Gray's Lily

The plant

Gray’s lily grows two to four feet tall, with its leaves set in whorls up the stem and three to eight flowers at the top, bright red to deep orange-red. Each flower is held out level or tipped toward the ground, its tepals spreading only a little. It flowers in June and July. Vascular Plants of North Carolina calls it a Southern Appalachian endemic of three states, from west-central Virginia into western North Carolina and the edge of eastern Tennessee. It wants cool, wet ground, mostly above about 4,000 feet: moist grassy balds, seeps in the forest, bogs and mountain meadows. The flora account says it is best known from balds such as Roan Mountain and also grows in shaded seepage on Grandfather Mountain. A description of the Roan’s grass balds lists it among their characteristic plants.

Gray on the Roan

Asa Gray reached the Roan in 1840 by wagon. By Bob Fulcher’s account of the trip, the party slept under shelters of balsam boughs and found spreading avens in great abundance. They came away with the lily. Gray came back in 1876, 1879 and 1884. Fulcher dates the naming of the species to 1879, and the author on the name is S. Watson, Sereno Watson of the Gray Herbarium.

The decline

Before about 2015, the flora account says, the lily was uncommon to infrequent in the North Carolina mountains and common at a few northern sites. A fungal disease has since cut it back hard. It is now quite uncommon over most of its range in the state and rare in the central mountains, and NatureServe has lowered its global rank from G3 to G1G2. The partners who manage the Roan monitor the lilies for leaf spot. The balds themselves are a second worry. Leigh Ann Henion, writing about the goats that graze Jane Bald, notes that the lily needs the open ground and could be lost if trees close it, and she puts the Roan’s loss at about three-quarters of its grassy balds over the past century, an estimate given without a survey behind it.