They have showy flowers, many with distinctive and pronouncedly reflexed petals, like a Turk's cap lily, ranging in colour from a greenish-yellow through yellow, orange, red and sometimes even a deep pinkish-red.

[citation needed] "Scandent herbs, the rootstock a horizontal rhizome, the stem leafy, the leaves spirally arranged or subopposite, the upper ones with cirrhose tips; flowers solitary, large, borne on long, spreading pedicels, actinomorphic, hermaphrodite; perianth segments 6, free, lanceolate, keeled within at base, long-persistent; stamens 6, hypogynous, the anthers extrorse, medifixed and versatile, opening by longitudinal slits; ovary superior, 3-celled, the carpels cohering only by their inner margins, the ovules numerous, the style deflected at base and projecting from the flower more or less horizontally; fruit a loculicidal capsule with many seeds"[2] As of June 2024[update], the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families accepted 11 species of Gloriosa, ignoring hybrids, varieties and cultivars.

In Australia, "scattered naturalized populations exist in the understorey of coastal dry sclerophyll forest and sand dune vegetation throughout south-east Queensland and New South Wales".

In India, Gloriosa is distributed in the Western Ghats but the density is rapidly decreasing due to excessive uprooting by herbal medicine producers.

A diamond brooch in the shape of the flame lily was a gift from Southern Rhodesia (modern day Zimbabwe) to Queen Elizabeth II on a visit in 1947 while she was still the crown princess.