Everything We Know About Fleur de Lis Heirloom Chrysanthemum

A few falls ago, Georgianna Lane traveled all the way from Paris to photograph our chrysanthemum crop, and some of our favorite varieties later appeared in her book, Chrysanthemums: Beautiful Varieties for Home and Garden. Fleur de Lis was among the varieties that she captured, and if it wasn’t a farm favorite before, it certainly was after we looked at those purple petals through Georgianna’s artful lens. 

The Mum Project was born of our efforts to preserve heirloom chrysanthemum varieties that are hard to source, and even harder to find data on. Seeing heirloom mums like Fleur de Lis documented through an international lens was super awesome, not only because a flower that we grew right here in Weyers Cave will now live forever in a book, but also because it’s now a variety that is being preserved not just horitculturally, but artfully as well.

Who is Fleur de Lis?

She’s a spider-form heirloom chrysanthemum, meaning its petals (technically ray florets, for the fellow plant nerds) are long, tubular, and reflex or cascade outward in fine, ribbon-like strands. Mature blooms can easily stretch 6-8 inches across, giving her a very firework-like look.

Unlike tightly incurved exhibition types, Fleur de Lis has a lot of movement. Her petals twist and arc, often with subtle variation from bloom to bloom, making each flower totally unique. Here in zone 7A, her color is consistently purple, but lots of growing conditions can alter her color, most notably colder climates, but light certainly can have an impact as well, as chrysanthemums are photoperiodic. 

The Mystery Factor

There is shockingly little formally recorded data on many heirloom chrysanthemums, and Fleur de Lis is certainly no exception. There’s so much that we wish we knew about her, like her introduction year, breeder, and original geographic origin. In many cases, that information is fragmented or lost entirely. Instead, that knowledge lives in garden club binders, personal notebooks, verbal histories, and in the memories of dedicated collectors. That’s the reason that we’re so committed to documenting varieties like this through The Mum Project.

Through our stewardship of such a large collection, we aim to record as much information on these heirloom varieties as possible, so that we can document and share our learnings. Mums can grow in climates across the United States, and we think it’s important to put both the plants and their stories into the hands of as many farmers as possible. After all, we have a great big dream of seeing heirloom mums as an exportable crop for the United States one day; preserving history while sharing it far and wide.

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