40 Fun Facts About Calla Lilies

Which small animal hides inside wild calla lily blooms, turning pale to ambush visiting insects?

A frog, the arum lily reed frog, sits in the white blooms by day with its bright orange feet tucked out of sight under its body.

In Mexico the calla lily goes by a name it shares with which notorious former island prison?

Alcatraz is the everyday Mexican word for the flower, while the island's name comes from an old Spanish word for a pelican.

Which American painter made news when six of her calla lily canvases reportedly sold for $25,000?

Georgia O'Keeffe saw her prices rise after the publicity, though there is no evidence the 1928 sale happened the way her husband and dealer Alfred Stieglitz announced it.

Which star reused a line about calla lilies from her flop play The Lake in the 1937 film Stage Door?

Katharine Hepburn was making fun of her own biggest failure: on Broadway the play had drawn her sharp rebukes from the newspaper critics.

The white calla lily is native to the marshes and stream banks of which part of the world?

Southern Africa is its native home, centred on South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini; gardeners have since carried the genus to every continent except Antarctica.

Irish republicans wear a paper calla lily badge each spring to honour the dead of which rebellion?

The Easter Rising of 1916 is what the badge recalls, and its green, white and orange echo the tricolour raised over Dublin's General Post Office.

Which farmyard animal, whose wild cousins eat its rootstock, gives the calla lily an old nickname?

Pig lily is still listed among the plant's common names, and in its homeland the large underground stem is dug up and eaten by wild pigs and porcupines.

Which Mexican muralist made calla lilies a recurring motif in his paintings of flower vendors?

Diego Rivera, better known for vast public murals and his marriage to Frida Kahlo, put the flower in many easel works such as The Flower Vendor.

The Irish republican calla lily badge was launched in the 1920s as a rival to which flower emblem?

The poppy appeal raised money for ex-servicemen, so republican women sold a paper lily instead to support the families of republican prisoners.

Which virtue has the white calla lily long symbolised, making it a favourite in bridal bouquets?

Purity is the link: the plant is neither an arum nor a lily, yet it borrowed the lily's meaning and has graced bridal bouquets for generations.

The calla lily's genus Zantedeschia honours a botanist from which European country?

Italy was home to Giovanni Zantedeschi, who exchanged letters with the German botanist Kurt Sprengel, the man who named the genus in his honour.

Which naturalist described the genus Calla in 1753, where calla lilies were first classified?

Carl Linnaeus placed the plants in Calla, but they were later moved to a genus of their own, leaving one northern bog plant as the only true calla.

The broad dark green leaves of the white calla lily are usually described as shaped like what?

An arrowhead is the usual comparison, and a single leaf can reach 45 cm long, with its size varying according to how much shade the plant gets.

Once a wild calla lily's berries ripen and soften, which animals mainly spread the seeds?

Birds are drawn to the soft ripe berries, which stay hidden until the green sheath wrapped around them rots away to expose the fruit.

Which US state breeds new calla lily hybrids commercially and has wild colonies along its coast?

California growers supply both cut flowers and planting stock, and the white species has escaped from gardens to naturalise along the coast.

The white 'petal' of a calla lily is not a petal at all but a modified version of which plant part?

A leaf is what it is: botanists call the showy funnel a spathe, and it starts out green before unfolding and turning white.

What do botanists call the yellow spike at the heart of a calla lily, which carries its tiny true flowers?

Spadix is the term, and on this plant it bears separate male and female flowers so reduced that they have no petals of their own.

Which needle-sharp crystals make every part of a raw calla lily burn the mouth, lips and throat?

Calcium oxalate crystals are the culprit, yet cooking tames them: in its homeland the plant was traditionally boiled and eaten.

The white calla lily grows not from a true bulb but from which thick underground stems, as ginger does?

Rhizomes let the plant multiply by offsets, which is how moved soil and dumped garden cuttings have spread it far beyond the flower bed.

Which starchy staple crop of the Pacific islands belongs to the same plant family as the calla lily?

Taro shares the family's defences too: raw, it is laced with the same kind of irritant crystals, so it has to be cooked before anyone eats it.

