Père Jean Marie Delavay. This was Lilium regale, the lily in my first London garden, which Wilson found in the valleys squeezed between the borders of Szechuan and Tibet, a ‘barren and desert-like’ terrain inhabited by monkeys, rock pigeons and green parrots, where the plant collector had broken his leg in a landslide. Finding the beautiful L. regale in such an inhospitable place must have offered some compensation for all the hardships he had endured. In summer the heat was terrific, Wilson tells us, in winter the cold intense, and at all times sudden and violent windstorms made progress difficult. But in June, in rock crevices beside raging torrents and high up the precipitous mountainside, the Regal lily in full bloom greeted the weary wayfarer, not in ‘twos and threes but in hundreds, in thousands, aye in tens of thousands’.

  His find was clearly no ordinary lily. Wilson wrote glowingly of its large trumpet-shaped flowers,

  more or less wine-coloured without, pure white and lustrous on the face, clear canary-yellow within the tube and each stamen filament tipped with a golden anther. The air in the cool of the morning and in the evening is laden with a delicious perfume exhaled from each bloom. For a brief season this lonely, semi-desert region is transformed by this Lily into a veritable fairy-land.

  Japanese lilies caused a similar stir when they finally reached Europe after Japan’s self-imposed isolation from the West. Ever since expelling the Portuguese and the Spanish in 1603, Japan allowed only the Dutch and the Chinese to trade, under rigorous conditions that made freedom of movement impossible. The few Dutch nationals allowed into the country were penned into the tiny artificial island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay. Fan-shaped, it measured just 233 metres on the outer side, 191 on the inner, and 70 on the west and east. Although it was undoubtedly beautiful – a later plant collector, Reginald Farrar, described his impression of ‘looking upon a transfigured landscape through a middle distance of perfectly calm, clear water, which gives each mass of azure or violet a redoubled opulence of soft colour’ – life on Deshima must have been intensely frustrating for foreigners. Kept under constant surveillance, the Dutch were required to make two annual journeys, later reduced to one, to pay costly homage to the ruling shogun in the capital, Edo (Tokyo). Yet despite all these restrictions, information about Japanese plants – and then the plants themselves – reached the West through the efforts of three remarkable Europeans who combined their medical training with a passion for botany. And each added to Europe’s stock of knowledge about Japanese lilies.

  The first to pass through Deshima, towards the end of the seventeenth century, was the German naturalist and physician, Engelbert Kaempfer, who stayed for two years and twice visited Edo, taking with him a box in which he kept the plants he had collected. Drawings made from these would prove useful in his descriptions of four hundred or so Japanese plants for the book he wrote about his travels, Amoenitatum exoticarum. Among these are eight lilies identified by pre-Linnaean Latin names, which surely included the crimson Japan lily (L. speciosum). When this last lily finally came to Europe, courtesy of Dr Philipp Franz Balthasar von Siebold, the magazine Botanical Register was fulsome in its praise:

  Not only is it handsome beyond all we before knew in gardens, on account of the clear, deep rose-colour of its flowers, which seem all rugged with rubies and garnets, and sparkling with crystal points, but it has the sweet fragrance of a Petunia. Well might Kaempfer speak of it as ’flos magnificae pulchri-tudinis,’ for surely if there is any thing not human, which is magnificent in beauty, it is this plant.

  After Kaempfer came the Swedish botanist and pupil of the great Linnaeus, Karl Pehr Thunberg, who arrived in Deshima in 1775 via Leiden, Amsterdam and a spell in South Africa, where he had learned Dutch and joined forces with the Scottish plant hunter, Francis Masson. Described as ‘an enthusiastic if somewhat careless botanist’, Thunberg gave the ‘japonica’ tag to plants that in fact originated in China and put together a hotchpotch of seven lilies for his Flora Japonica, mistaking several genuine Japanese lilies for their European cousins. He was right about Japan’s Bamboo lily, however, a beautiful pink trumpet lily, which he was the first to collect and to which he correctly gave the name L. japonicum.

  The most successful plant collector at Deshima was another German, the Bavarian Philipp von Siebold, who was introduced to the Japanese as a ‘mountain Dutchman’ to explain why his spoken Dutch was far less fluent than that of his Japanese interpreters. Capitalizing on a growing interest in western sciences, von Siebold gave science lessons to his interpreters, who in return taught him Japanese and a little written Chinese, as well as helping him to procure specimens for his botanical researches; the many successful cataract operations he undertook using European techniques unknown in Japan also increased his popularity. But he broke the rules, and following the discovery of sensitive material in his possession, including maps, he was subjected to house arrest and then expelled from Japan in October 1829.

  Despite this setback, he was able to take much of his living plant collection with him. Many of these plants went to Ghent, including more than twenty different kinds of lily. Among them were varieties of the crimson lily, L. speciosum, one of which he named Lilium speciosum Kaempferi in ‘honour of the indefatigable Kaempfer . . . because it was he who gave the first account of it in Europe’. He pointedly did not name a lily after Thunberg, whose mistakes he took pains to correct, naming L. callosum as the mountain lily Thunberg had mistaken for L. pomponium.

