I had neither heard of nor seen a gloriosa lily before we moved into our present house in September of 1989. Early the next summer, a most surprising plant reared up in the side yard, apparently arising from a tuber or root. It looked much like a Turk’s cap lily, and indeed, it was clearly a monocot, but this plant vined by means of tendrils that were really elongated tips of its lance-shaped leaves. This lily was the legacy of the previous owner of our house, a major mover and shaker in the Tallahassee Garden Club, and as we were gradually to discover, a collector of many unusual and exotic plants that popped up here and there in our yard.
Eventually, I identified this climber as a gloriosa lily, a native of southern Africa where its twisted, frilled petals and striking color had made it the national flower of Zimbabwe. To sweeten the deal, I learned that all parts of the plant contain the toxin colchicine and that a few milligrams of this can kill you dead. It made me look back differently on a summer job I once had where my task was to slosh colchicine on plant cells in order to arrest their cell division in metaphase so we could count the chromosomes. Nobody told me the stuff was deadly, but such were the sensibilities of the day. During that same job, I also snapped the neck off of a sealed ampoule and pipetted pure nicotine oil to make a standard dilution for paper chromatography. At least that time, I was warned that nicotine was frighteningly toxic, freely absorbed through the skin and would kill you even deader than colchicine. I guess that's why my boss suggested I wear rubber gloves.
Aside from its abiding beauty, the gloriosa lily shows that evolution finds many ways to solve a problem, and always starts with something that is already present. If hanging on to other plants or structures for support is the “goal”, of course, becoming long and skinny and simply wrapping around some structure is a reasonable option, but there are also many structures common to most plants that can be modified into tendrils or hold-fasts. Thus, in some species, the whole leaf remains slender by developing only the midrib, or in plants with compound leaves the single terminal leaflet or pair of leaflets may become tendrils, as can the little thingie called a stipule at the base of leaves, or the entire first leaf of a shoot, or the terminal shoot itself, and finally the pedicel that bears the flower. But in the gloriosa lily, the source of the tendril requires no profound knowledge of homology, as it is obviously the elongation of the tip of the leaf itself.
As a rule, tendrils (if viewed in time lapse) often wave around, or grow toward the dark rather than the light, and respond to contact by growing faster on the side away from the contact, causing the tendril to bend or curl around the contacted object. Once attached, the tendril contracts into a tight curl, drawing the vine toward the support. You can see this in everything from cucumbers to catbriers.
Gloriosa lilies come in several cultivars, the one in our yard being Gloriosa carsoni. Oddly, about ten years ago, the variety G. lutea, an all yellow, frill-edged flower appeared in two separate places in our yard, vining over a fence and up through a camellia bush. Where did they come from? It’s a mystery, for I have never seen our G. carsoni set seed because there are no pollinators to do the job, and even if it had, how would a yellow flower grow from the seeds of a very different parent. In south India where the lilies are raised as a source of pharmaceuticals (yes! colchicine), the flowers are hand pollinated, and the plant has been part of traditional medicine for many centuries. In Roman times through the middle ages, extracts of a colchicine-containing crocus were used to treat gout. The juice of the gloriosa plant has also been an ingredient of arrow poison, which should tell you something. In the USA, unapproved colchicine drugs have been around for a long time, but the FDA didn’t get around to approving colchicine for the treatment of gout (in low doses, of course) until 2009, but continues to discourage its wider use because it has a “narrow therapeutic range”, i.e. if you mess up the dose by just a little, it will kill you dead.
Our gloriosa lilies return every year, but they are planted where there is nothing to climb on, and they looked sad lying prostrate on the ground. In kindness, and because they are glorious, I crafted some climbing cages out of construction mesh years ago, and as they reappear every spring, they wrap their leaf-tip tendrils around the wire, climb to the top and reward us with their peculiar beauty.
Such beautiful, memorable flowers!
Speaking of Tendrily: "Her..tresses..in wanton ringlets wav'd As the Vine curles her tendrils." (Milton, Paradise Lost)
Gloriosa!!