Flower of the Month |Belladonna Lily
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Let’s cut straight to it: Belladonna is the latin term for ‘beautiful lady.’ She’s pretty and she knows it (clap your hands). She’s not afraid to march into a bouquet and completely own the crowd. Regular girl lilies want to be her; regular boy lilies want to be with her…

Let’s put aside the vaguely problematic body-shaming and gender-normative metaphors for a moment (everyone’s beautiful, you should all be/be with whoever you damn well please, right?), because frankly, the belladonna lily doesn’t even need to deal in such bombast. Even if Belladonna had been christened Plainjane it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to how deliciously pretty those blooms are. Fragrant funnel-shaped flowers that look like they’ve been dabbed with gentle brush strokes of pink watercolour paint, they sit above a leafless stem. It’s for this reason actually that belladonna is sometimes referred to as the naked-lady-lily - bet the cheeky Vauxhall chappies down the flower market FACKIN’ LAV IT.

We’ll leave you though with a lovely, evocative (rather than provocative) name for our flower of the week. In Portugal - where it has been naturalised from its native South Africa and is now widely cultivated - they call it ‘meninas para escola’: girls going to school,. There’s something so quaint and wonderfully seasonal about the image this conjures: crisp autumn mornings settling in, schoolchildren heading back to school after a hazy summer break, skipping along in their Portuguese school uniforms with skirts that match the pink shade of the particular lilies in the background, blooming that same time of year… bellissimo.

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