Lily

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.

Greek myth gave the white lily a divine origin, as drops of the milk of Hera, queen of the gods, that fell to earth as she nursed the infant Heracles, the same spilled milk making the Milky Way in the sky. This gave the flower an older association with the great goddess before Christian tradition made it Mary's. The lily also became a flower of Easter and resurrection, its bulb buried like a body and rising to a white bloom, and the trumpet-shaped Easter lily is now a fixture of the festival. Purity, virginity, the Virgin, divine motherhood and resurrection all gather to the single white trumpet of the flower, read from its immaculate colour and its rising from a buried bulb.

The French royal emblem, the fleur-de-lis, literally flower of the lily, is itself widely believed by botanists and heraldry historians to depict a stylised iris rather than a true lily, most likely the yellow flag iris, Iris pseudacorus, common in the marshes of the Ile-de-France, one more case of the word lily being loosely applied across history to a flower that was not, strictly, a lily at all. Whatever its exact botanical origin, the emblem carried much the same associations of purity, royalty and divine favour that the true lily held in religious art, so that a possible case of mistaken identity became one of the most recognisable symbols in Europe.