With their flamboyant flowers, statuesque stems and bounteous beauty, lilies are a perennial favourite of ours.
There’s just one drawback – their pesky pollen can leave hard-to-remove yellow stains on everything from clothes and carpets to cushion covers and tablecloths.
We’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve leaned over to take a sniff of their glorious scent and ended up with pollen all over the place. Even more annoyingly, nine times out of ten it’s our favourite new outfit that ends up smeared with unsightly yellow pollen stains.
But there’s no need to panic. There’s a foolproof way to budge those stubborn stains in double-quick time. The important thing is not to delay. The more speedily you tackle the stains, the better chance you stand of shifting them.
Clothing
First and foremost, don’t touch the pollen and don’t dampen it with a wet cloth either. If you do, you’ll risk pushing the unsightly powder deeper into the fabric and it will be even harder to shift.
If possible, take your stained clothing outside and give it a good shake to get rid of as much of the loose residue as possible.
Next, grab a roll of stick tape (any type at all will do!). Wrap it round your fingers sticky-side-out and lightly dab it on the fabric to remove the powder from the affected area. Soak the item of clothing in cold water for 30 minutes or so, then rinse it twice before applying your favourite stain remover and washing it as the care label recommends.
Leave it to air-dry (don’t put in the tumble drier) and hey presto, it should be in tip-top condition in next-to-no time.
Carpets & upholstery
There’s nothing more annoying than finding that your luscious lilies have dropped pollen all over your pale carpet or your stylish new sofa.
The good news is that the trusty sticky tape trick works on flooring and upholstery too. Hover a vacuum cleaner nozzle a centimetre away from the carpet or upholstery to pick up any loose powder, then pat it softly with the sticky tape.
If you can still see traces of pollen stain on the surface of your prized sofa or carpet, use a dry sponge to blot the area with a dry cleaning solvent or homemade vinegar solution (mix one part white vinegar with two parts water and make sure you spot test first). Remember to dab the carpet rather than scrub it – and avoid over-wetting it too.
The homemade vinegar solution is generally safe to use on fabrics and won’t bleach them because it’s only mildly acidic. Another useful tip is to blot the stain from the outside in to prevent it from spreading and getting bigger.
Side-step the pollen problem
A nifty ruse to avoid the pollen conundrum altogether is to tackle the problem at source. As the old saying goes, prevention is better than cure, so as soon as your lilies start opening you can carefully snip off their stamens (the rubbery anthers at the top of the stamens are the parts that produce the pollen) or gently pull them off with a damp tissue. Never remove the stamens directly with your hands or you may end up transferring the pollen on to something else, including your fingers!
The bonus is that as well as avoiding those annoying pollen stains, removing the stamens will help your lilies to last even longer. How? Because pollen erodes any petals it touches, reducing the flowers’ lifespan.
To make things super-easy, Stargazer lilies can be a great choice of bloom. As well as looking and smelling divine, Stargazers are known for their striking pink flowers with white edges. But they also have protruding stamens with orange anthers, which means they are much easier to remove than the stamens on other varieties of lily.
Then again, if your aesthetic sense tells you that lilies without stamens are like burgers without fries or Ant without Dec, you could try spraying the anthers with hairspray. The upside is that it will stop the pollen making mischief and staining your clothes but the downside is that it’s likely to shorten the lilies’ life. You win some, you lose some!
