Calla Lily

The calla lily, Zantedeschia aethiopica, is not a true lily but an arum of southern Africa, its striking white bloom formed of a single furled bract, the spathe, wrapped around a golden central spike. Introduced to Europe as an ornamental, its pure white sculptural form made it, like the true lily, an emblem of purity and of the resurrection, and it became a favourite flower of Easter. Its cool, elegant simplicity carried a symbolism of chastity and of transcendent beauty.

A plain caution belongs with the plant: like many arums, the calla lily contains calcium oxalate crystals in its sap and tissue, which cause a sharp burning irritation to the mouth and throat if chewed, mildly toxic to both people and pets, a fact worth stating plainly beside its reputation as a flower of purity. In the twentieth century the flower gained an entirely new cultural life through art, above all in the paintings of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who painted calla lily vendors repeatedly as a symbol of Mexican identity and labour, and in the large-scale, close-cropped calla lily paintings of the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe, which read the flower's sculptural white form in an idiom entirely independent of its older Christian symbolism.

Sources Plants of the World OnlineRoyal Botanic Gardens, Kew with Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

The calla lily holds the two ends of life in a single flower. Its whiteness and its association with purity made it a favourite bridal flower, carried at weddings as a sign of virtue and of holy love; and the same qualities made it equally a flower of death, banked at funerals and painted on memorials as an emblem of the resurrection and of the soul restored to purity. In Christian art it can stand, like the Madonna lily, for the Virgin Mary. This double life, the flower of the bride and the flower of the grave, rests on a single meaning, purity, read at the beginning and the end of a life alike from the flower's immaculate white form.

Native to marshy ground in southern Africa, the calla lily has become naturalised and in some regions genuinely invasive where it has escaped cultivation, notably in parts of coastal California and Australia, where conservation authorities now list it among the plants that crowd out native wetland vegetation, an ecological footnote quite at odds with the flower's cultivated reputation for refined purity. It remains, nonetheless, one of the most requested flowers for both weddings and funerals across the modern Western world, its sculptural simplicity suiting the formal photography of both occasions in a way few other flowers can match.