The lily most freighted with meaning is the Madonna lily, Lilium candidum, a tall white trumpet-flowered bulb of the eastern Mediterranean, cultivated since antiquity. Its pure white bloom made it, above all, the flower of the Virgin Mary and of chastity: in countless paintings of the Annunciation the angel Gabriel holds or presents a white lily to Mary, and it stands for her purity and for the immaculate. The Gospel invokes the flowers of the field, consider the lilies, how they grow, as an image of a beauty greater than Solomon's that neither toils nor spins.
The lilies of the field that Jesus invokes in the Sermon on the Mount are themselves a case of contested identification: the Greek word used, krinon, was a loose term that could cover almost any showy wildflower, and while some translators simply render it lily, the botanist Michael Zohary and other scholars of the plants of the Bible have argued the flower most likely intended is the common crimson crown anemone, Anemone coronaria, which still carpets the hills of Galilee in spring, with the scarlet Turk's-cap lily, the poppy and the iris also proposed by various scholars, so that the single most quoted flower in the Gospels is not, in fact, securely identified as a lily at all.