Three plants — all old favorites of mine — that have recently caught my helper Isaac’s attention on our walks around downtown Palo Alto: two because of their striking foliage and flowers, one because its multitude of yellow flowers seem to thrive everywhere, even in the most unlikely wastelands. Then the first two have remarkable — and, alas, similar — names: acanthus, agapanthus. While all three have odd common names: bear’s breeches / britches, lily of the Nile (not a lily, and from South Africa, far from the Nile), daylily (again, not a lily — and why day?).
acanthus. On this blog, in my 7/1/12 posting “Two plants of the season” (golden marguerites, acanthus), with this photo of the latter, whose leaves Isaac recognized as an architectural motif, but whose flowers were a pleasant surprise:
A stand of the plant in bloom:
(#1) Acanthus mollis, with its flower spikes and its giant leaves, which are responsible for its jokey common name bear’s breeches / britches (big enough to serve as shorts or underpants for a bear)
The English noun breeches was new to Fijian Isaac; I just said ‘short trousers’. From NOAD:
plural noun breeches / britches: short trousers fastened just below the knee, now chiefly worn for riding a horse or as part of ceremonial dress: a pair of buckskin breeches. [AZ: formerly also by school-age boys]
I told him about the slang idiom too big for his britches and glossed it as ‘puffed up’ (a usage he was familiar with), and he savored the breeches image.
agapanthus. Stands of the huge strap-like leaves were everywhere on our earlier walks (the plant is evergreen), and I kept promising they’d send up stalks with rounded clusters of blue or white flowers (looking like little lilies) at the top, meanwhile providing lush green foliage to fill spaces. During the past week this promise was fulfilled, and I could tell Isaac that meant that summer was upon us, and the flowers would last throughout the summer. Agapanthus plants in bloom:
(#2) A border of mixed blue and white flowers of Agapanthus praecox orientalis; from my 6/22/11 posting “agapanthus”
I also admitted that I was extraordinarily fond of the plant and revealed that its name had nothing to do with acanthus, but did incorporate one of the Greek words for ‘love’, which I knew Isaac would know. In the tripartite division of this meaning domain that both Isaac and I learned in Bible classes growing up (Isaac is a deeply believing Christian, I am now a non-believer), the varieties of love are agape ‘love of / for God’, philia ‘brotherly love, friendship’, and eros ‘sexual love, desire’). (In fact the usage of the first two is much more complicated than that, but let this stand.)
It’s not at all clear why agapanthus got the taxonomic name meaning ‘love flower’, but so it is. It is very pretty. The name it’s often sold under, lily of the Nile, is entirely off-base: it’s not in the (extensive) lily family, Liliaceae, and it’s from South Africa, far from the Nile (presumably getting its name because it’s African and exotic). Well, the individual flowers in those umbels are sort of lily-like.
daylily. The plants are everywhere, in many shades of yellow and orange. Notably, growing in many unpromising spots, urban wastelands (hence one of its common names, ditch-lily. Isaac’s first idea was that they were a desert plant; he’s gotten used to the local practice of growing ornamental garden plants mixed in with desert plants, succulents of many kinds and some cactuses — in gardens, but also in decorative plantings in pots, on the street and elsewhere.
Eventually, I showed Isaac that though there were daylilies blooming in apparently arid places, if you looked carefully, you could see sources of water: rubber hoses carrying water; sprinkler heads. Where you found these, you also found daylilies in bloom; where they were absent, dry hard clay devoid of plants. The plants can survive on little water, but not in an actual desert.
Isaac wondered about the name, and I explained that these plants had many flowers, but each one lasted only a day and then withered away, but that new flowers were opening up all the time. An astonishing idea.
So, from Wikipedia:
A daylily, day lily or ditch-lily is a flowering plant in the genus Hemerocallis. … Despite the common name, it is not taxonomically classified in the lily genus. Gardening enthusiasts and horticulturists have long bred Hemerocallis species for their attractive flowers; a select few species of the genus have edible petals, while some are extremely toxic. Thousands of cultivars have been registered by the American Daylily Society … The plants are perennial, bulbous plants, whose common name alludes to its flowers, which typically last about a day.
… The daylily has been nicknamed “the perfect perennial” by gardeners, due to its brilliant colors, ability to tolerate drought and frost and to thrive in many different climate zones, and for being generally low maintenance. It is a vigorous perennial that lasts for many years in a garden, with very little care and adapts to many different soil and light conditions.
… Formerly daylilies were only available in yellow, pink, fulvous (bronzed), and rosy-fulvous colors, now they come in an assortment of many more color shades and tints thanks to intensive hybridization. They can now be found in nearly every color except pure blue and pure white.
Then, from my 6/20/13 posting “Poppies, lilacs, and lilies”, on daylilies and lilies (in the genus Lilium):
Most people (botanists included) don’t treat daylilies and (“true”) lilies together as constituting a category, but some do. My man Jacques did (and he’s not the only person I’ve come across who thought this way); he recognized that they were different plants, but treated them like opium poppies and California poppies, as two subtypes of a larger category, which he referred to with the word lily.
May 6, 2026 at 3:40 pm |
We had Acanthus mollis growing in front of our porch in Redwood City home where I grew up. We called them “Monster Bushes” because they grew so big from absolutely nothing as they die off every year to the ground. All that gloriously big foliage comes back every spring. The flowers last a long time.
They also grow at the bottom of the Sanchez Street Stairs on 19th St. below our condo in San Francisco, so I’ve lived near his plant most of my life!
Ooh, a quick search reveals that it’s hardy in zone 7 through 10, so it will grow up here in Pioneer. I need to go get me some.
May 7, 2026 at 6:35 am |
The most common and hardy day lily (at least around here) is orange; we have many on our Gloucester property, where they were already abundant when we bought the place in 1978. We put in some commercially-acquired yellow ones a long time ago, but they only lasted a few years, while the orange ones continue to proliferate.