Stargazer Lily Tattoo Meaning
Ambition, aspiration, beauty, and the bloom that faces the heavens.
Leslie Woodriff spent thirty years trying to create a lily that faced upward.
Most oriental lilies face outward or downward — their heavy blooms droop toward the ground. Woodriff, an Oregon lily breeder, wanted a lily that looked at the sky. He spent decades crossing cultivars, most of which failed, before producing the Stargazer in 1974. He named it for what it did: the bloom faces directly upward, toward the sky, as though looking at something above it.
He never profited from it. He sold the bulbs for ordinary prices, did not patent the variety, and died in relative obscurity while the Stargazer became one of the most commercially successful lily cultivars in history — now one of the most sold cut flowers in the world, generating hundreds of millions of dollars annually in an industry that did not remember his name until decades after his death.
The lily in Western tradition is the flower of purity and of annunciation — the white lily of the Virgin Mary, placed in the hand of the angel Gabriel in countless paintings of the Annunciation, the flower that appears when something is about to be declared. The moment before the significant message arrives, there is a lily.
In Chinese tradition, the lily — bǎihé — means a hundred years together, the sound of its name suggesting longevity — a wish encoded in language that the flower then enacts in its bloom.Leslie Woodriff bred the Stargazer facing upward into all of this at once: the botanical ambition of a man who wanted a lily that looked at the sky, the annunciation lily of Western tradition, the hundred-years wish of the Chinese name. A flower that looks upward contains everything that has ever been said about aspiring toward something above the present moment.
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