Category — Heirloom plants

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…

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.

While reference books gave me a little sense of the role ‘Beersheeba’ played in daffodil history, I thought I’d like to branch out a little, to see if I could find more of Beersheba’s story.

The ‘snippet views’ at Google Books can be tantalizingly frustrating - they give you only a bit of a sentence around the word you are searching for. Still, even these tiny offerings can offer insight: I would love to know what the House of Commons debated on NARCISSUS ‘BEERSHEBA’ in 1971. But that knowledge is denied me.

Even the scantiest information makes it clear that ‘Beersheba’ was used extensively in breeding, and remained one of the most popular white daffodils for many years after its introduction to the world.  It won prize after prize, and not only in England. The  New Zealand Railways Magazine pictured Beersheba among six of “the best blooms shown at the National and Auckland Daffodil Shows, 1932.” The famous daffodil breeder Guy Wilson used Beersheeba in his breeding programs, ensuring that Beersheeba genes got into the many daffodils that have been bred off his own hybrids. Even a brief glance at breeding records from the UK and the US shows that Beersheba chlorophyll may be lurking in many of our modern white daffodils, so popular was it for breeding early in the century.

But Beersheba also shone on its own, not just as a parent. Its long popularity testifies to that. In 1939, the Herbertia, the American Plant Society’s publication, mentioned Beersheba as a “supreme variety, fully proven”.

In 1948, 25 years after ‘Beersheba’ first made its appearance, “Flowers in Colour” (obviously a pamphlet meant for general home-garden use, nothing esoteric) lists it as “a pure white, producing finely shaped large flowers suitable for second-early forcing or for garden decoration”. When they first open, the “pure white” - the trumpets, particularly - is more of a cream. And grown in shade, the trumpet of my Beersheeba stays creamy. With more sun, they go to that sparkling white these older records keep warbling about.

“In 1966, daffodil expert George S. Lee, Jr., lauded ‘Beersheba’ -then the most widely grown of all white trumpets-as a “flower of perfect form and purity of color that it still holds its own after 40 years, ” reports Scott Kunst, in a 1989 version of his Old-House Journal. Scott Kunst is the owner of Old House Gardens, where I got my Beersheba bulbs. Yes, the world of heirloom bulbs is a small one.

McClure and Zimmerman, which also carries Beersheeba, describes it as “a more delicate version of Mt. Hood” (another heirloom white, which I am very fond of). This description appears word-for-word as a Martha Steward article quote, so I assume it was cribbed from McClure and Zimmerman. While generally McClure and Zimmerman’s writeups strike me as amazingly good (they’re one of the remaining catalogues that relies on words and line drawings to entice), this one strikes me as an insult to both Mt. Hood and Beersheba. It’s like saying an ear of wheat is a more delicate version of corn on the cob. It is, but their uses and personality are so different that saying so doesn’t get us much further forward.

On the other hand, another tiny snippet gave me a lot of information, since I have the context to put it in: Elizabeth Lawrence liked Beersheeba. For some of us, that’s enough, as far as garden taste goes. It also means that this is a daffodil that will do well in warmer areas, up through about zone 8, or maybe higher in the west.

But clearly Beersheba is a wide-ranging daffodil. Dave’s Garden lists the plant as growing in Garberville, California (a northern California town with mild winters and burning summers) and Nantucket, Massachusetts (a lot colder). There are clues to this in some of the older snippets, as well as some of the more modern writeups on what has now become a hard-to-find antique: Beersheba is recognized as a reliable garden citizen, coming back and establishing itself comfortably.

Sometimes it’s good, though painful, to smash old worlds and go on to something new. But Beersheeba is such a beautiful survivor of another world: I’d like to see it come back. Partly because that would signify that at least sometimes, there is a place in the world for the refreshment of quiet beauty.

Hey! I thought I’d lost it! but my lovely heirloom ‘Beersheba’ is back in my garden again.

As you can see, Beersheeba is a refined daffodil, with its smooth long trumpet and gently incandescent petals.

It reflects the sensibility of the age it was bred in. But wait - this daffodil is from 1923. Wasn’t that flappers, screaming colors, LOUD? Well, part of it was. And the person who bred this daffodil was also devoted to the screaming colors, as we shall see. But it takes five to seven years to bring a daffodil from pollination to seed, so the aesthetic of the flower is an interesting cross between the tastes of several years before (when the pollination was planned), and the tastes of the current time (when you decide whether it stays in the garden, or gets put in the compost pile). That means Beersheeba was conceived in the thick of WWI.

Rev. Engleheart may have named Beersheeba as a peace offering to the Battle of Beersheeba in 1917, a well-known battle in the Sinai and Palestine campaign in WWI. (Beersheeba, or Be’er Sheva, is a town in what is now Israel, near Jerusalem.) In 1923, England would have been full of war victims, and still devastated by the upheaval of the war that changed the world forever.

