Canopy Lilies

Overview

Canopy lilies grow without soil, rooted in the moss and leaf-litter that gathers in the crotches of great boughs. In the Crownboughs the High Elves grow them along their garden-walks and in the trained galleries of their halls, and on summer nights their scent fills a hall. Every house keeps its own strains, bred over centuries, and a house's lilies are its signature at court.

Appearance

A canopy lily is a clump of long, strap-like, leathery leaves, glossy dark green, arching from a fat, pale bulb wedged into the bark, with grey roots that cling and wander over the wood like veins. In summer it sends out a drooping stem bearing from three to a dozen trumpet flowers, each as long as a hand, waxy and thick-petalled. Wild lilies are white with a green throat. House strains run from ivory to cream, blush, pale gold, and a rare greenish-white, some speckled, some with dark stamens dusting the petals rust. By day they smell faintly green; after dusk the scent opens, heavy, sweet, and spiced, and carries along a boughway.

Habitat and Range

Wild lilies grow high in the old trees of the forest world wherever leaf-mould collects in a fork and light reaches it. In the Crownboughs nearly all are grown: set in bark pockets, in moss beds laid along trained limbs, and in hanging baskets of woven withy over the garden-walks. They need moisture and shelter from the hard wind, and an outer walk stripped by storm loses them.

Behaviour and Temperament

They are slow and patient plants. A bulb takes years to flower from seed, and a clump grows only as fast as the litter under it builds. A lily that is moved too often sulks and does not flower.

Life Cycle

A bulb flowers each summer once mature, and a clump can outlive the gardener who set it, splitting into offsets that are given away or kept. Seed is seldom used outside the houses, since a seedling does not breed true and the houses guard their strains.

Uses and Dangers

Their use is beauty and pride. A house fills its hall with its lilies at the court season, wears a flower at presentation, and sends a cut stem with a message. A visitor is expected to know whose lilies are whose. An offset from a house's strain is a gift between houses, less than a grafted sapling from the family grove and more than courtesy. The scent is said to make sleep deep, and some households keep lilies out of sleeping chambers.

They harm no one.

Lore and Belief

At court, a house whose lilies fail to flower in a season is thought to be failing, and rivals make sure it is noticed; a house will force a reluctant clump into flower rather than be seen without. Tenders say a lily cannot be hurried any more than a child can, which is the region's oldest argument in another form. Some believe the strains carry the memory of the houses that bred them, and a house that has died out is mourned at court by a cut stem of its last lilies.

Lily-thieves who climb to a rival house's galleries by night to take an offset are the stuff of court gossip and, now and then, of duels; one feud between two old houses is said to have begun with a single stolen stem.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi