Category — Bulbs

Lilium regale, front view

I’ll admit it.

I’ve bought lilies in the bag, on impulse. Just going by their looks, in the shallowest sort of relationship. But I’m also an eternal seeker after something more, something…it’s elusive, but I know it when I see it.

I tend to look among heirloom and species bulbs for that elusive something. Older bulbs were bred for gardeners, not the cut-flower trade. What that means for us is that heirloom bulbs are easier to grow into flower and  tend to last better in the garden.

Lilium regale, back view

 Species lilies can be trickier, as most are very particular about where they live, but some are forgiving, and others can be patiently cultivated in woodland settings. The best places to find these bulbs are the gardens and catalogues of people who are as nuts about bulbs as I am. The breeders, the preservers, the people who see something in the wild and have the patience to cultivate it from seed.

You can find good species and heirloom lilies in bigger catalogues, such as the venerable Scheepers/ Van Engelen  listings (Scheepers sells small amounts for home gardeners; Van Engelen sells larger, discounted quantities for professionals, and people like me who just don’t know when to stop).  In lilies, breeding seems to make older varieties obsolete sooner than in bulbs such as daffodils and tulips, so you don’t see many hybrid lilies that are more than about 30 years old in the mainstream catalogues.  But Scheepers has several species varieties, including the incredibly wonderful Lilium regale and Lilium regale album, trumpets that will exhale scent on your midsummer garden and, if you’re lucky, establish themselves in a glorious perennial clump.

‘Mrs R.O. Backhouse’, heirloom lily supreme. “Backhouse” is pronounced like the wine god, Bachhus.

Brent and Becky’s Bulbs  offers an enormous selection of hybrid lilies, but also includes some old favorites, such as ‘Golden Splendor’ ,  a Jan de Graaf hybrid which has itself been used extensively in breeding due to its beauty and good character. (Or at least they did have ‘Golden Splendor’; I just looked at their newly-issued fall catalogue and can’t find it. Never mind, they have tons of other wonderful heirloom bulbs). Brent and Becky’s has the largest lily selection I’ve seen in a regular bulb catalogue, including an excellent species lily section, with over a dozen offerings. You can always count on their bulbs to be good quality, unmarred and bursting with life. I often think Brent and Becky are doing a darn good job keeping lilies alive in US gardens, even though they are supposed to be daffodil specialists.

For heirlooms, there’s always Old House Gardens, a repository of many fine heirloom and species varieties. Of course, as always in the botanical world, there’s considerable arguing over which is which. For instance, ‘Citronella’, a Jan de Graaf hybrid, is often listed as a species lily in other, less knowledgeable catalogues, with ‘Citronella’ acting as the name of the species selection. Citronella is actually a cross between Lilium davidii var. unicolor and Lilium amabile var. luteum.

The lovely ‘Citronella’. Not fragrant, but I let it in my garden anyway.

‘Black Beauty’ (from 1957) is another lily that looks as if it should be a species - but it isn’t, although it’s often sold as one by less-knowledgeable vendors. ‘Black Beauty’ is a hybrid of Lilium speciosum and Lilium henryi, made by Leslie Woodriff.

One of my personal favorites, ‘African Queen‘(1958)  is also listed. I got my own ‘African Queen’ bulbs there. I also tried their version of Lilium formosanum (a species lily from Taiwan).

Elegant, fragrant ‘African Queen’

While the prices at Old House Gardens aren’t as cheap as some places, you get value for the money . The lavishly floriferous quality, and the huge, honking size of their bulbs - prove that Scott Kunst and company are dyed-in-the-wool bulbomaniacs. If the mouthwatering descriptions of  about twenty lilies hasn’t already proved that.

The Lily Garden  is a site (and catalogue) offered by someone who suffers the most serious condition of plant mania: a breeder. And not just any breeder, but Judith Freeman, whose ‘Silk Road’ is only the latest of her lilies to make the big time. Her ‘Tiger Babies’  lilies, a delicious confection of fragrant peach tigerlily lookalikes, has been on my list of desired ones for some time. Maybe you think I’m getting off the subject, talking about newer lilies. But ‘Tiger Babies‘, while relatively new,  have now been around for thirty years, as Freeman’s site informs us (and she should know).

