Force Of Bad Habit

Day 261: On or near the anniversary of my mother's birth, the Turk's Cap lilies come into bloo......

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...the Columbia Lilies come into bloom. They ranked second only to Skunk Cabbage among her favorite flowers, and I never see them without remembering her contribution to one of the more persistent bits of mis-learning in my life. You see, her father had lived in the Midwest where the redder true Turk's Caps grow. When he came out West, the nomenclature came with him and was applied to our native "tiger lily." He called them "Turk's Caps," not knowing any better, and my mother picked up the erroneous taxonomy as a matter of course. In turn, she instilled it in me at an early age. I was in my 20s before I found out that "Turk's Caps" were in fact Columbia Lilies (Lilium columbianum), and thus I began trying to retrain myself from the ingrained misidentification.

Nowadays, if I am approached by someone asking for an identification of the "tiger lily" growing on the roadside, I do not hesitate in the slightest with my answer: Columbia Lily. It is only when I am remembering my mother that I slip and say, "Oh, the Turk's Caps are in bloom."