A fine flower to start withWritten by George Ellison One of the
best pieces of advice I ever received in regard to learning
wildflowers was to “concentrate on one family at a time.” The
person advising me didn’t, of course, intend that I should
devote my attention exclusively to the species in a given family
and ignore any plants outside that group. But she rightly
intuited that making real progress in a systematic manner
required some sort of focus. My choice was the Lily Family
(Liliaceae). In retrospect, I realize that picking this family
was a rather grand first choice since it includes many genera
and an array of species. I could have started with a less
complicated group. But I was attracted by the showy — sometimes
even gaudy — species represented in the Liliaceae: fly poison,
wild hyacinth, lily-of-the-valley, trout lily, swamp pink,
Indian cucumber root, grape hyacinth, bog asphodel, star-of-
Bethlehem, Solomon’s and false Solomon’s seal, featherbells,
rosy twisted stalk, the numerous trillium species