South African Crocosmia lilies

When I posted this picture below...














...Gayle commented:

Those red flowers in your yard look like Indian Paint Brush. If they are, they are growing a lot taller than the ones in my front yard.

Andy responded:

Gayle: I can't quite hone in on the shape of those flowers, but it doesn't remind me of Indian Paint Brush. I've seen a lot of them in Texas during the wildflower season. The blooms look too broad.

My recollection of Indian Paint Brush is that the petals are very small, and the plant almost looks like a "back scrubber" you might win at a carnival...not tall at all.

They look like our orange pop-ups that we get every autumn down here in Louisiana. We call them "Spider Lillies." I understand that in other parts of the US they are called "Naked Ladies."

It's probably not Naked Ladies either. I just can't close in on the flowers close enough with my stupid computer...maybe Patrick will set us straight when the curtain comes down on today's drama.

Gayle and Andy, they are South African Crocosmia lilies not Indian Paintbrush or Naked Ladies. They are red version of what Andy calls "orange pop-ups" or "Spider Lillies." Crocosmias are usually orange. Fifteen years ago in San Francisco I bought one bulb of the red Crocosmia (known as Lucifer) and it multiplied to about ten which I brought up to Oregon and planted here. In the five years that I've been here, they have multiplied into hundreds of bulbs. - so many that I have had to move many down to the trailer park.

Here's the Naked Lady lily (South African amaryllis belladonna) which is the last lily to bloom each summer. They're called Naked Ladies because the leaves die before it flowers so the lily blooms at the end of a naked stalk.















Both Naked Ladies and Crocosmias naturalize easily in the wild.

Here are pictures of my South African Crocosmia lilies that I have taken over the past five years. You can see that they are related to what is probably South Africa's most famous lily, the gladiolus.















Crocosmias are also known as Montbretias.


















The common orange version.




































The yellow version.














A really dark red version.