That's Cape York Lily!

In the castle of rain

Nov 22, 2025

∙ Paid

ALSO KNOWN AS: Curcuma australasica, native turmeric, wild turmeric, kuṅkuma (Sanskrit), kumbigi (Guugu Yimithirr language), Aussie bloom

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“Water me like a monsoon,” this wild turmeric says. “Let my leaves swim. For at one time I, like you, lived in the ocean.”

The Cape York lily wants to see how streets are rivers, how windows are full of cracks. So water can get through. The smells rise and travel on droplets and remind us that there is in fact nothing but an endless water that animates. Give us back the ocean we long for, where our veins even, like all streams, are returning.

In Queensland, Australia, it is the suddenness of rain that makes the monsoon, the tremendous calamity of water followed by a perfect pause. In his book Running in the Family Michael Ondaatje equivocates monsoons to an object. Not a person or a god, not a living entity, but it catches every flicker in the night to make looming sheets of itself over the landscape. More like a mountain than an elephant. The “tactile smell of wetness” Ondaatje continues, remains even after the rain. Its absence stands like an invisible temple of scent.

In this dance of wetness the Cape York lily flourishes. When it’s not raining it will dry away, back into the ever strong rhizome, which can expand throughout the rainy season. If it is broken it can regrow as simple as a memory.

Pink Crown on Rainy Days

Cape York is a small section of Queensland - the northernmost tip of Australia that is periodically doused in rain. It is hot and tropical. The ocean surrounding looks lit from within like blue jello, and a force of greenery covers the land. It is the wettest part of the continent. But this does not make it particularly valuable as cropland. The soil is considered poor for regular farming practices. Because of this the Cape York lily knows how to grow in both clay and sandy soil. The Aboriginal name for the Country (Country is also an Aboriginal term for land) is Pajinka. This land here witnesses the thriving - ultimate city: the great barrier reef. Cape York tapers like a finger pointed directly at the massive archipelago including Papua New Guinea where the plant is also native.

This is not the turmeric of your grocery store, which is known as the Indian or Asian kind, that has shocks of red on its leaves. Unlike turmeric, Cape York lily is known as a “yellow ginger” because of the bright inside of the rhizomes. Cut it in half and see the flesh radiate in tone - from a deep yellow to a soft buttercream on the edges.

It is vibrant throughout the southern hemisphere’s summer, blooming from November until the beginnings of winter in March. The bloom looks a bit like a pineapple. The top of the plant is spiked in pink bracts that are darker on the edges and nearly whiten as they fall into the plant. All along these bracts is the thinnest layer of hair. Then the flowers open up like “oohing” mouths peering out of the calyx like they’re smelling something lovely out in the world.

These mouths could be compared to foxglove or snapdragons, but they’re pale yellow green, like they’ve never been taught to call attention to themselves. And then again they don’t have to with their pretty pink bracts above. Still they reach out, though.

Inflorescence is a whimsical word, one that sounds like it should be looping in the wind. But inflorescences don’t always do that. The Cape York lily flower structure stands like a cylindrical building, with flowers craning out along the side. These flowers are pollinated by the likes of the blue banded bee or the Cairns birdwing butterfly. Yet they don’t need to, the plants can also pollinate themselves. The flower stalks break the soil and bloom not three feet from the ground. Dwarfing the squat inflorescence, however, are sturdy fibrous leaves that have horizontal veins like the panels of a canoe. Usually these leaves stretch and arc over the ground in curves that are six feet long.

Beneath the shade of that hefty leaf, the Cape York lily doesn’t need much sun. It grows in forests where light comes through the natural stained glass of leaves. They take in some sun when they can, lining the edges of the common rain and eucalyptus forests of the region. Not only is there significant rainfall here, the mountains in the east work to sweep the land with a seasonal flow of water. The Cape York peninsula itself is flat and winding with rivers that swell onto floodplains. The Cape York lily needs oxygenated water, so they need that flow. It’s not a gentle stream though.

