White Spider Lily in Japan: Is It Rare, and Why Is It Called Unlucky?
In late September, at the autumn equinox, red spider lilies come up along rice paddy banks, river embankments and graveyards all over Japan. The Japanese name, higanbana, means "equinox flower". Every year, people also notice a paler one among them, cream-white with a blush of pink or yellow, and ask the same two questions. Is it rare? And is it unlucky?
We are a small tree care and landscape business in Mie Prefecture, central Japan. This page explains what the white spider lily is, where it comes from, why some people feel uneasy about it, and how to grow it.
Not a white form of the red one
The white spider lily is called shirobana-manjushage in Japanese, and its scientific name is Lycoris × albiflora. The "×" in the name means it is a hybrid.
It is easy to assume it is simply a white mutation of the red spider lily (Lycoris radiata). The medicinal plant database of Kumamoto University states clearly that it is not. It is a hybrid between the red spider lily and shoukizuisen, a yellow spider lily. The same database notes that the flowers are tinged red or yellow when they first open and then turn white, and that the plant does not set fruit.
The botanist Tomitaro Makino proposed that it arose as a natural cross between the red spider lily and the yellow species. Later studies of the chromosomes refined this. In an answer on the website of the Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists, the geneticist T. Suzuki of Nara Women's University explains that the white spider lily most likely came from a cross between kohiganbana (Lycoris radiata var. pumila), a fertile relative of the red spider lily that flowers about a month earlier, and one form of the yellow species. The Pacific Bulb Society notes that the plant was first described by Koidzumi in 1924, as a natural hybrid that may have arisen on Amami Oshima, an island south of Kyushu.
The name of the yellow parent is itself not settled. Japanese sources call it shoukizuisen and give it as Lycoris traubii or Lycoris aurea. We use the Japanese name here.
Why a red flower is unlikely to turn white
Suzuki also explains why the red spider lily of Japan is unlikely ever to produce white flowers on its own. Japanese red spider lilies carry three sets of chromosomes, like a seedless watermelon. They cannot make seed, and they spread only by their bulbs dividing underground. Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences gives the same account: because Japan's red spider lilies make no seed, they spread only where people planted the bulbs, along paddy banks, embankments and graveyards.
A mutation for white colour in one of the three sets would be hidden by the other two, and with no seed there is no next generation to bring it out. So when a few white flowers appear in a bank of red ones, Suzuki's conclusion is that the most likely reason is simple: white bulbs were planted there together with the red ones at some point, and came up later than the red ones.
So is it rare?
It is found mainly in Kyushu, in the south-west of Japan. Kumamoto University describes it growing in moist places in the hills and near houses. Outside Kyushu, we think most of the white spider lilies you see were planted.
It does not set seed either. Like the red one, it increases only by its bulbs. So in our view it is less rare than unable to travel. With no seed, it seldom turns up anywhere new unless someone carries the bulbs.
Why some people call it unlucky
The unease mostly comes from the red spider lily, and the white one shares it.
Tokyo University of Pharmacy explains that the bulbs contain lycorine and other alkaloids, and are strongly poisonous. Eating them causes nausea, and diarrhoea with stomach pain, and in severe cases can kill. That poison is part of why people planted them. Rats keep away from the poisonous bulbs, and moles stay away too, because the earthworms they feed on become scarce. So a line of spider lilies helped stop animals digging into paddy banks and dikes. In graveyards, they are said to have been planted so that animals would not disturb burials. In times of famine, the bulbs were ground and the poison washed out in water, so they could be eaten as emergency food. Please do not try this.
A flower that blooms at the equinox, when families visit graves, and that grows around graveyards, came to be linked with death. Tokyo University of Pharmacy notes that it is sometimes called shibitobana, "dead person's flower", because of its poison and because it is seen in graveyards.
On top of this, a pale flower standing out among red ones simply looks strange to some eyes. We think this is the whole of it. The white spider lily has no bad meaning of its own. It is increasingly planted in gardens for its soft colour, and it is fine to grow it if you like it. Just keep the bulbs where children and pets will not dig them up.
In the garden: the leaves are the plant
This is the part most people miss. The flowers come up on bare stems in September and October, with no leaves at all. The leaves appear after the flowers fade, stay green through autumn and winter, and wither by the following summer. In November, a clump of white spider lilies is a tuft of strap-shaped leaves. That is when the bulb is feeding itself for next year's flowers.
So please do not mow or cut back the leaves in autumn or winter, even if they look untidy. Let them die back on their own in late spring or early summer.
When the leaves have withered, in June or July, is the time to lift and divide the bulbs. The usual advice is to plant them with the tip facing up, about 5 to 8 cm deep, in sun or light shade, in soil that is moist but drains well. In our area of Mie, they need no special winter care.
