WHEN IS A LILY NOT A LILY?

Fun With Common Names: “Lilies”

Back in January of this year, I wrote an article on some ins and outs of botanical names (“BOTANICAL NAMES --…”). In that article, I spelled out some short-comings of using common names. Among those many shortcomings was: “They are ambiguous. Many common names are used for different unrelated species,…” and I gave a couple of examples of such ambiguity.

Those examples — pine and cedar — were trifling compared to the following morass. The one common name that, just maybe, takes the prize for “The Common Name Used by the Most Plants” is…drumroll…

“LILY”

Botanists consider only one group of plants to be “true lilies” and that is the whole of the genus Lilium. They are the plant that just about everyone recognizes as a “lily” and nothing else. But this group, this genus is not the only “lily” out there, at least not according to gardeners. Gardeners call a vast assortment of plants by no name other than “lily.” Some call non-true-lilies “lilies” because they “look like lilies,” usually not knowing what the plant really is otherwise. But there are many plants, including those unidentified sorts, that took on the mantle of “lily” long ago and those who know and/or use these common names may or may not know that they are usually not closely (or sometimes not even distantly) related to Lilium, the “true lilies.”

I suppose the big question is, “What does it matter if I (that’s you) call a plant ‘lily’ or, if it’s not a ‘lily,’ and I call it some other name?” If you tell yourself it’s a lily, fine. If you tell someone else it’s a lily, in the context of “you should go buy a lily,” or “you should plant lilies there,” then there’s probably going to be a problem. If you do a web search for simply “lily,” you’ll run into some confusing non-lilies — depending on exactly what kind of “lily” you’re searching for, you may run into photos and/or info that makes it confusing, to say the least. I just did a quick Google search for images of “lily” and within a smallish assortment, there were seven other species of plant that came up as “lily” that aren’t Lilium — or even related. I’m glad I wasn’t looking for images using the common name that belongs to Amaryllis belladonna.

So, have you ever wondered, as I have, just how many plants have the word “lily” somewhere within their common names?

Here is part of that answer. There are nearly 200 “lily” names that belong to plants that are not true lilies. Talk about “ambiguous.” In an effort to better clarify this whole thing about “lilies” versus “true lilies,” and why you might get stuck with a wrong plant, I’d like to throw out some details of that botanical nomenclature (naming)-versus-common-naming battle while having some fun (at least for me), PLUS get into the taxonomy (classification) of it all.

Rather than just list the plants that bear the common name of “lily” within some combination of words, the idea here is to start with “true lilies” (species of Lilium and what a majority of gardeners call, simply, “lilies”) and go “outwards” from most related to “true lilies” to least related.