I just discovered a flower growing in my garden this fall. It looks very much like a large pink crocus. Someone told me it is called naked ladies. Is it actually a crocus? Is it poisonous?
Here is the tricky thing about common names: they often refer to more than one plant. Based on your description of a low-growing flower like a crocus, it sounds like Colchicum autumnale is growing in your garden. If it had long bare stems and lily-like flowers, you would be looking at naked ladies of another sort, that is, Amaryllis belladonna, or possibly a species of Lycoris (both of which are in the Amaryllis family). What they all share is the characteristic of flowering once the foliage has died back (hence the nakedness of a flower without leaves).
Colchicum is in the family Colchicaceae. It has a history of being misidentified as Crocus sativus, the source of saffron, which also flowers in fall. Crocuses belong to a different family, the Iridaceae. Mistaking Colchicum (also called meadow saffron, which adds to the confusion) with Crocus sativus (whose dried orange stigmas have culinary and medicinal uses) can have dire consequences. When the 17th century herbalist Nicholas Culpeper cautioned that “some have fallen into an immoderate convulsive laughter which ended in death” from consuming saffron, it is likely that people had ingested Colchicum stigmas, not saffron from crocuses. Colchicine (which is sometimes used as a gout medication) is highly toxic when ingested. Amaryllis belladonna and Lycoris are also toxic, especially to cats and dogs, but humans should not ingest any part of these plants, either.
Naked ladies were once naked boys, the prevailing common name before Victorian morality intervened and thought it too suggestive. Why ‘naked ladies’ is any less so is a mystery. It is not known who coined the name ‘naked boys,’ but an early flora of Nottingham by George Charles Deering (an 18th century German-born botanist and physician) documents their presence in the autumn garden. The name is thought to go back as far as the 16th century.