Naked Ladies running amok
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
I get the strangest e-mails. This week, Marion Young of Myrtle Creek, Ore. sent a message to me, a defrocked Master Gardener, inquiring about my knowledge of naked ladies. Honest folks, I don’t make this stuff up and to reassure you, I promise this is not going to be an R-rated column.
Marion was inquiring about the plant Amaryllidaceae, pronounced am-uh-ril-id-AY-see-ay, and here’s the skinny (definitely a play on words) about her inquiry. The naked lady moniker came from a description gardeners gave this sleek, tall lily that is not clothed in foliage when it blooms. When flowers appear before leaves the process is known as hysteranthy. At maturity these lilies only have the bloom at the top of their 24 to 36 inch leafless stems. I don’t have any naked ladies in my garden, but I do know that the plant comes from a bulb and is from the Amaryllis genus and the belladonna species.
You might say that is a simple, straight forward answer to Marion’s question, but the details of her e-mail message tickled my funny bone. She wrote that about 3 or 4 years ago her son, a professional landscaper, redid the landscape at the Tri-City Presbyterian Church in the Myrtle Creek area. In digging up the landscape, there were some interesting bulbs that no one was able to identify, so Marion says she took the lot, gave some to her daughter, Linda, who lives in the Portland area and gave some to anyone else who wanted them.
She doesn’t remember planting them at her home alongside the South Umpqua River. "This year," Marion wrote, "naked ladies appeared in the landscape at the church for the first time, and also in my yard. I was sitting out on my deck when I spied a naked lady coming up out of the ivy on the river bank."
Naked ladies mysteriously popping up at the Presbyterian Church among the Rhododendrons and in Marion’s ivy patch and Marion is relying on information from a Master Gardener that was drummed out of the organization when he changed the tenses in the Douglas County Master Gardener’s newsletter?
It would appear from Marion’s desperate e-mail that naked ladies are running amok. I honestly don’t think Marion, the sedate octogenarian, is responsible for introducing naked ladies all over Tri-City and other exotic spots in Douglas County and perhaps around the state and across the nation. I rather think her son missed a few bulbs when he dug up the landscape at the Presbyterian Church or the gophers or squirrels moved them in among the shrubs for a winter’s snack.
Those rodents may be in for a winter’s surprise at first nibble since all parts of the plant are poisonous if ingested. The plant is tenacious and divides itself without any assistance from Marion or anyone else. It is a very hardy bulb.
Relax Marion and all you pious Presbyterians, the pink naked ladies are part of the lilies of the field that were described by both Matthew and Luke in the New Testament as "toiling not, neither do they spin and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."
This also may help the Presbyterians. Naked Ladies have several descriptive names, including the "Resurrection Lily," or more commonly the "Surprise Lily." It obviously surprised Marion by popping up in her ivy.
I am almost reluctant to mention this, but perhaps Marion should know that the Colchicum autumnale, an autumn crocus, is sometimes referred to as Naked Boys.
Don’t tell me Mother Nature doesn’t have a sense of humor.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)