Thunberg’s Orange Lily
Thunberg’s Orange Lily
About this plate
Thunberg’s Orange Lily is plate 1304, from Edwards' Botanical Register, drawn by Sydenham Edwards, John Lindley. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: London, James Ridgway, 1829-1847.
Twelve ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- slightly upright 1.23 : 1
- published 1829
- Plate 1304
Not a catalogue entry but a way of looking: how to stand, what to notice, how the line was cut, when it flowers, where it came from, who made it — and then the poems and the classics that taught China to see the same flower. Read the twelve in order and the plate opens.
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First Look
搜尽奇峰打草稿。
—— 清·石涛《苦瓜和尚画语录》
Exhaust the strange peaks, and then make the sketch.
Slightly taller than wide; the eye lands above centre. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there.
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Name and Thing
No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.
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Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 19.7% of the sheet, foliage 3.7%, the cast red with a second note of amber. No other plate shares exactly this measure. A bulb of overlapping fleshy scales gives the lily its Chinese name, 'hundred-fold'; six tepals reflex as the flower opens, around six stamens with long, T-shaped anthers.No colour group is recorded. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.
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Composition
Slightly taller than wide, the plant set a little above centre. (about 1.23 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 44% of the sheet, centred near the centre — the herbarium way, drawn to be read whole. Old plates set the plant slightly off centre, with unequal margins — that small imbalance is what keeps it alive.
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Line and Colour
The first half of the nineteenth century moved from copper to steel to lithography; stipple could render the softest transition. Decide first whether it was printed or painted; only then discuss whether it is beautiful.
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Season
Early to high summer, June and July; the flowers last only days, so artists drew them just as they opened. The year 1829 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The plate records ten days of peak; the other three hundred are leaf, fruit and rest.
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Provenance
Temperate north — China, Japan, Europe. Long used in Chinese medicine, lilies were hunted in East Asia by nineteenth-century collectors and transformed European gardens. The volume was made in 1829-1847, when most of this knowledge came from living plants under glass.
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The Book and the Hand
“Edwards' Botanical Register” was drawn by Sydenham Edwards, John Lindley and published 1829-1847. This plate is Plate 1304. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
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Poetic Resonance
更乞两丛香百合，老翁七十尚童心。
—— 宋·陆游《窗前作小土山蓻兰及玉簪最后得香百合并种之戏作》
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the corolla becomes its resting point.
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The Written Tradition
人无癖不可与交，以其无深情也。
—— 明·张岱《陶庵梦忆》
Never make a friend of a man without an obsession: he has no deep feeling.
The Bencao Gangmu describes the bulb as garlic-like, edible and medicinal; Song writers already noted that the leaves vary while the flowers stay white. Keep the line; it will surface the next time you meet the same plant.
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Symbolism
In the West the white lily is Marian purity, held by the angel of the Annunciation; in China the name sounds like 'a hundred years in harmony', a wedding wish. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
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What to Take Away
Appreciation is not knowledge but habit — one more look each time. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1829.
