“Thee sent me what we call the Atamasco Lily, from its shape. It has a blush of purple before the flower opens; is white within. It is properly a Lilin Narciss: the leaves of the last, and the flower of the first. If, in thy rambles, thee happens on this flower, pray to send a root or two.”
Thus Peter Collinson, the garden lover, and merchant of London wrote in 1740 to John Bartram, the plant collector in Pennsylvania. It is, perhaps, an outstanding example of English understatement in garden writing.
“Rambles indeed!” Bartram might have muttered, as he toiled in his search for plants on those immense and hazardous journeys he made up and down the eastern seaboard. Nor would he have found it easy to dig the roots, which grow deep down in low-lying land.
The zephyr or fairy lily (Zephyrantires atamasco), one of the members of the large amaryllis family, is a native to Virginia and other southern states. With its three-inch-lung flowers on foot-high stems, pure white, or sometimes as Collinson described them, tinged with purple, they are one of the loveliest of April flowering bulbs.
Growing Solely And Abundantly On Jamestown Island
Jamestown lilies are what they are called there. Curiously enough, they are peculiarly restricted in Virginia (though in the southern States they grow widespread), thus earning their local name. Here, in the Tidewater, Mark Catesby, the English botanist, found them several years before John Bartram.
He noted that they were as numerous as the cowslips and wild orchids in his Suffolk meadows.
Among the splendid spring-time flowers at Magnolia on the Ashley River in South Carolina, among the azaleas and camellias, the wisteria and the Cherokee rose (all from China and Japan), are two native plants growing haphazard and perhaps by many, almost unnoticed—the Carolina jasmine and the Atamasco.
You may see the lily, white and frail, along the margin of the swamp; virginal even in contrast to the brilliant azalea color and the still, ebony-black water of that enchanted place. You may see it in Charleston, for the flower women gather it from the savannah land of the Carolina Low Country.
They Named It Fraser Lily In Charleston
In the early morning, you may see them carrying their baskets, brimful of Atamasco lilies, on their heads, as they make their way slowly and deliberately along the streets to take up their stand near St. Michael’s Church.
Atamasco lily—Jamestown lily—they do not know these names. Fraser’s lily is the name they give you. And why Fraser’s lily?
Neither they nor anyone else I asked in Charleston could tell me. Doubtless, they carry the name of yet another British plant collector, John Fraser, the Scotch man, and a nurseryman at one time of King’s Road, Chelsea, who collected in the Carolinas around 1790.
Or perhaps the name is in honor of his son, John Fraser Jr., who sometimes accompanied him. By whatever name you choose to call it, this lily is a lovely thing when it flowers from Pennsylvania to Florida in April and May.