If many of Freeman’s progeny have become classics in the lily world, that’s not be so surprising: Freeman did her apprenticeship under Jan de Graaf in Oregon, and was once married to Ed McRae, another famous lily breeder. That makes her a sort of royalty in the lily-breeding world.  She’s still at it, and offers us the benefit of her labors, as well as cultural instructions (wouldn’t you rather get these from someone who’s actually been out in the field growing lilies for a long time?), lists of lily bloom times, plus some species offerings at reasonable prices. She even includes lilies that are easy from seed, a useful list for some of us who have fruitlessly tried with lily seeds over and over.

Telos Rare Bulbs is a site that specializes in species (which I always think of as the ultimate in an heirloom plant). They don’t have a large selection of lilies on their page of native bulbs from the Western USA - but they have two native lilies I have never seen offered in bulb form and have not been able to grow from seed. They have a lot of other native bulbs, too - both to the Western US, and to South America and South Africa. You’ll find a lot of selections here that you won’t see anywhere else.

Some of these catalogues offer spring-planted bulbs, and some fall-planted lily bulbs. Some offer both. Which is best? I suspect that has to do with where you live. For those who live in extreme climates or just want to get their bulbs in for that instant satisfaction, spring-planted bulbs seem to work well. But while I have spring-planted lily bulbs and had it turn out well (it was one of those shallow relationships I was talking about, with Nerone lily), I find that more often, my spring-planted lilies are stunted and tortured-looking. A fall and winter of establishing their roots and getting some good nutrition really works for them. Perhaps for some of you in other climates, it works differently?

And perhaps, as a contribution to the public weal, you can contribute other good lily sources? I’d  especially like to hear from people in other countries (although I’m always anxious to fuel my passion with more lily sources for my own use). When I was searching around for lily sites, I found myself becoming somewhat morose that I wasn’t living in Australia or New Zealand. They have some good-looking lily sites.

Emerging lily…

Why do I grow tulips in the woods?

I started growing tulips, and other spring bulbs, because I was living in a low-water situation. Ten people on a 2 ½ gpm well. For those of you not familiar with wells, that’s not a lot of water for ten people, especially if they have gardens. Several times a summer, the tank would run dry, leading to tight-lipped (sometimes not so tight) comments about whoever had let the hose run or the faucet leak. A snippy irascible atmosphere settled over the land. For half a day or more, we lived dirty, with dry faucets and hoses.

I was the last person to arrive, so I knew that any garden I had would have to be very low-water.

At first I planted natives and herbs, favorite friends of mine for a long time. Natives, of course, are bred for my rainfall  and climate. Mediterranean plants come from the same kind of climate,  where it doesn’t rain in summer. So they are also excellent allies in low-water gardens.

Herbs are great, but I began hankering after flowers. As usual, I turned to my stacks of catalogues and books to research. And what I found - one of the great “duh” revelations of my life - was that most of the popular spring bulbs were either Mediterranean, or California natives. Which meant they didn’t need any extra water from me.

What are the bulbs that fall in these categories?

Well, of couse, tulips

and narcissus (a daffodil is a narcissus, but not all narcissi are daffodils)

hyacinths

calochortus of various species, some of which are sold in major bulb catalogues, some of which can be found only in specialty catalogues, or grown from seed.

crocus (both the species and larger, showier kinds)

and a number of others, including alliums, ornithogalum, tritelia, and scilla.

There are some bulbs whose genus includes both bulbs that like moisture and bulbs that can handle a lot of drought (fritillaries, iris, and lilies are some), but you can’t go wrong with the ones I’ve pictured above. They love drainage and hate summer water, and if you grow them in pots, the way I do, you can move them out of the way when the foliage starts to wither.

There really are 1001+ ways to save water with spring bulbs, if you count all their different species, varieties, and cultivars. If you plan carefully, you can have a feast of beautiful, low- to no-water flowers for months, and get them back the next year.

And now is a great time to buy bulbs. (If you don’t know where to buy them, check out my Spring Bulb Shopping series for some of the places I think are the best.) Some catalogues are still offering discounts for early orders, and the selection is the fullest it will ever be.

Low-water gardens can be beautiful, floriferous and yes, even lush. Bulbs will lighten your mood, enchant children and neighbors, and put tiny bits of glorious other dimensions into your life. Get bulbs. You’ll be glad you did.

