THE GLORIOSA LILY originated in tropical regions of Africa and tropical and temperate Asia, and now grows naturally in other parts of the world, like Southern Florida and Australia, where it is considered an invasive weed. It arrived in England around 1690 and has been cultivated in Europe since at least the 18th century. Gloriosa Rothschildiana, a well-known cultivar of the flower, was reportedly introduced to England by Lionel Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild — a British banker, zoologist and politician, and a member of the famous financial family — in the late 19th or early 20th century. This variety, brilliant red with yellow licking at the edges, underscores why the gloriosa is commonly called a fire lily or flame lily: Those six elongated tepals resemble an incandescent blaze.
The bloom had its moment on the global stage in 1947 when the future Queen Elizabeth II, then a young princess on a royal tour with her family, received a platinum, white-gold and diamond brooch in the shape of a flame lily as a 21st birthday gift presented to her on behalf of the children of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where Gloriosa superba is the national flower. Five years later, the piece would become iconic when, in the wake of the death of her father, King George VI, Elizabeth wore it pinned to her black mourning clothes in her first photographs as England’s new queen. Her choice of the bloom solidified the flower’s reputation as rarefied and majestic, if a little doleful.
But while the gloriosa’s shape is consistently flamelike, its colors are variable, thanks largely to the hybridizing efforts of Japanese growers, who Page says replaced the Dutch as the main source of the gloriosa lilies sold by his company around 2008. Among its numerous varieties are the butter yellow Gloriosa lutea, the chocolaty purple Gloriosa carsonii and the Gloriosa superba ‘Greenii,’ whose sophisticated shade of greenish cream one could imagine on Martha Stewart’s walls. “There’s been a lot of concentrated breeding on expanding the color forms,” says Eric Hsu, the plant information coordinator at Chanticleer, a public garden just outside of Philadelphia. Hsu also notes that an individual flower’s hues change and deepen as it ages, in a process he calls “a rumination on life in a vase.”
Speaking of vase life, the gloriosa lily’s is prolonged — lasting roughly a week — which helps explain why it can endure long-distance shipping, and also, in part, its popularity among floral designers despite its costliness. Whereas the Dutch bred the flower mainly for conspicuous blooms and tended to sell only the heads, the Japanese Gloriosa superba is “more statuesque,” says Rich Moore, a salesperson at the New York Flower Group, with “long stems and many buds and blooms on each stem.” Floral artists like this length, Werber says, for the way it “can extend the line and form of an arrangement.” Thompson explains that the flowers spring out with “this incredible sprawl” once removed from their shipping boxes. “When you get them in the air and to relax,” she adds, “they spread quite enormously — sometimes as wide as 18 inches.”
