Arum Lilies

Noun from circa 1818.

It is a North American herb of the Arum family with digitate leaves, slender green spathe, or spathe, and elongated spadix.

I sure do love myself an elongated spadix.

Mmm.

Why is it called green dragon, though? Is that thing kind of like a dragon tongue, a fire, a tail? What is it? I can tell you that the species name is Erysema dragontium, or dragontium, but I don't know why it is called the green dragon.

Let's see.

Unique native woodland perennial in the Arum family, related to Jack in the Pulpit.

jack in the pulpit i guess we have that to look forward to in the jays uh let's see anything uh produces a green hooded spade and a long protruding greenish yellow spadix that is the dragon's tongue or tail i didn't say tongue but i did say fire did i say tongue extends far past the hood and then there's berries yep orange red berries and all parts of the plant are poisonous because they contain needle-like calcium oxalate crystals which can cause severe burning and irritation in the mouth or on the skin So don't eat it? Yeah, I should post some pictures of this thing so you can see it, so you can not eat it.

There are the hooded green flowers of wild arum in a marbled vase against a deep black background.

Gluck calls that painting Lords and Ladies, after the old country name for the plant.

And there is an earlier painting called Flora's Cloak, showing the goddess of flowers wrapped in blossom, which comes to belong to Constance.

It hangs in her shop, and sometimes in her home, and her staff call it fondly interflora in nineteen thirty four constance moves her business to a larger shop at sixty four south audley street in mayfair among the great dressmakers she has seventy people working for her now the back rooms are full of buckets and benches and the clean green smell of water and leaves that same year she publishes her first book called flower decoration and opens a school to teach what she knows in it she writes about white flowers how their pleasure lies in light and shade in endless small experiments some of the most fashionable rooms in london are being decorated all in white by a designer named cyrie mom white walls white chairs white flowers a white stepped frame suits those rooms perfectly and gluck's paintings begin to hang on their walls constance brings gluck into her world of clients one of them is molly mount temple at broadlands a great pale house in hampshire who orders flowers for her dinner table to match whatever she is wearing that night molly asks gluck to paint her portrait that year too the two of them travel south together to Hammamet, on the coast of Tunisia, to stay with friends in a white house by the sea.

its long, pale trumpets hanging from twisted stems.

There are the hooded green flowers of wild arum in a marbled vase against a deep black background.

Gluck calls that painting Lords and Ladies, after the old country name for the plant.

And there is an earlier painting called

It is like a sort of house of horrors, really.

We're standing here next to things like Aquilegias, Arums, Culticums, Ilex, Taxus, Buxus.

You know, they're all plants that we're familiar with, but we're perhaps not quite as familiar with some of the more horrific stories, some of the kind of ghost stories and folklore attached to them.

The Taxus, one of the folklore stories, you know, you get a lot of views growing in graveyards.