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Lily Family
Key Words: Flowers with parts in threes. Sepals and petals usually identical.

If you find a plant with parallel veins in the leaves and regular flowers with parts in multiples of three, chances are you have a member of the Lily family. The flowers have 3 sepals and 3 petals, usually identical in size and color. Any normal person would just say there are 6 petals, but botanists distinguish a difference. Starting from the outside of the flower you count towards the inside: sepals, petals, stamens and pistil. In Lilies, the first layer consists of 3 colored sepals, while the second layer consists of 3 colored petals. Such botanizing may seem overly academic, but it becomes important as you learn more complex family patterns.

Members of the Lily family have 6 stamens, although some may be lacking anthers. The tip of the pistil, called the "stigma" is also noticeably 3-parted. You are most likely to confuse the Lily family with the Iris family, except that the Irises have only 3 stamens, and Iris leaves grow from the base in a flat plane, as if the plants have been squashed in a book. Worldwide there are about 250 genera and 3,700 species in the Lily family including 75 genera in North America.

As you study plants and their relationships you will realize more and more that evolution isn't just an abstraction that happened in the past, but an active process that you can reach out and touch. For example, if one population of day lilies is similar but different from another population, then we have to decide if the differences constitute mere variations within a species, or a whole new species. This is kind of like trying to find the line between two neighboring cities. There might be a lot of difference downtown, but you could drive through the suburbs from one to the other without seeing the boundary. How do you know when you have crossed the line from one species into a new one?

The same is true at the family level. Among the Lilies there is enough variation to justify breaking the family apart into smaller families of more closely related plants. For instance, daffodils are so different from the more typical lilies described here that they really deserve a family of their own. The trouble is that daffodils are closely related to plants that are closely related to other plants that are closely related to more typical Lilies. So where do you draw the line between one family and the other? In the effort to clearly distinguish these groups, botanists have proposed to break the Lily family up into as many as 70 distinct families, but to no avail. Recent genetic studies are helping to clear up the confusion, and will eventually require a complete rewrite of the family. In the interim, I rely on the historical subfamilies that work adequately to group the Lilies into their approximate relationships.

Virtually everything in the Lily subfamily is edible, such as onions and blue camas, however, there are a few deadly plants in the Bunchflower subfamily (with bunches of little white or greenish flowers), like the death camas which could easily be mistaken for edible Lilies. For this reason, it is important to harvest lilies for food only when you can positively identify them, usually when in bloom.

The Asparagus subfamily includes lilies that produce berries instead of dry seed capsules. Some of the berries are barely edible, while others are not. The Agave subfamily includes those spiny plants of the desert southwest, the agave, sotol and yucca, any of which can be used as a source of fiber for making cordage or rope. The Aloe subfamily includes the mucilaginous Aloe vera so favored for treating sunburns. The daffodil belongs to the Amaryllis subfamily.