They’ve been especially nice this year!

The photo here shows the Sego Lilly in some of the more ununusual colors that it can occasionally be found in. This magnificent display is from the garden of Lena Mabbutt of Price, Utah, who has made a crusade of discovering Sego Lillies in different colors. (She got a better grade in a class taught by Utah’s legendary Dr. Cottam for finding a Sego Lilly in a color he hadn’t seen before.)

If you go up into the mountains, you can still find them blooming but the season has passed in the desert benches now. But next spring, look for them in early to mid May along the road to the Hurricane lookout point (between La Verkin and Virgin on state road 9).

Web pages about the Sego Lilly make the claim that it was, “an important food plant not only to the Native Americans, but the settlers as well. It is reported to have saved the Mormon settlers from starvation when grasshoppers destroyed their crops.”

I’ve worked at digging out a few Sego Lilly bulbs for transplanting. You would have to be starving. First, the stem is thin and fragile, especially below ground level where it becomes almost transparent. The bulb is often a foot or more below ground level and the stem usually twists around rocks and other roots and sometimes heads off horizontally. These things ain’t turnips! If you can follow the stem of a Sego Lilly to the bulb, you deserve it.

In some places, this pretty little flower is called the “Mariposa Lily”. Mariposa in Spanish means butterfly and that seems very appropriate. I couldn’t find a thing about where the name “Sego” came from, however. (There’s an old ghost town in the Utah Bookcliffs named Sego, but I found a site saying it was named after the flower.) If you know, leave a comment and let me know.