  The lily that caused the greatest stir of all, however, was L. auratum, the great Golden-rayed lily of Japan, collected by John Gould Veitch and first shown on 2 July 1862 at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Third Great Show by his family’s renowned nursery firm. Japan had by now been forced by the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry to open its doors to the West, and Veitch was one of the first to take advantage of the opportunities this offered for systematic plant collecting. He had found the lily growing wild on hillsides in central Japan, where it was much sought after for food. ‘They are boiled and eaten in much the same way as we do Potatoes,’ he noted, ‘and have an agreeable flavour resembling that of a Chestnut.’

  ‘One of the best new plants that has been introduced for years,’ trumpeted Gardeners’ Chronicle, calling it as ‘sweet as Lily of the Valley’ and the focus of ten thousand eyes at the Kensington Show. Just one week later, the paper printed an even more effusive report, declaring that it stood far above all other lilies as regards size, sweetness and exquisite colouring, emitting a perfume of orange blossoms sufficient to fill a large room but ‘so delicate as to respect the weakest nerves’:

  Imagine upon the end of a purple stem no thicker than a ramrod, and not above 2 feet high, a saucer-shaped flower at least ten inches in diameter, composed of six spreading somewhat crisp parts rolled back at their points, and having an ivory white skin thinly strewn with purple points or studs and oval or roundish prominent purple stains. To this add in the middle of each of the six parts a broad stripe of light satiny yellow losing itself gradually in the ivory skin. Place the flower in a situation where side light is cut off, and no direct light can reach it except from above, when the stripes acquire the appearance of gentle streamlets of living Australian gold, and the reader who has not seen it may form some feeble notion of what it is.

  Even this fine lily was absent from formal Japanese gardens, however. Visiting Japan early in the twentieth century, the sisters Ella and Florence Du Cane noted how big buds of L. auratum would be fighting their way among the rank growth along the roadside, filling the air with their scent, yet no lily found its way into the hallowed company of Japan’s ‘seven beautiful flowers of late summer’. Tiger lilies were still grown in village gardens as prized vegetables, wrote Florence Du Cane, their flower heads cut off to strengthen the bulbs, an
d thousands if not millions of L. longiflorum bulbs were cultivated annually for export, but only humble folk grew lilies for show, ‘many a giant bearing from twenty to thirty unblemished blooms, at the top of a stem some six or seven feet high, clad with equally unblemished foliage’.

  GIVEN ITS GROWING popularity in the West, the lily naturally slipped from the garden into literature and art, reinventing itself with each successive ‘school’ until it became the most potent flower in the lexicon of late nineteenth-century art. Among Britain’s early Pre-Raphaelite painters, the pale white lily started out as the ultimate floral accessory to the Annunciation scenes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and of Arthur Hughes, who painted a profusion of lilies at Gabriel’s feet. Edward Burne-Jones similarly fell under the lily’s spell, planting lilies in his gardens at Red Lion Square and Kensington Square, and including them in two Annunciation scenes he painted for The Flower Book, which portrayed the subjects suggested by the flowers’ names, rather than the flowers themselves.

  The lily was also the perfect accoutrement of Japonisme, the craze for all things Japanese ushered in by artists such as James McNeill Whistler, who never visited Japan himself but who gave his mistress Joanna Hiffernan a wan white lily to hold in the first of his three ‘Symphony in White’ paintings – in the later two, the lily gave way to Japanese azaleas. And those are surely speckled varieties of Lilium auratum in John Singer Sargent’s celebrated Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, in which two young girls, daughters of the illustrator Frederick Barnard, play with paper lanterns amid the tangled flowers of a Cotswold garden.

  The lily found its echo, too, in the decadent strains of poets such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, a close associate of Rossetti, who described his lover leaning over his sad bed as

  Pale as the duskiest lily’s leaf or head,

  Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,

  Too wan for blushing and too warm for white.

  French poets have likewise drawn the lily into their most intimate imaginings. Bewitched like many of his contemporaries by the biblical story of Herodias and her daughter Salome, the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé evoked a strange, brooding lily, which he internalized in the virgin Hérodiade – a compression of Salome and her mother – who preferred to cling to her virgin state in the face of her impending marriage. As she told her nurse:

  I pause, dreaming of exiles, and,

  as if close to a pool whose fountain welcomes me,

  I strip the petals off the pale lilies within me.

  In The Beloved of 1865–6, by contrast, Rossetti jettisoned the wan white lily for a flaming Tiger lily to accompany the Bride from the biblical Song of Songs, advancing with her handmaidens to meet her lover, their floral offerings celebrating the sensual pleasures she will shortly enjoy. And while the painter returned to a triple-blossomed Madonna lily in The Blessed Damozel, painted twenty-five years after his poem of the same name, the full-blown flowers held by the dead girl reek of sexual longing for her earthly lover. Their love may well have been unconsummated, but it was hardly pure.

