1.
Not lily of the valley, not the trout, spider, water, peace, or calla lily—none of these are a true lily. Not even the daylily is deemed a true lily, though its blossoms, like the true lily’s, are trumpets, that blow out into stars. Not being true means that taxonomists have not included these plants in their invention, the genus Lilium.
At Easter, we hunted eggs in my mother’s garden. At Valentine’s Day, we sent bouquets to each other at school. We celebrated every occasion, both birthdays for 16 years, together.
Lily is the name of my cousin. We grew up like sisters—or that’s what we said.
Though we did not have the same genes.
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The daylily was the most abundant ornamental in the landscape of my childhood in the Southern mountains. Only as an adult did signage in a city park planting tell me that the daylily is nearer, hereditarily, to asparagus than the bloom so mythically lovely it was the envy of Venus. That the daylily is not the pure flower said to have sprouted from Hera’s breast milk, that it is not true at all.
*
How to tell a true lily apart from another?
A true lily has six petals, while a daylily has three petals and three sepals in disguise.
In a little time, Lily, sunbathing, lay back under the weight of breasts, hair and body blonder and bronzing. While my pallor blushed, all my matter stretching angular, up into legs.
A novice may think the distinction between sepals and petals is insubstantial, but a seasoned botanist discerns it.
Lily could speak to our differences before either of us could write. When someone praised my dark curls, Lily said of her yellow ponytail, “Mine is silky,” lisping the S but articulating contrasting virtue.
2.
The calla lily is not only called a false lily but termed a false flower. The starched swirl that skirts its center doesn’t have the characteristics of a petal—resists drooping, bruising, and shattering.
*
There’s the tradition of the gauzy white bridal gown with a train the bride’s maids are supposed to carry above the dirt, if she is to reach the altar immaculate enough. A delicacy friends cultivate in the betrothed, according to the stories we’re told, because they are being kind, they want her to shine on her special day.
And the teenagers emerging from boutiques’ fitting rooms modeling clothes and discarding them in piles according to whether the others say, That’s so last year, That’s played out, are schooling each other in ephemeral beauty.
*
Or the teenagers say, hey, don’t copy me, poser. Or, that doesn’t look like you. Suggesting individual, lonely, styles.
And the bride, because she has beaten them to finding a mate, can expect the other women not to wear white, to differentiate themselves from her. As we know, it is also customary that they do not wear any dress fancy enough to compete with hers for notice.
*
I dressed in Lily’s hand-me-downs as a child. They were good enough for a second wearer or needed only patches on the knees.
For her wedding, she wore a knee-length shift and boots. After the ceremony, she, the rest of the bridesmaids, and I went for a walk through the woods behind her in-laws’ house.
*
The Calla lily is characterized as insufficiently perishable, a ditch-clogging invasive, here, in the United States. But, had we not imported it out of its native habitat, there would be no reason to call the flower domineering, greedy, a weed.
3.
The peace lily is often encountered on receptionist’s desks and in the lobbies of medical facilities. Peace lilies require only low light and are low maintenance enough to survive almost anywhere, so they’re generally considered nothing special. And accomplished growers have little interest in tending to them.
I’ve been spending plenty of time waiting for doctors. I have a condition that is stiffening me early, at 41, and could make my spine ossify, even as I am alive.
*
At the culmination of hospital stays, on the ultimate occasions—deaths—pricey oriental lilies are sent to show deep sympathy.
*
A peace lily is good for one function, an indoor plant expert suggests: serving as a canary in the coal mine of a greater potted collection, to indicate when the rest are about to need irrigation. Peace lilies are expressive plants: They wilt quickly and dramatically and can be restored easily with a bit of water. They are of interest when they suffer.
There would be a 50 percent chance of passing on the sickening antigen if I had a child, and it increases by various percentages the likelihood the child would develop numerous additional diseases. My back’s predisposition to bow, shoulders to slope, and pelvis to degenerate means I won’t be the one to carry a baby who will convey our family traits into the future.
But nobody else in my healthy family has the antigen I have. What happens to me says nothing about impending danger for others’ offspring.