Which country's National Pest Plant Accord bans the sale of the green-striped calla lily 'Green Goddess'?

New Zealand outlaws growing, selling or distributing the variety, whose green stripes help each bloom last much longer than the plain white form.

Calla lily foliage can drip water from its tips to shed excess moisture, a process botanists call what?

Guttation works through special water pores, which stops the plant becoming waterlogged and lets it thrive with its feet in a marsh.

Zantedeschia rehmannii, a parent of many hybrid calla lilies, has a common name featuring which colour?

Pink arum lily is its usual name, though the blooms actually range from mauve to rose-purple, with paler margins.

Which photographer, whose show The Perfect Moment sparked a censorship row, often shot calla lilies?

Robert Mapplethorpe photographed orchids and calla lilies alongside portraits of stars such as Debbie Harry, Grace Jones and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Which American photographer's close-up Two Callas, a study of calla lilies, debuted at Film und Foto in 1929?

Imogen Cunningham was put forward for the exhibition by Edward Weston, who nominated ten of her photographs, eight of them botanical.

Because it tolerates iron and thrives in wet ground, the white calla lily has been used to treat what?

Wastewater treatment suits a plant that grows wild in marshes and can happily stand in water around 30 cm deep.

The calla lily reached Europe so early that it appears in a 1664 account of the royal garden in which city?

Paris had it growing in the Royal Garden by 1664, and the plant may have reached Europe even before the Dutch set up their first outpost in its homeland.

In classical times the calla lily's species name aethiopica meant lands south of Libya and which ancient land?

Egypt and Libya marked the southern edge of the known world, so the name has nothing directly to do with modern Ethiopia, where the plant is not native.

Which British body gave its Award of Garden Merit to the hardy calla lily cultivar 'Crowborough'?

The Royal Horticultural Society also honoured 'Green Goddess'; 'Crowborough' is the more cold-tolerant pick for cool climates such as Britain and Ireland.

The ASPCA lists the calla lily as toxic to dogs and which other common household pet?

Cats that chew the plant suffer intense burning of the mouth, tongue and lips, with drooling, vomiting and trouble swallowing.

The faint scent of white calla lily blooms draws crawling insects and which other pollinators?

Bees and crawling insects do the work, and each bloom avoids fertilising itself because its pollen ripens before its ovaries are ready.

True lilies sit in the family Liliaceae, but calla lilies belong to which family, alongside philodendrons?

Araceae, the arum family, also includes Monstera and the titan arum, which bears the largest unbranched flower head in the world.

Unlike the large hardy species, many colourful florist calla lilies have foliage marked with what?

White spots are really translucent flecks, a feature botanists call maculation, and the hardy white species usually lacks them.

Which white predator sits camouflaged on wild calla lily blooms, waiting to seize pollinating insects?

A crab spider needs no web: it relies on its whiteness to vanish against the bloom, then grabs the insects that come to feed.

In its homeland, calla lily leaves were traditionally used as a poultice and to treat which complaint?

Headaches were treated with the leaves, even though chewing the raw plant is enough to make the throat swell.

Which houseplant nicknamed dumb cane shares the calla lily's plant family and its mouth-numbing crystals?

Dieffenbachia earned the nickname because chewing it can leave a person temporarily unable to speak.

Seedlings from crossing the white calla lily with yellow Zantedeschia elliottiana die because they lack what?

Chlorophyll is missing: the hybrids come up as albinos that cannot survive, which has frustrated attempts to give the big white species brighter colours.

Rare Zantedeschia odorata, a wild cousin of the white calla lily, smells like which garden flower?

Freesia is the scent of this species, which was only described in 1989 and is known from just a few wild localities.

Until 2011 the calla lily was the national flower of which remote South Atlantic island, where it grows wild?

Saint Helena, the island where Napoleon died in exile, has the plant growing widely across it, yet there it is counted as an invasive species.

Which brass instrument, echoed in the flared shape of the bloom, gives the calla lily another common name?

Trumpet lily joins a long list of aliases for the plant, including florist's calla, garden calla and white arum.