Japanese showy lily

About the plant

Japan was closed to the West for two centuries, and the only Europeans allowed in were the Dutch traders on the artificial island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbour. Their physician from 1823 was a young German, Philipp Franz von Siebold, who collected everything he could get his hands on and in 1830 sent to the botanic garden at Ghent the first Japanese lilies seen in Europe. Among them was this one: a lily whose petals curl back on themselves, white flushed with crimson and spotted all over like a fawn, with a scent to match. It flowered in the London nurseries within a few years, and Paxton's artist drew it in 1838 from a plant at Rollisson's nursery at Tooting.

It became the lily of the Victorian conservatory, late-flowering, scented and easy, and when the golden-rayed lily arrived from Japan in 1862 the two were crossed to make the oriental hybrids that are the lilies of the flower shops today. Paxton's Magazine of Botany, edited by the Duke of Devonshire's gardener from Chatsworth, published it among the new plants of the year with notes on growing it in a cold frame, and the plate, hand-coloured, shows the flower at natural size.