“I like to have them surprise me with their small and sudden flowers”

Image source: Wikipedia Commons

“Fairy lilies—the pink, the white, and also the yellow—are the rain lilies, the little zephyranthes that spring up after showers. B. Y. Morrison said they should always be grown in quantity, as they grow in the hills of Mexico, in meadows in parts of the South, or in his own garden at Pass Christian. ‘The lawns have been mowed,’ he wrote early one June, ‘and the late azaleas are in bloom with sheets of Habranthus tubispathus and all the zephyranthes in sheets of pink. We have one zephyranthus that sows itself freely in patches of solid color. It came from the USDA years ago, without a name.’ In my own garden there is room for only a few of each kind, but I like to have them surprise me with their small and sudden flowers; they make no demands, and take up so little space. When I find one of the delicately colored flowers in bloom, I pick it, put it in a little glass bottle, and take it from room to room in order not to lose a moment of its brief and fragile existence.”

—Gardening for Love, Elizabeth Lawrence