There are lilies in the studio most of the year, which makes them one of the few flowers I can speak about from the bucket instead of from memory. Right now, in October, they are oriental hybrids — heavy pink, the pollen already dusting the inside of the box. The question usually arrives whole: what do lilies represent. Whoever is asking expects one answer. The flower has at least three, and two of them cannot both be true at once.
The Oldest Answer Is Three Thousand Years Old
Lilium candidum, the Madonna lily, has been in cultivation for at least three thousand years. It is native to the Balkans and the Middle East, not to any of the places that later claimed it. It turns up painted on Minoan walls — the figure at Knossos we call the Prince of the Lilies, and a building at Amnisos named the House of the Lilies for what is on its plaster. Whatever it meant to the people who painted it, they thought it belonged on a wall.
Christian art gave the flower the meaning most people are reaching for. In medieval Annunciation scenes, Gabriel hands Mary a white lily, and from there it becomes shorthand for chastity in Catholic and some Orthodox iconography, an attribute of saints known for it. That is where purity comes from. A specific claim, from a specific tradition — not a general fact about the plant.
What Do Lilies Represent at a Funeral, Then
Here is the part that does not resolve. The same flower now works weddings and memorials both, and the sympathy reading is the newer of the two. You will find it stated confidently across the florist trade — the lily as the restored innocence of the soul that has gone — but it does not trace back the way the Annunciation does. It reads to me like a convention that formed because white lilies were available, large and dignified, and acquired a meaning afterward.
I do not think that makes it false. Meanings get made that way. I have written here about the anniversary flower list, which a jewelers' association largely invented in 1937 and which people now follow in earnest. But I would rather tell you which reading is old and which is recent than hand you a chart.
Half the Flowers Called Lilies Are Not Lilies
This is the part I find genuinely useful. Calla lilies are Zantedeschia. Daylilies are Hemerocallis. Peace lilies are Spathiphyllum. Lily of the valley is Convallaria. None of them sit in the genus Lilium, and the symbolism attached to the white Madonna lily was never about any of them. So when someone asks me for lilies, my first job is to work out which plant they are picturing.
Two practical notes while we are here. If you have a cat, true lilies and daylilies are the serious ones — every part of the plant, pollen included, and the damage is to the kidneys. Pollen alone has done it. Lily of the valley is not a lily either, but it is cardiotoxic, so it is no safer. Peace lilies cause mouth pain and swelling rather than kidney failure. Tell me you keep cats and I will build you something else. I would rather lose the sale.
The other note is that the big pink oriental everyone recognizes, Stargazer, is barely fifty years old. Leslie Woodriff bred it in California in 1974 by getting the bloom to face upward. Its predecessor hung its head, and customers read a downturned flower as a wilted one. The most recognizable lily in the American trade exists because of the angle at which it looks at you.
So — what do lilies represent. Purity, in a tradition that is genuinely ancient. Mourning, in one that is not. And a genus that half the flowers carrying its name have no claim on at all. Given the choice I would take the fragrance over any of it: an oriental lily will scent a whole room by the second day, which is more than most flowers will do for you.
If you would like to stand in front of some and work out which ones you actually mean, the studio is here year round, and the Flower Van is on Abbot Kinney most weekends.
