Meet the hurricane lily
BY BRUCE BRANUM
The Greenville Standard
Hurricane lilies are blooming once again in the Butler County area and bringing their colorful red gracefulness to bear.
They always seem to pop out in late summer as the height of hurricane season looms.
It has many nicknames which include: red spider lily, surprise lily, naked ladies, hurricane lily (of course) and a few more, but there is a distinction for the names.
Heather Kirk-Ballard, an LSU AgCenter Hortriculturist, wrote an article explaining some of the history and the difference of names.
Her article can be found at https://www.lsuagcenter.com/profiles/rbogren/articles/page1604001386428
She penned, “Red spider lily (Lycoris radiata) is a classic Southern garden plant. Red spider lilies have been cultivated since early recorded history in China, Korea and Nepal, making their way to Japan and then to the United States in the early 1800s. Since then, it has been naturalized and is now considered an heirloom plant in the southern U.S., where it is commonly passed on to fellow gardeners.
Red spider lily produces four to six orange-red flowers on long stamens that curl upward. Flowers emerge first, followed by foliage later in the fall with continued growth throughout the winter. This flower gets its name from the plants that have a narrow, strap-like petals with extremely long stamens that give the spider-like appearance. This variety does best in partial shade and does not tolerate direct sunlight. However, too much shade can prevent them from blooming.
This common variety does not produce seeds, helping it grow faster and resulting in large clumps of bulbs that can be divided every three to five years after leaves die back and bulbs go into dormancy in late spring or early summer.
White spider lily (Lycoris albiflora) has white flowers in clusters of six to eight blooms on 12-to-18-inch-tall stalks with long, curved stamens, making it an excellent cut flower. Leaves emerge in fall and die down in spring. It does not produce seeds.
Naked ladies (Lycoris squamigera) produce strap-like leaves in spring that disappear in summer. In fall, trumpet-shaped, purple-pink flowers bloom on 18-inch-tall stalks that pop out of the ground, making it another great cut flower specimen for the garden.
Golden spider lily (Lycoris aurea) produces yellow clusters of trumpet-shaped flowers on stems 18 to 24 or more inches tall, and leaves with a blue tint emerge in fall, growing up to 24 inches tall and producing a larger plant than the red spider lily.
Surprise lily (Lycoris haywardii) is one of the few spring-leafing hurricane lilies, and according to Gary Knox, professor of environmental horticulture and nursery crops at the University of Florida, it was first discovered in Winter Park, Florida, in a 1948 in a shipment of Chinese plants to Dr. Wyndham Hayward.
Surprise lily develops leaves in early spring that die down in early summer. The trumpet-shaped flowers are magenta-pink with bright blue tips at the ends of petals, and unlike other lilies, it blooms in July — earlier than other varieties.”
Another website which explains a bit more detailed history of Lycoris and the many varieties can be found at https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/lycoris.