It’s hard for us to conceive what it was like to be in the aftermath of WWI, although I contend that it’s a war we’re still reeling from, the war that brought us into the modern world and left the old one smashed forever. In England, shocking numbers of a generation were dead, the class system was in the  beginnings of upheaval, and the memories of bombing, cold rooms, and scanty food were fresh, as was the shellshock of the men returning.

 Maybe it’s human nature to turn toward plants for peace, because this time was also a heyday for the modern daffodil, evolving since the 1880s. Beersheeba’s breeder, Rev. G. H. Engleheart, was a daffodil man, one of the amateurs doing their part right in there with the professionals.

All white daffodils originally come from the wild Narcissus pseudonarcissus subsp. moschatus. What Engleheart did was cross a seedling with one of the early white daffodil hybrids, ‘White Knight’. “…it was immediately recognized as way out in front of any other runners. Strong bulbs, healthy dark foliage, and sturdy stems held flowers of amazing size and very distinct character. Long triangular petals were welded at right angles to the trumpet, with no hint of leaning forward. Trumpets were long and narrow, but neatly flanged. Above all else, soon after opening, the flowers were a sparkling pure white. It was the first white to gain real recognition from the general public.”

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, Engleheart worked on poet daffodil crosses, and bred brighter-flowered daffodils which were a part of later professional breeding programs. He also worked on white and pale-colored daffodils, which led to Beersheba. It was the daffodil which made him immortal, at least to the lovers of narcissus.  “…still a white trumpet to be reckoned with well after the Second World War,” as Michael Jefferson-Brown puts it in 1991.

Next post: more about Beersheeba, and why we should care about it now.

Reference: Narcissus, Michael Jefferson-Brown,Timber Press, 1991

I like hummingbirds, but I feel uneasy about giving them sugar water in feeders. For starters, sugar water doesn’t seem like good nutrition for them; for another, you have to be sure the sugar water is fresh and not fermented by heat. I’m sorry to say that I’m not the kind of person who can be trusted to remember and take care of that.

So one of the qualifiers for my garden list is flowers that will nourish birds, particularly hummingbirds.

I can’t say I’ve actually done a lot to attract hummingbirds, but I  accidentally chose two heirloom bulbs which are shaping up to be hummingbird plants par excellence. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get pictures while the hummingbirds were actually working them, so you’ll have to take my word for it. But hummingbirds did work both these flowers, with enthusiasm, and came back for more.

The one at the top of the page is ‘Atom’ glad.

I didn’t use to like glads. I associated them with those stiff spiky arrangements that put you off at formal events such as weddings and funerals.

Maybe that sterile association is what made me so surprised to see a hummingbird working my ‘Atom’ glads. I mean, they’re red, right? Hummingbird color? But I just never associated glads with nectar and pollinations, somehow.

But my bulbomania, and the enticing descriptions at Old House Gardens and Brent and Becky’s got me interested in glads. Especially the old-fashioned hybrids that used to be called primulus, from a species with more graceful, smaller spikes and hooded flowers. Though the catalogues don’t mention it, ‘Atom’ looks like one of these hybrids to me.

It’s unfortunate that I didn’t get a picture of a hummer on these glads: just never happened at the right moment. But they were faithful, if irregular, visitors. If you choose to plant this heirloom glad, you may get the same bonus.

‘Citronella’ lily was another surprise hummingbird attraction.

This is a hummingbird’s view of the flower. I hadn’t even thought of hummingbirds being attracted to a lily, much less a downfacing yellow one.  But the hanging lily heads gave me an extra-good show one morning as a hummingbird worked it: I could see the hummer fully, as it was hovering underneath the lily with only its beak stuck up into the flower. For a moment it stopped to rest on the lily stalk: it was only a little bigger than one of the buds. (My camera and I were parted that morning, so no pictures. Some things just need to hide in the magic of the moment.)

‘Citronella’ was bred by Jan de Graaf, in 1958. He was the first major lily breeder in the United States (before that, species lilies were grown in quantity, but there wasn’t a lot of hybridization). It’s an Asiatic lily, with parents L. davidii var. unicolor and L. amabile var. luteum. Ed McRae, one of the inheritors of de Graaf’s mantle, describes it as “pendant to outfacing golden yellows of exceptional form and beauty.”

Still, I was hesitant to get Citronella, since it isn’t fragrant, and in  my small garden I like it if every plant serves at least two purposes.

But I’ve come to trust de Graaf hybrids for their grace, and Citronella wasn’t too pricey, so I popped for some.

It turns out Citronella  does serve two purposes. One: it’s beautiful, and at least in its first year filled in that lily blank between the trumpets and the other kinds of lilies. Two: it’s hummingbird food, and a whole lot more nutritious than sugar water. Fun to watch, too.

I recommend both these bulbs as easy to grow, beautiful, and attractive to hummingbirds. Who knew?