Rain Lily Rescue

We’ve written before about our plant collection rescue efforts, and last week, we were fortunate to conduct yet another of those important missions. This was the rescue of the Flory/Flagg/Smith rain lily collection. Walter Flory and Ray Flagg are two of the biggest names in the rain lily world over the last 70 years, while Gerald Smith is the country’s top Hymenocallis guru.

Many of the top experts in the plant world are either researchers or private collectors, who typically focus on a plant group or two, and take in depth, life-consuming deep dives into those plants. We feel there are far too many stories where these world class plant collections died with the owner, in which case, decades of accumulated plant genetics were lost. Many of these collections often include plants which are now extinct in the wild.

Since ex-situ (in cultivation) plant conservation is a key part of our mission, we try to keep tabs on people who have such world class perennial/bulb collections, and who may be aging out, or be in poor health. So far, we have been able to rescue collections from: John Fellers (rain lilies) in 2009, Thad Howard (bulbs) in 2009, Phil Adams (lycoris) in 2012., Alan Galloway (aroids) in 2020, Victor Lambou (Hymenocallis, Louisiana iris) in 2021, and now the Flory/Flagg/Smith collection (rain lilies) in 2024. In all cases, duplicate plants have been or will be distributed to other botanical gardens as a back up genetic repository.

We had been tracking the Flory/Flagg/Smith bulb collection for over two decades, when we got an email last week that the collection was in danger of destruction within weeks, due to Eminent Domain.

Dr. Walter Flory (1907-1998), who started the collection, received his PhD in 1931 from the University of Virginia for his work with both edible asparagus and phlox. From 1936 – 1944 (during WWII), Flory was a horticulturist for the Texas Experiment Station, where he bred a number of crops for the southern climate. It was here that Flory developed what would become a lifelong passion for members of the Amaryllis family. After eight years in Texas, Flory returned to his native Virginia, where he continued to climb the academic ladder, culminating in being named Director of the 700-acre Blandy Experimental Farm, which included the 130-acre Orlando White Arboretum. In this position, Flory was able to have graduate students carry on his research in the Amaryllid family.

In 1952, Flory made his first botanizing trip to Mexico, focusing on hymenocallis, zephyranthes, and sprekelia. Follow-up trips became more frequent and Flory regularly botanized both the Texas and Mexican sides of the US border. In short, Flory’s study and research into members of the Amaryllid family has greatly increased our understanding of this amazing group. Other collectors of the same era including Mary Henry, Dr. Thad Howard, Marcia Clint, and many others would send their bulbs to Flory for study and identification.

In 1963, after some significant arm-twisting, Flory accepted a new position as the Babcock Chair of Botany at Wake Forest University. There, he developed the first non-medical doctoral program at the University. With his reduced teaching load, and ability to travel worldwide for research and botanizing, Flory was able to publish much more amaryllid research.

Dr. Ray Flagg started his career as a graduate research assistant (1957-1962) for Dr. Flory at Virginia’s Blandy Farm. There, his studies focused on rain lily taxonomy. From there, Flagg followed Flory to the Piedmont region of NC, where he became the Executive VP of Carolina Biological Supply, a position he held for the next 40 years. For the last 21 years, he remains active in rain lily taxonomy, coauthoring several new species, all while he still consults with his old company.

When Dr. Flory passed away in 1998, his bulb collection was shifted to the auspices of Dr. Gerald Smith, a botany professor at nearby High Point University. Smith had been a graduate student at Wake Forest, where he met Flory, before completing his PhD at the University of Georgia.

Smith and Flagg collaborated on Flory’s unfinished writing project, Amaryllidaceae for Flora of North America. Flagg, despite being a nonagenarian, and Smith, now nine years retired, continue work on the rain lily taxonomy, having published four new species: Zephyranthes stellarosea (2015), Zephyranthes pseudoconcolor (2018), Zephyranthes alba (2019), and Zephyranthes ita-andivi (2019). In 2010, they also reclassified four other rain lilies, in their paper, moving four Zephyranthes species into the genus, Habranthus: Habranthus arenicola, Habranthus. chichimeca, Habranthus longifolius, and Habranthus conzattii.  

In 2014, Flagg also published his important work, Rain-lilies (Amaryllidaceae) of U.S.A. and Mexico. Meanwhile, Smith’s work with Amaryllidaceae resulted in several papers, primarily focused on spider lilies; Hymenocallis godfreyi as a new species (1994), Hymenocallis (Amaryllidaceae) in Texas, with a New Varietal Combination (2001), Hymenocallis franklinensis as a new species (2001), Nomenclature of Hymenocallis Taxa (Amaryllidaceae) in Southeastern United States (2003), Hymenocallis gholsenii as a new species (2009), The Phylogeny of the Southeastern United States Hymenocallis (Amaryllidaceae) Based on ISSR Fingerprinting and Morphological Data (2010), and The Spider Lilies (Hymenocallis) Native to Florida (2013).

On December 4, our plant records specialist/taxonomist, Zac Hill and I arrived early morning at Gerald’s home in Lexington, NC. We were joined by another local bulb aficionado, George Dees, who volunteered to help with the rescue. The collection was all grown in clay pots, most of which hadn’t been repotted in decades. In many cases, it may take years to regrow many of the bulbs back to flowering size. To solve the transport space issue, all plants were removed from pots and into ziploc bags, along with the tags. Instead of names, most of the plant tags corresponded to Gerald’s code book, which, thankfully, also returned home with us. As we got started, the temperatures stood at 27 degrees, and without any measurable heat in the green house, it was challenging to extract the plants from the pots.

Our only break, was a run to the world famous, Lexington Barbeque, which was right around the corner.

In all, we returned to JLBG with 750 different rain lily accessions. After spending a few days sorting, Zac has many weeks of work ahead to go through the code books and get each accession tagged better. So far, we’ve found some new species which have never been made publicly available. We’ve also discovered a trove of very rare bigeneric hybrids from the 1950s and 1960s. After the bulbs are tagged, they are being repotted into new soil, which will allow us to grow them back to flowering size, so we can confirm that the tag matches the bulb. Where duplicates exist, these will be the first plants to be shared with other collectors. As you can see, this living plant collection represents a tremendous resource for a future generation of bulb researchers. This is another reason that full funding the JLBG endowment is both critical and time sensitive, or all of this effort will go to waste.