Surprise!
Wake up and smell the roses is a phrase that transforms in my mind to slow down and look at the flowers. It’s easy to do this time of year as one drives around Eureka Springs. It also becomes part of a spiritual practice, whether one calls it Zen practice or adopting the Christian axiom, “do onto others as you would have them to do onto you.” However you look at it, one concept is involved – practicing patience.
What else can you do in a town with out-of-state plates on large SUVs, out-of-place double-wide fifth wheel pickup trucks, and a high percentage of tourists who have no idea how to drive on narrow streets? In fact, if you roll down your window, you can wake up and smell the lilies as you patiently roll at five in a fifteen mile per hour zone.
This time of year if you practice Eureka Springs traffic patience, there’s a surprise for you in the beauty of naked ladies. Naked lady, surprise lily, resurrection lily, magic lily, lu cong, and Amaryllis hallii are names associated with what botanists know by the inelegant name Lycoris squamigera, beautiful hardy members of the amaryllis family.
The surprise comes because in the springtime, strap-like, mostly unnoticed leaves appear, which die back to the ground as early summer heat rises. Then in the heat of July and August, up pops the naked flower-stalk, decorated with large flaring trumpets of pink lily-like flowers. This seems to be a particularly rich year for them with an early hot July followed by favorable cool, moist weather at the end of the month. A profusion of naked ladies crowds each flowerhead.
The genus Lycoris (to which our naked ladies belong) is native to eastern Asia. Living plants were introduced from Japan to America by Dr. George Rogers Hall (1820-1899) of Bristol, Rhode Island, upon returning from Yokohama, Japan in 1862. That’s the same Dr. Hall who introduced our notorious invasive alien Japanese honeysuckle to American horticulture.
New England nurserymen widely distributed naked lady bulbs in the late 1800s. Little used historically due to toxicity, the root contains the toxic alkaloid galanthamine, once used to treat nerve pain and symptoms of polio. Galanthamine in minute doses is used in prescription drugs as a long-acting, selective, reversible and competitive acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitor for the systematic treatment of mild to moderate cognitive impairment of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Surprise.