*
Oriental lilies are also sent for births—cut flowers meant as symbols of life, ended or just at its fragile beginning.
*
After hospitals failed our grandmother, to her funeral, well-wishers sent stargazer lilies.
She had always referred to Lily and me as her girls, jointly, like one creature. And though our parents are different, in our relationship to her we were equal. It didn’t occur to me to care that there weren’t roses on her coffin. Lily and I held hands in the night dark chapel.
4.
Female animals are unlikely to compete violently like males, whose function is only to inseminate someone, because females’ biological purpose is to stay alive to care for the offspring.
But there are means other than physical blows. Armaments are what animal bodies will have if females compete physically. Ornaments are what their bodies will have if they compete for mates more with appearances.
*
Plants do have showy shapes and colors to attract pollinators, markings guiding the way in, nectar to feed them. The lily has got its stellar petals, its beauty-mark spots and its contrasting throat, cupping sweet syrup.
But plants’ thorns and thick skins and bitter tastes aren’t to protect them from members of their own kingdom. The lily’s toxin is a response to insects’ unwanted attentions, only sickens animals that would eat it leaves and all.
*
Plants can crowd and throw shade on each other, hogging the soil or open air.
But they also share water through networks, support their fellow Plantae in dry spells.
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Some female animals ostracize others, driving them from the flock or herd.
Occasionally, an animal may commit infanticide by stealing a baby and keeping it from the real mother until it dies of dehydration.
*
Some female animals, if they are advanced Homo sapiens, choose this behavior: to cultivate ornamental flowers, and invite guests to walk through their gardens, pointing away from their bodies towards what they can agree is gorgeous.
A female human, if she is not much of a gardener, may gather as much language as she can about lilies and arrange it prettily on the page because she wants to give it, the pleasure of reading, to others.
5.
The daylily spreads, the density of its green filling in bare roadsides and covering eroded creek banks. That’s why it’s also referred to ungenerously by some as the ditch lily. It does not need humans to give it anything, self-propagates, undiminished.
Daylily rhizomes travel on their own, and the tubers mass and multiply, allowing a woman to divide off a start and give it to a friend. On her land, the plant can continue offering bud after bud, so all summer, spoken from the newest throaty flare to open, there is an answer to the criticism that the daylily, a bloom lasting one day only, is shorted-lived.
I have a new reason to think of roots continuing. Lily has become mother to baby girl.
*
The lily of the valley, connected by fibers beneath the earth’s surface to its colony, fends for itself on the forest floor. Or, rather, they succor themselves, many bells nodding in agreement on every shoot.
This is the hardy flower I wish I could have sent to Lily on the day of her daughter’s birth when virus and quarantine orders prohibited visitation by all but next of kin.
Lily has named the child Hannah Rose, in that way shared her.
6.
The trout lily grows in the mulched margins between buildings and trees outside my office door and on the mountain where Lily and Hannah Rose’s cabin sits.
Mostly, I will not be where they are. They have stayed in the state we are from. I have moved away, following my field. Which means nothing pastoral, only a decent job.
*
The trout lily—also called the dogtooth violet—doesn’t seem to care for formalities, with its wrinkled leaves lying low in the leaf litter. Call it the name of either of two other species of plant, compare it to a slippery aquatic creature or a domestic terrestrial being—it is like many things.
My disease’s name is so complex I haven’t learned to pronounce or spell it. But, never mind that Hannah Rose has learned to write an H. Soon enough, she’ll progress through the letters and reach the R.
7.
Among the few qualities people manage to fault true lilies for are their dark pollen and strong scent.
The early bloomer girl turns heads, gets noticed when she enters a room, and is the object of desire briefly. But girls are supposed to be quiet and tidy and leave few traces of what they do. Soon the ideal shifts to the woman who can stay thin. She’s called the beauty because she can nearly disappear.
In middle age, perhaps my body, which can get closer to skinny with less starvation than some, is the preferable type—in terms of looks (not procreation or other functions). But why think this way?
