sego lily

The Utah state flag has an eagle, a shield, a beehive (the famous symbol of Mormon industriousness), and a sego lily. A sego lily? Yes, and it's the state flower of Utah too, so designated by the legislature after a vote by schoolchildren in 1911. The story goes back to 1847 and the arrival of the Mormons under Brigham Young in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Food was scarce, especially during the first winter. But the Mormons learned from the Paiute Indians of an abundant supply of food that was safely hidden from ravenous crickets and grasshoppers, the soft walnut-sized root of a lily that the Paiutes called sego. Scientists call it Calochortus nuttallii, and elsewhere in the West, outside Paiute territory, it goes by many other names, including butterfly weed, cat's ear, fairy bell, globe tulip, Indian potato, Mariposa lily or tulip, and mountain tulip. In Utah, however, the Paiute name remains predominant.

Above ground, the sego lily grows six to eight inches high and produces white, yellow, or pink flowers in clusters of three. But Utah honors it especially for its nutritious root. A typical story of the early years is the 1848 establishment of a fifty-acre farm in Bountiful, Utah, by the family of Daniel and Amanda Henrie. They planted four acres of corn, according to their great-granddaughter, "but the crickets took everything and the parents and brothers and sisters subsisted that first year mostly on sego lily roots, buds off the grease wood, wild greens and jack rabbits or anything they could find to eat to keep body and soul together."

The Southern Paiute language is a member of the Shoshonean branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. There are about a thousand speakers of Southern Paiute now living in southwestern Utah and neighboring parts of Arizona and Nevada. No other Southern Paiute word has been taken into English.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: perennial plant having umbellike clusters of one to four showy white bell-shaped flowers atop erect unbranched stems; edible bulbs useful in times of scarcity; eastern Montana and western North Dakota south to northern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico
  Synonym: Calochortus nuttallii