On a balmy July in England, Harry James Veitch’s obituary read, “his chief ability was his highly developed business faculty, for he could lay no claim to scientific distinction, probably not even to a taste for science.” For a man whose family legacy was plants, he made money on their trade with hands that were likely so clean they glimmered. Harry, the youngest in a long line of horticulturalists, started the Chelsea Flower Show which remains to this day. His fifth time grandfather before him started the nursery that he continued. John Veitch, a Scotsman who made it in England before he traveled throughout Asia, after the Napoleonic wars and was documented at the time as being the “discoverer” of the Cape York lily. Youtube videos show tough guys in big cars launching off the yellowed soil of Queensland, sloshing in mud - in the winter of the year. But come summer the rains will descend and this Cape is known to be nearly unreachable. Weather is not always an event. Sometimes it is a structure that descends upon one. There is no way to drive through it, or swim. No way to negotiate with. It stands there simple and as much as an object as any mountain or rock. This is when the Cape York lily blooms, John Veitch, a man of business and boundless ambition could only come to a place like this at the end of his wits. Did he think of his mother when he found the flower? Or did he find it already blooming in someone else’s garden?

A Heart of Gold

As part of the Zingiberaceae, or ginger, family Cape York lily is wildly healthy. There are about 100 Curcuma species worldwide, but this one is the only one that is native to Australia, which is not to say that the environment is much different between this and its kin. Turmeric grows in the rain and heat.

The name “kurkum” comes from the Arabic word meaning “saffron” because its rhizome so resembles the color of saffron stigmas. Comparing plants to one another in their names is common. It is making a metaphor of a living thing. And what do we get but something that tells you nothing about the plant but about the person making the comparison. Westerners named the turmeric as if it had to wear the habit of another to be understood. This is a form of erasure. If not straight violence, then it’s careless. But there is something of a ladder in a simile. Language only goes so far to describe a thing. In the best of circumstances a simile or metaphor is a bid for connection.

The Cape York lily is most literally itself, though. Neither lily nor saffron, but a legacy completely different that is both related to turmeric and fundamentally of the forests of Cape York. In addition to being a food and medicine, Cape York lily has been proven to prevent the presence of pests and pathogens in the soil and so can be an effective companion plant to food crops. The root looks like a baby, if a baby was born with fine stripes that have little clasping strings all around, reaching out to the microbes in the soil. The roots are known to create little healthy environments around them, fixing nitrogen so that the surrounding plants can be healthy too.

Species of Curcuma are used in Thailand, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and Malaysia, to treat illnesses that involve the lungs, or external wounds; diarrhea and dysentery. Not only is it prized for its warm taste - It is proven to have anticancerous effects. Like all turmeric plants it has the polyphenol compound called curcumin which makes it antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial.

Many only know the earthy spice that turmeric brings, the unmistakable gold its powder releases. This same powder is used as dye, to gild rice. The root is not always ground. Sometimes it stays whole. Traditionally the native turmeric root is roasted over a fire and eaten. I don’t know, but I would imagine it is used as medicine in Pajinka.

Ninety percent of this Country is now restored to its original stewards like the Guugu Yimithirr. So it may not be a surprise that this plant is not endangered.

Cape York, in fact, is on track to have the entire peninsula be given back to its original stewards by 2026, a future that connects it to its past, a legacy that goes on.

Humor me as I attempt to understand the Aboriginal Guugu Yimithirr language that locates things in relation to where they are cardinally as opposed to egoically, to whoever the speaker is. Western mythology leads us on a timeline in one direction, that goes to a final end. We are always lost on the line, not knowing when will be the final ending, so grasping to a beginning that feels too far away to hold. If we were to see the mountain for its own place in the world, the flower has its own relationship to the mountain. There is a perspective water has too, a relationship. Everything has a place in the world: it is located in a four dimensional space. Imagine if you were to always know that your dresser is south to your cat, or east of her. If the rain has a location, then it would not overwhelm us. Every apocalypse is only a story of adaptation, a change in perspective.

myth for native turmeric

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