Lycoris radiata Seeds | Red Spider Lily
LATIN NAME: Lycoris radiata
COMMON NAME: Red Spider Lily
Plant Profile
The red spider lily stages its whole year in the wrong order. Bare stalks shoot up in early autumn and open into umbels of narrow, backward-curling crimson flowers with long stamens trailing outward like spider legs. Nothing else of the plant is above ground. Only after the flowers have finished do the strap-shaped leaves push through, and they stay green all winter before yellowing and disappearing in late spring, so that for the hottest months there is no sign of the plant at all.
Because sex is off the table, the plant spreads by offsets from the parent bulb, forming tight clumps over the years, and by the movement of bulbs between gardens. Every plant you are likely to meet is a clone of a long line of clones, which is why a new colour almost never appears in a border.
Each scape carries an umbel of several flowers above papery spathe bracts, and each flower is built from six tepals that curl back tightly toward the stalk, exposing the long filaments and the anthers. The flowers are faintly scented, and because they open in quantity in the second half of autumn they are a late resource for bees and butterflies at a time when few other nectar plants remain.
In Japan the flowers open at the autumn equinox and are planted along rice-field banks and around graveyards, where their appearance has long been read as a sign of remembrance. The association is so strong that the flower carries a funerary symbolism in art and literature across East Asia. In the southeastern United States, where the bulb was carried by settlers and spread through gardens, it is known as the hurricane lily because the bloom coincides with the peak of the storm season.
Science & Biotechnology
The plant grown in most gardens is a triploid, carrying three sets of chromosomes instead of two. That extra set is a reproductive dead end: the chromosomes cannot pair evenly, so the flowers open, look perfect and then set almost nothing. A fertile form is known from a small part of Japan, but the great majority of cultivated plants belong to the sterile line and have been multiplied vegetatively for centuries. Seeds, when they do appear, are fleshy and short-lived and must be handled without delay.
Lycoris is one of the alkaloid genera of the daffodil family, and this species is the type of that chemistry. The bulb accumulates lycorine, the alkaloid that gave the genus its name and that appears across the Amaryllidaceae, together with lycoricidinol, also called narciclasine, and a group of related phenanthridine compounds. These are not passive storage products: lycorine inhibits protein synthesis and has been investigated for antiviral and antiproliferative activity, and the same compounds make the bulb violently purgative and dangerous to eat.
Because the plant is sterile and slow to bulk up, Amaryllidaceae growers use twin-scaling, cutting a bulb into pairs of scales joined at the base so that each pair produces small bulbs, and tissue culture from bulb-scale explants for faster multiplication of a chosen clone. Cell and organ cultures are also used to study alkaloid accumulation under controlled conditions, which avoids stripping wild populations for bulbs.
Uses & Benefits
The other alkaloid family in the genus is the galanthamine type, and galanthamine is the acetylcholinesterase inhibitor licensed for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease in the form of its hydrobromide salt. Its original industrial source was snowdrops, and Lycoris species have been studied as an alternative because they build up the alkaloid in their bulbs. The biosynthetic route runs from the amino acid tyrosine through the central intermediate 4′-O-methylnorbelladine.
Growing from Seed
Choose a sunny position with sandy, free-draining ground and set the bulbs with the neck just at or a little below the surface; deeper planting delays flowering and encourages rot. Space them 15 cm apart in a clump, and leave the clump undisturbed for years, because flowering is best where roots are not being disturbed.
The plant’s year follows the monsoon: it wants moisture while the leaves are growing in winter, and it wants to be dry while it is dormant in summer. In wet-summer climates that means planting on a raised bed, on a slope, or under the eaves of a wall, and never in a hollow that holds water.
Divide established clumps only when flowering thins, in the dormant period after the leaves have gone, and replant the largest bulbs immediately. Feed with a light dressing of bonemeal or a low-nitrogen bulb fertiliser as the leaves emerge, and again as the flower spikes appear. In cold-winter areas apply a deep mulch over the dormant bulbs. Slugs attack emerging foliage, and narcissus bulb fly and basal rot are the diseases to guard against.
Our Take
Plant it somewhere you will not be tempted to dig in summer, and then forget it for a decade. The pink Lycoris squamigera extends the genus into cooler gardens, while the orange Hemerocallis fulva and the tall Allium giganteum make good companions in a border that needs late-season structure. Handle the bulbs with gloves, grow them dry in summer, and let the equinox do the rest.
Related Reading
More species in the same orbit as Red Spider Lily: