Lily

Reviews / Votes

all the volumes [in the Botanical series] combine scholarship with lively anecdote and are beautifully and generously illustrated . . . there are fascinating accounts of the lily in Native American myth, culture and cookery and of the annual Giglio festival, imported from Italy to New York, in which enormously tall towers decorated with lilies are paraded through the streets. Reiss is also good on the various uses of the word lily, most notoriously in the racist Lily-White Movement, which held sway in the Republican Party from the end of the American Civil War until 1933 . . . the illustrations in this volume are particularly fine * <i>The Spectator</i> * Lily and Pine are beautifully produced, with an old-fashioned and wonderfully solid feel to them they are well illustrated with material from a very wide range of sources, and bound at a higher quality than the general run of hardback books, especially given the modest price. I can see them becoming collectors items. * <i>Gardens Illustrated</i> * The illustrations throughout the book are as disparate as the people and places it recalls. The many photographs, paintings, botanical artworks and engravings combine to tell their own intriguing story but it is Marcia Reisss lively and page-turning text that pulls everything together, making of her many chosen lilies a fine literary bouquet, lacking only the mind-blowing perfume that so many of them propel. * <i>Hortus</i> * Lily is a masterful book of 223 pages containing 106 illustrations to help tell the many lily related tales presented by the author. I am pleased to have added this book to my library * <i>North American Lily Society Quarterly Bulletin</i> *