*
A breeder of a new type of true lilies—called Rose Lilies—advertises, “We have cultivars with 12, 18, or 24 petals instead of the usual 6. What’s more, they have no fragrance and produce no pollen. No headaches and mess for you.”
But I was drawn to read the ad because I was thinking of who I miss. I wanted pollen and scent. I wanted the perfume to follow me into my home and add its aroma, its complexity, to the spices of the dinner my husband had prepared. If I brushed against a flower, I wouldn’t mind the turmeric-colored pollen mark, the reminder, on my finger.
8.
Among primates, if one female is attacked by another, usually granddaughters and mothers and sisters and daughters will fight in her defense. But, for evolutionary reasons, animal cousins are too distant to stand up for, and allegiance to friends doesn’t exist. Females are pitted against all others but those who can most directly pass on the same genes.
I don’t think there are equivalents to cousins, aunts, and nieces among plants. With flowers, it seems less clear whose offspring is whose, in the dense vegetation of an ecotone, or where the seed with its tiny propellor has flown, or the bulb has been transplanted by a rodent.
*
It is a comfort to see features familiar to my mother and aunt appear on Hannah Rose’s maturing face. As some faces wrinkle and cave, the child’s will fill out.
*
I can interpret nature in ways that bolster my spirits and choose which components to make my similes. The fall of leaves at the end of the season feels much more acceptable if I think of them as related to spring, their rotting compost to feed seedlings.
A female monkey whose infant is killed may help with suckling and caring for the troop’s remaining young.
9.
Another lily native to the place where Hannah Rose will be raised, the place Lily has returned, a place I recall so dearly, is the Turk’s cap. It’s a tall figure dangling with as many as 40 blossoms, which are vivid orange, and dotted with darkness.
Its pattern reminds me of the matching leopard leotards Lily and I wore for Halloween. This was early on, when I was still padded with baby fat, and she was the slenderer one, and those were the differences that others must have observed. Qualities that, at the stage, must have made her appear much more mature.
The Turk’s cap may be confused with the tiger lily, but the tiger lily is Asian, from another hemisphere altogether.
*
When we had those costumes on, I just thought we were of a litter. Now, looking at a snapshot of us trick or treating, I still don’t think this is an image in which Lily’s shape, hinting at the teen age it will briefly be, shows our diverging futures.
I see my juvenile potbelly predicting what’s ahead. Looking like her stomach swelled in pregnancy. And like, though I’ll bear no children, most women eventually will look. We’ll thicken around the middle as we get older, settling into our corpora, this earth.
*
What does the Turk’s cap or tiger lily classification clarify anyway? Spots aren’t what decorate a tiger’s fur, and Turkey, to which our endemic’s nomenclature refers, is a place so distant none of us have been there—yet.
The spider lily found wild in the Caribbean is native to West Africa. Some members of the genus’s ancestors rode the part of the former continent Gondwana when it broke off and drifted away across the ocean.
Maybe Hannah Rose will go farther abroad than I ever did.
*
Of course, plenty of plants also have limited ranges. The Columbia lily looks a lot like a Turk’s Cap to me, but it lives in only one county in Montana.
Philopatry is the tendency to remain in the location of one’s birth. Members of certain populations are supposed to do that; they don’t require expansion into a new place.
Maybe Hannah Rose will stay in our home region, for all the time she’s given.
10.
A taxonomist has written that water lilies have less in common with true lilies than they do with the earliest, least evolved plants. There’s a dismissiveness to the tone. But, through the ages, the water lily has stayed on, being itself, not changing, just regenerating.
And I remember well how Lily and I swam in a pond with water lilies when we were girls. We kept diving back in—in summer, into the evenings, until we were summoned for bed. In our joy before we were put to rest, in our saggy bathing suits with no one looking at us, we took pleasure in both the jumping and the paddling, we were not aware of our bodies as better than one element or another, or of earth as apart from the heavens.
The roots of the water lilies were in the dirt we had just come from. The pads floated in the liquid by which we were held. The flowers curved up in a transcendent gesture, in the air where we would next travel.
