Lilium

Asiatic hybrids are the easiest lilies to grow and among the first to bloom — rigid, unbranched 3-4 foot stems carry large, mostly upward- and outward-facing flowers 4-6 inches wide in nearly every color but blue, often with dark basal spotting. The flowers are showy and good for cutting but, unlike most other lily groups, usually have little or no fragrance. Every part of the plant is dangerously toxic to cats.

One of the oldest cultivated garden flowers, the Madonna lily is a stately summer bulb that sends up a tall, leafy stem topped by a cluster of broad, outward-facing, pure-white trumpet flowers with golden-yellow anthers and a powerful sweet fragrance in early-to-mid summer. It is grown for that classic white trumpet and heady night scent. Two things make it unusual among garden lilies: its culture is the reverse of nearly every other lily (it is planted shallow in late summer and forms an overwintering leaf rosette), and like all true lilies every part of it is highly and often fatally toxic to cats.