Easter Lilies in September

What a thrill to see Easter lilies blooming in my garden in the fall!

My dear mother-in-law has been giving me the Easter lily she buys in honor of her husband every year for the past two or three years. Each year I've enjoyed them while the blossoms lasted after Easter and then planted them into my garden, but I've never had them blossom again...until this summer and fall!

These are the second set of liles to blossom this year. The first came in August, and the second came right before we left from our vacation up north (a couple of weeks ago), and I was thrilled to return home and find that they were still blooming.

Another thing that was thrilling and amazing to me was that I didn't expect more than one lily plant to sprout from the ground where I planted just one plant. I knew that I might have more than one blossom per plant, but I didn't know that after planting the lily from the pot and watching it shrivel back a bit and look like it would be focusing on putting down roots this year, when the plants came up again (either the next year or, this year, it happened later the same season), I would have multiple plants from that one planting. What you see in this photo here is what I planted this year from one plant, and you might be able to pick out in this photo that there are three distinct plants coming up in this area.

I'm no botanist, so I don't know why this happened, or whether this means that these particular plants that bloomed this month will die over the winter since they didn't spend the summer this year just putting down roots. But I'm just going to enjoy what came up when it's here. It reminds of that verse in the Bible...

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. (Isaiah 40:8)