The Gardener's Friend — On Hymenocallis
You are a recipient of Coucou Postale, a postcard series designed to engage and delight readers through stories and art using good old fashioned mail and the magic of the Internet.
Hymenocallis — Tampa, Florida, 2017
There are flowers we revere and there are flowers we ignore. Lilies are the latter. We don't do it on purpose. It's just that they are a part of the scenery.
When I first moved to Vietnam, lilies were everywhere, especially in trash heaps. Most of them looked fresh, nowhere near expired. What’s the deal with them? I asked my Vietnamese friend, hoping for the profound. They’re cheap.
Lilies come in infinite varieties, but there is one that stands out in my travels most of all: the spider lily or Hymenocallis. Plant lore is rife with stories of scorned-lovers-turned plants. The spider lily is not one of them. In fact, digging around produced no dirt on the perennial bulb — at least in English. Most likely, this is because the spider Lilly is native to the Caribbean, South and Central America, where my language and research skills are limited.
What I do know is that its Latin name visually describes the webby membrane that is a hallmark of the bloom. This is a common practice in the naming of plants. It’s practical more than anything, but in the case of Hymenocallis, it begets even less inspired English variants like spider lily — an insect it could resemble if spiders had 5 legs. Or worse, borrowed ones. One species native Peru boasts the lackluster “Peruvian Daffodil.” Indeed it does resemble a daffodil, albeit one that’s mated with amaryllis. Why not then Amarodil or Dafforillis for more pizazz? Plant-like lungwort acquired its name because its shape resembled a lung. For a time, it was believed to cure lung-related ailments. But even this kind of naming is flawed. Today, we know lungwort has no bearing on lung health.
So why do we name plants the way we do? Perhaps hidden within these uninspired monikers is a reflection of our separation from the plant world. Generic names allow for a shallow rapport rather than one that requires inquiry. To know anything though, we have to get close. — GF