While light pink is the most common color, they're also available in red, mauve and white, usually with contrasting yellow throats. Well, these hardy bulbs have a strange life cycle. The strap-like, deep green leaves appear in spring and die away long before a single flower blooms. By midsummer in our South County area, the foliage is gone, making way for the naked ladies. Don't let the delicate pink flowers fool you, though.
Naked ladies are tough as nails.
The leafless flower stalks appear literally out of nowhere, usually popping through rocky, parched ground in such unusual places as highway median strips or vacant lots. Ideal drought-resistant plantings, naked ladies will grow in almost any soil with very little care or fuss. They will survive and bloom with no extra water other than what Mother Nature provides. In formal gardens, they're extremely handsome when planted amid low shrubs or grouped in perennial borders, especially if they are surrounded by airy baby's breath or some sort of groundcover to cloak the withered leaves. Shasta daisies in order to mask the bareness of the stems.