  Later, under the influence of Japonisme, the lily was to become decidedly more stylized. Among the most active in promoting a Japanese aesthetic was the Scottish designer Christopher Dresser, who used the lily to teach designers how to achieve the vigorous simplicity of Japanese drawings. ‘The lily is grandly drawn,’ he noted in his influential book on Japanese art, architecture and art manufactures. ‘The sweep of line, the precision of touch, and the crispness of its rendering, make it charming to the artist: and the little bits of grass, which mingle with its leafage, destroy that hardness which the sketch, in their absence, would have.’

  The lily received its greatest praise from aestheticism’s high priest, Oscar Wilde, who divided his affections – as did many in the Aesthetic Movement – between the lily and the sunflower. The art critic Henry Currie Marillier recalled a schoolboy memory of having seen Sir Edward Poynter’s portrait of the royal mistress Lillie Langtry, the ‘Jersey Lily’, in Wilde’s drawing room, displayed on an easel surrounded by lilies.

  Wilde took his love of lilies to America in 1882, on a lecture tour arranged by the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, who had also organized the highly successful New York run of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience, which contained a merciless parody of Wilde’s aesthetic principles. Scornfully rebutting Patience’s caricature of the aesthete ‘walking down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your mediaeval hand’, Wilde ended one of his American lectures with a tribute to his two favourite flowers, explaining that

  the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all; it is because these two lovely flowers are in England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art – the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving the artist the most entire and perfect joy.

  For Wilde, there was no greater praise. ‘We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life,’ he told his American audience. ‘Well, the secret of life is in art.’

  The lily’s apotheosis in art was almost complete. All that remained were the twisting plant forms of art nouveau, known variously as Jugendstil and even Lilienstil, which reached its popular peak at the turn of the twentieth century. Leading the field was the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, who made his name with a last-minute commission to produce a poster for the darling of the French stage, Sarah Bernhardt, at whose feet Oscar Wilde had flung an armful of lilies when she arrived in Folkestone with the Comédie Française.

  Mucha’s posters and lithographs reflect a Belle Époque of women with impossibly flowing hair, wreathed with lilies or clad in elegantly jewelled and feathered headgear. He naturally included the lily in his four flower posters of 1897, which also featured an iris, a carnation and a rose. In his lily poster, a fair-haired woman stands in a sinuous pose, her head tilted backwards. Apparently growing out of a clump of giant white lilies, she holds in each hand a lily stalk whose flowers reach up to form a crown above her head. Art, it seems, had taken the lily as far as she could go.

  AFTER SUCH A public crowning, lilies slipped quietly back into the garden. Gertrude Jekyll devoted one of her early books to instructing amateurs in their cultivation, believing that these ‘most stately and beautiful of garden flowers’ were not ‘nearly so much grown in gardens as their beauty deserves’. Lilies were best grown on their own among quiet greenery, she declared, apart from her obvious favourite, the white Madonna lily, ‘so old a garden flower’ that it belonged with other old favourites, such as Cabbage roses (Rosa × centifolia) and the late Dutch honeysuckle. She wrote glowingly, too, of the Nankeen lily (Lilium × testaceum), then of mysterious origin but since revealed as a cross between the Madonna lily and L. chalcedonicum. Its name was only an approximation of its colour, she said, for in place of the ‘clear though rather pale washed-out wash-leather colour, there is a tender warmth in addition that must be allowed for in thinking of the colour of this charming Lily’.

  For all Jekyll’s efforts, the lily remained a Cinderella of the garden, viewed as ‘difficult’ and ‘capricious’ – a condition that Jekyll blamed on the ignorance of the gardener rather than the plant. Many of the newly arrived Asiatic species were indeed better grown under glass than outdoors, among them the lovely Easter lily, L. longiflorum from the Liu-kiu islands off the south coast of Japan.

  Until the 1940s, most new garden lilies were dug up in the wild and transplanted into the gardens of Europe and the United States, and deliberate hybrids were rare. But knowledge of the genus Lilium had been growing steadily since the first French monograph of the 1840s and the series of British monographs and supplements, begun in 1880 by Henry John Elwes, a wealthy Gloucestershire landowner. From the late 1930s, gardeners could turn to the increasing number of good, easy-growing lily hybrids available, starting with those produced at the Oregon Bulb Farms by Dutchman
Jan de Graaff, hailed as ‘the greatest grower and hybridizer of lilies of the present time, and probably of all time’. He called his first commercial lily ‘Enchantment’; for a time it was the world’s most widely grown lily and is still on general sale, especially as a florist’s flower. Its hot-coral petals unfurl brashly from a speckled throat, and it is hard to image a lily further removed from the cool white lilies that so enchanted the Minoans more than 3,500 years ago. Even the scent is lacking.

  But if you are diligent, you can still track down the original varieties, hidden away in botanic gardens and old physic gardens or massed in old-style cottage gardens. I suspect their sweetness will take you by surprise, and their beauty. In contrast to the rose and the sunflower, only the lily emerges unsullied from the poet William Blake’s very particular natural history:

  The modest Rose puts forth a thorn,

  The humble Sheep a threat’ning horn,

  While the Lilly white shall in Love delight,

  Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright.

  3

  Sunflower

  We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.