Superb lily

About the plant

Thornton published the first plates of his Temple of Flora in 1799, and the superb lily was among them, painted by Philip Reinagle with a classical temple in ruins behind it to stand, the text explains, for the fallen grandeur of the ancients beside the living grandeur of the flower. The lily deserved it. It is the giant of the eastern American meadows, a stem that can reach three metres carrying a pyramid of up to forty nodding flowers, orange flushed with red and spotted with maroon, their petals curled back so far that the tips touch behind.

It had come to England in 1727 through the Quaker cloth merchant Peter Collinson, who paid the Philadelphia farmer John Bartram five guineas a box for seeds and roots and distributed them among the English gentry; within a generation it was in every great garden. The Iroquois and Cherokee had long dug its bulbs for food. Richard Earlom, the finest mezzotint engraver of his day, cut the plate, which was printed in colour and finished by hand.