One of the floristically most fascinating countries in South America is Chile. Of its approximately 5,700 angiosperm species, 2,700 are endemic and many of these plant species can be found in gardens and horticultural collections across the world. My personal favourite as the front-runner in a beauty contest is Rhodolirium montanum Phil. (often known under its widespread synonym Rhodophiala rhodolirion (Baker) Traub) in the amaryllis (Amaryllidaceae) family. This species has not only stunning flowers but in addition, it is the centrepiece in a popular Chilean folk story, about a beautiful woman and her love for a mysterious stranger.
Let’s start with the trivia, but interesting nevertheless. The amaryllis family (think of daffodils, snowdrops, but also of onions and garlic) contains (depending on who one asks) between 1,600 and 2,200 species in 73 to 80 genera. Most of the species are perennial, herbaceous species and distributed in tropical and subtropical areas worldwide. Many of the representatives in the amaryllis family have bulbs or underground stems. The flowers have usually three or six petals and three or six sepals, and the fruits are capsules or berries.
As its scientific name suggests, Rhodolirium montanum is a species found at high altitude, well above the tree line in the Chilean and Argentinean Andes. In Chile, scientific reports document the species at an altitude of 3,200m asl. Its native range extends on both sides of the Andean mountain range, from Central Chile into the Argentinean province of Mendoza. It grows in between rocks and endures the long, cold Andean winters as a bulbous geophyte under a snow cover, which can persist for up to eight months per year. With rising temperatures in spring, each individual plant produces two to six flowers, which can be quite variable in shape and colour. The flowers which have no scent can be white or pink, with a greenish yellow base and crimson guide lines. There are six stamens in two whorls in the throat of the corolla. The anthers contain a large number of pollen grains. And while the species can self-pollinate (albeit with a low seed set), a small native bee species, Megachile sauleyi, seems to be the main insect pollinator although interestingly, the plant does not offer nectar to their visiting pollinators. The capsule fruits contain black, flattened seeds.
What about the folk story of eternal love? Not surprisingly, there are different versions of the story. All versions start with this beautiful local woman called Añañuca who lives in a small town, identified today as Monte Patria in the Chilean IV Coquimbo region, about 300 kilometres north of the capital Santiago de Chile. Añañuca meets, and falls in love with, a handsome and enigmatic stranger who visits her town.
In one version of the story, this stranger is a young miner, who is looking for a lost gold mine. Having met the love of his life, the miner stays in the town, and the young couple living happily together decide to get married. However, one night, a goblin (sometimes, a mountain elf, or an evil spirit) appears in his dream and reveals to him the exact location of the gold mine he had originally been looking for. He wakes up and, in his excitement, he leaves Añañuca and the town immediately to find the mine. Añañuca waits for him, day and day, week after week, month after month, but her lover does not come back, so in the end, without consolation and without knowing what happened to him, Añañuca dies of sorrow. Her neighbours bury her up the hill on a rainy day, and to their surprise, on the next morning after sunrise, as if by magic the entire hillside is covered with beautiful flowers, to this day called Añañuca, or Rhodolirium montanum.
Photo and Copyright: Joaquin Sepulveda, shown here under a CC-BY-NC licence. Source: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/148177239
In a different version of the story, the handsome and enigmatic stranger is not a miner but a Spanish soldier, putting the story in the context of the Spanish colonial period. Añañuca and the soldier fall in love with each other and decide to get married. But for the soldier’s camaradas, such a relationship crossing social and cultural barriers is not acceptable, so they take him back to Peru by force. Añañuca, desperate to be re-united with the soldier, decides to follow him. So she walks into the wilderness in search for him, she does not care about the weather, about food and provisions, and does not seem to feel the cold or the hunger, at least initially. However as the days pass, Añañuca struggles, she gets injured and leaves a trail of blood from her inflicted wounds. Ultimately, she becomes exhausted, she is too weak to continue her journey, so she dies in some forgotten place somewhere between Monte Patria and Peruvian border. But every year, in all the places where her blood had hit the ground, beautiful flowers appear, you guess it, Añañuca, or Rhodolirium montanum.
And this is how the Chileans have made one of their plant species a symbol of eternal love, of loss, sacrifice, and suffering, and thereby linking what is deeply human with nature.
Plants worldwide 