I never really got what the big deal about Juno irises was.

But last fall, when I did my very-last-minute-end-of-sale order, Iris bucharica was still on the list of one of my favorite bulk suppliers. It’s one of those ones I was always planning to try, and always knocking off the list as I honed down my original thousand-dollar wish list to a ghost of its original self.

Now I was left with the ghost list to choose from, and I picked these irises.

As is my thrifty habit, I put them in a container with some of the mid-season tulips I bought, ‘Golden Melody’. I wouldn’t honestly have bought ‘Golden Melody’ usually, either, but it was one of the few tulips left on the list. I’m not actually a big fan of really bright colors in tulips, but how bad could bright yellow be?

As it turned out, not bad at all. ‘Golden Melody’ exactly matched the buttercups in the field behind and around them, and had a nice sturdy quality that made it an excellent cutting flower. I gave away a lot of bouquets involving ‘Golden Melody’, and of course I had it in the house myself.

But my favorite ‘bouquet’ turned out to be in my container.

It wasn’t an auspicious start: when I first saw the Iris bucharica foliage, I thought the chickens had been in my plant pots again, biting off foliage to little layers of whacked-off leaves.

All the other irises I’ve grown have had nothing like the fantastic pleated unfolding of Iris bucharica foliage.

And each level of foliage (doesn’t it remind you of polygonatum?) puts out a stubby flowering stem, so Iris bucharica blooms a long time.

I loved watching the snub-nosed, finely-marked buds of Iris bucharica open out into two-colored marking-etched flowers.

I had originally figured that the Iris bucharica would bloom early, and ‘Golden Melody’ would take over about the time they were giving out. I hadn’t known about the multiple blooms of Iris bucharica, and I hadn’t known we were going to have such a cold rainy spring: flowers lasted (and in some cases are still lasting) weeks beyond their usual time.

So I wound up with a big bouquet of Iris bucharica and ‘Golden Melody’ in a container - and it was a pleasure to watch it develop and flourish over the course of almost a month. (That’s crimson-and-yellow-striped ‘Professor de Monsseri’ in the background.)

It’s sad that I didn’t do the research on Iris bucharica first, the way I usually do. I didn’t know it had multiple flowers; I didn’t know, as Janis Ruksans points out, that in the wild it has many variants, (His favorite form is one collected near the Afghanistan border, a lemon yellow with green markings, which he selected.) The form most commonly used in the garden, he says, is a good grower and an exellent increaser.

I’m glad it’s going to increase, because not only is Iris bucharica beautiful and long-lasting, it’s fragrant. I only found that out toward the end of its life, though, and sniffing fading irises in the rain is not a true indicator of scent. I didn’t get any.

But you can benefit by my loss. When you order your own Iris bucharica, be sure to inhale.

History may be recreating itself in a small pot on my porch. I mean that  part of history where a tulip grower, in a muddy patch somewhere in 17^th century Netherlands, noticed that one of the tulips had come up funny. Had come up beautifully weird, in fact.

When my own tulip came up beautifully weird, I thought at first it was a sport. A sport is the botanical equivalent of a whim; the plant suddenly decides it wants to be, or look like, something else. Some plants have a family (or at least a genus) tradition of sporting; tulips are one of those.

But now I’ve had a few days to look at these tulips, I’m leaning toward the theory that some of the soil I’ve grown my few, precious broken tulips in got in this pot and infected ‘Annie Schilder’ with the virus that makes broken tulips into the intricate, variable gorgeous things that they are.

I’ve had several tulip sports in my garden. I’ve even had another Annie Schilder sport.

As you can see, the sport patterns are beautifully flamboyant, but they don’t have the refinement of the tulips in this pot, with their fine-brush patterns dividing the colors, spreading their way across the tepals, lacing into a new pattern each day.

(yeah, that’s a dog behind the tulip. Honi soit qui mal y pense.)

There aren’t a lot of true broken tulips on the market anymore, so people tend to confuse them with what are called Rembrandt tulips, tulips that also have streaked patterns. I like Rembrandt tulips, but their markings are nothing like true broken tulips. Once you’ve seen the two, you’ll understand what I mean.

