Toad Lily
Tricyrtis hirta
“October's most improbable flower. Ignore the name and look at the bloom — toad lilies are orchid-exotic and ridiculously easy to grow in shade.”
— ROSIE
Rosie's Take
Toad lilies are the flowers I show people when I want to change their idea of what a garden can do in October. Those extraordinary, orchid-like blooms — white, heavily spotted and speckled with purple — opening on arching stems when the rest of the garden is packing up. They look like something that escaped from a tropical greenhouse, not something growing happily in a shady British border.
Tricyrtis hirta is the species you'll find most easily, and it's the one I grow. The flowers are about an inch across, star-shaped, with six tepals splayed outward, each one white and densely freckled with purple spots. The centre is a complicated arrangement of spotted styles and stamens that rewards close examination. There's a flamboyance to the detail that's completely at odds with the plant's modest stature and woodland habitat.
They flower from September into November, which is exactly when the shade garden has run out of ideas. I grow mine under a Japanese maple, where the filtered light shows off the spotted flowers and the dark, arching stems. The combination of falling maple leaves and opening toad lily flowers — that transition from one season to the next happening simultaneously — is one of my favourite moments in the garden year.
The name 'toad lily' is unfortunate. I suspect it's kept this plant from greater popularity, because nobody wants to put something called a toad lily in their shopping basket. But close your eyes to the name and open them to the flower, and you'll find something genuinely special. The spotted orchid of the autumn shade garden, hiding in plain sight.
✿ From the folklore cabinet
The common name 'toad lily' comes from the Philippines, where indigenous Tasaday people reportedly used the sticky sap of a related species to attract frogs and toads for food — they would rub the sap on their hands before hunting. Whether this is true or apocryphal, the name stuck. In Japan, where Tricyrtis hirta is native, the plant is called 'hototogisu' — named after the cuckoo, because the spots on the flowers resemble the speckled breast of the bird. I prefer the Japanese name. It has more poetry in it.
