The Wood Lily

By Donna J. Hathaway

I have chosen the lovely Wood Lily, Lilium philadelphicum, as the subject of the first Spotlight feature because it was the first Lilium that I ever saw in the wild, though I did not know its name at the time. It was in my home state of Vermont that I first laid eyes upon a brilliant red jewel of a flower at the edge of a woodland. It was on a bank too steep to climb and across a brook, but I could see that it was a lily, and with the afternoon sun shining through, it looked like a glowing ruby. I was quite enchanted, and I came that way again a couple of days later to see it. Then it was gone, and I never saw it again. I never forgot about it, and when I became seriously involved in lilies I knew what I had seen all those years ago the moment I saw a picture of the species in a book. (It is also nicknamed the Flame Lily, for obvious reasons.)

This beautiful species is both widespread and elusive. It grows from New England westward to the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and from the Missouri River area north to the Great Plains and into Canada. However, its habitat is undisturbed meadows, rugged prairies and forest edges, and it only sends up one or two flowers at a time, rarely more, so the bloom season of each plant is very short. Each flower is quite long lasting, but compared to species such as L. canadense or L. superbum with their impressive pyramids of buds and with which it shares some of its range, it takes a bit of luck and persistence to see it in bloom. It does not take kindly to cultivation, so one is unlikely to encounter it in a garden.  It is best enjoyed as the wildflower treasure that it is.

L. philadelphicum looks quite unlike any other American species lily, though it bears a passing resemblance to L. catesbaei, another of the very few up facing American lilies, but that one has a much more southerly range and requires a wetter, more acid soil for its habitat. L. philadelphicum has a short-jointed stoloniferous bulb and seed germination is immediate (or sometimes delayed) epigeal, which is also a departure from the hypogeal type of many American species. It prefers cold winters with a good snow cover; it does not like to be in wet or exposed ground over winter.

The photos accompanying this article were all taken by Barry Francis of North Dakota, who has kindly allowed me to share them here. He has found several large stands of this lily and has gone on photographic expeditions for the last few years to record their blooming. Barry says that the hard part is finding the places where they live; the bloom time is quite reliable, from the third week of June to the first week of July in North Dakota.

I have chosen pictures from each colony of lilies that show the wide variation in color and form that occurs in this species, from light tawny orange through deep orange to the deepest lacquer red of the flower I first saw, and from narrow, widely spaced “clawed” petals to broad, but always with open space clearly showing at the narrow base of the petals to give a kaleidoscope effect. The lilies shown have the scattered leaves characteristic of the andinum subspecies of its westernmost range, with some having a single whorl of foliage just below the inflorescence. (In the eastern part of this lily’s range, the whorled foliage type is more typical.) This should not be surprising in a species with such a broad spectrum of morphological variations.