‘Zurel’ tulip, a purple-and-white modern Rembrandt

‘Insulinde‘, a true broken tulip

It’s lucky for me that not all of my tulips turned into exotic beauties, so I can be sure of the identity of the original. In 17^th century Netherlands, my remaining ‘plain’ Annie Schilder (Annie Schilder has some beautiful, subtle flushes of coloring, plus fragrance, so I wouldn’t really call it plain) - my plain Annie Schilder would have been called a breeder tulip. Breeder tulips were the solid-colored tulips whose coloring was so beautifully broken up when all went well.

In order to make that happen, the early broken tulip growers used strange concoctions of crushed bugs and other arcane ingredients, or cut tulips in half, bound the different halves together, or did all sorts of  mysterious garden rituals to make their tulips break into the patterns that could make them prestigious millionaires.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that it became evident that the very ingredient that made the tulips so beautiful might also be the ingredient that made the tulips so likely to be sickly and die off.  Broken tulips are created by a virus.

Their sickliness is the reason that they fell out of favor with commercial breeders. Broken tulips are chancy, delicate things, the Elizabeth Barrett Brownings of the tulip world. Once commercial growers knew that broken tulips carried a virus, a virus that could make their tulips spindly and weakly and unreliable, they phased them out. Gardeners were warned (and still are, though few of them now understand what the warnings are about) to plant broken tulips away from all others, lest they be infected.

But I - well, I never practiced garden hygiene. I’m a dirty gardener. In garden scicnce, I take Fleming for my model: his discovery of penicillin was based on an accidental contamination of a petrie dish.  While I’ve planted my broken tulips in pots so that I can identify them and give them special attention, I’ve sometimes used the soil from those pots for other tulips, or even put a surreptitious pinch into a pot, just to see what would happen. Once I had grown my first true broken tulip, I was quite willing to sacrifice some of my plainer ones to this beauiful, inspiring virus.

 It’s unfortunate that my record-keeping habits are also dirty, because I honestly can’t say that this pot of tulips is the fruit (or flowering) of my experiment. But I hope it is, and I look forward to further developments.

I don’t really like novelty-colored tulips. And my experience of green tulips in particular is, well, not so hot. (Sometimes green tulips are called viridiflora tulips; they’re the ones with the thick green stripe down the petals.)

Yet the moment I saw ‘Formosa’, backlit in the Scheepers catalogue, I was drawn in. Attraction can be like that. Through all the multiple crossings-out that take place between my first list (for, oh, say, several hundred dollars’ worth of bulbs) and my last (much more moderate, but still more than I should really sensibly spend), Formosa remained. I wanted this tulip in my life.

I actually got Formosa fall before last, but for some reason it, and other tulips I planted that year, didn’t emerge, except blind.  (“Blind” is a term for bulbs who put up leaves but don’t flower. You can see why you’d want a shorter term for that.)

 But this year, the spiky clawed buds came up and opened into flowers rather flatter than the usual tulip.

Formosa has been worth the wait. It’s not a big, showy flower, but it has a charm of its own, like many heirloom tulips. It’s officially a yellow tulip with green stripes, but the effect is a radiant chartreuse.

Formosa’s luminous green blends beautifully with all the spring greens surrounding it,  and it is beautiful with other tulips.

This unusual stripey combination may never happen again in my lifetime. I’d planted the early greigii tulip ‘Professor de Monsseri’ in with the late Formosa, figuring it would be good succession planting. But this year, our spring has been so cold and rainy that all the flowers have lasted and lasted, and they’re blooming together in stripey splendor.

In the garden, under the newly-leaved oaks, chartreuse Formosa sets off ember-colored ‘Annie Schilder’.

When the black tulips near Formosa start opening, the two will be a satisfying combination of deep and luminous, light-drawing and light-radiating. I know this because I already have a preview in the vase.

This bouquet combines ‘Dreaming Maid’ in its later, more purple stage, and ‘Paul Scherer’ along with Formosa, with a little white-flowered lunaria in for interest. I love the way ‘Paul Scherer’ is the exact same chocolate-black color as the anthers on Formosa.

I’m always torn about cutting tulips, because I enjoy them so much in the garden. But putting tulips in a vase is a way to get to know them up close and personal.  You get to watch them as they go through all their changes, and notice every little detail of their colors and shapes.  Putting a vase of flowers in a spot you often pass by or look toward will subtly, magically, lift your mood. It’s one of those little pleasures of life that make it really worth living.