REGAL LILIES
I have a friend who grows exquisite trumpet lilies. It goes without saying that she has a green thumb, but she also has a raised, south-facing bed with perfect drainage. There are no deer in her area to eat the plants, so they don’t have to be fenced or sprayed with noxious deer repellant. The lilies grow–and grow and grow and grow–eventually reaching five or six feet tall with huge trumpets. They are the envy of the neighborhood.
I aim to grow trumpet lilies like that–but not just any lilies. Next summer I expect my garden to be home to several Lilium regale or regal lilies. The golden-throated regals have the trumpet shape of a large Easter lily. The inside of each petal is white, but the outside is ribbed and brushed with distinctive burgundy and rose markings. Hyperbole is rampant in the world of horticulture, but I think it is not an overstatement to say that the scent of even one mature regal lily is intoxicating.
Despite claims that the regals are easy to grow, I have had only middling results with them in the past. This was because I either bought inferior bulbs or planted those bulbs in less than optimal conditions. In any event, when I gazed covetously at my friend’s lilies at the end of last summer I was ready to make amends and try again.
I considered where to put them and had several possible sites in mind, but none that seemed optimal. My most successful garden lilies are a large clump of ‘Black Beauty’, a raspberry-flowered, Turk’s cap type introduced to commerce 1957 and to my garden about four years ago. The clump grows larger and more beautiful every summer and I was not about to tempt fate by moving it to make room for my regals.
Then one day, as I was weeding an established iris bed, I was struck by something so obvious that I wondered how I could have overlooked it for so long. My iris were growing in a south-facing, raised bed with impeccable drainage. Sun shone down on them for many hours every day. The site was perfect for regal lilies.
At summer’s end I ordered several regal bulbs from a first rate supplier. While I waited for the shipment, I relocated the iris. The rhizomes needed dividing anyway and I put them in another spot that would not have been congenial to lilies, but would work perfectly well for iris. I planted my three large regal bulbs shortly after they arrived a few weeks ago and now the only thing left to do is wait and hope that my results will rival those of my friend.
Regals are as renowned for their provenance as their beauty. The species is native to western China’s Szechwan province. The lilies were among over 1,000 new species discovered at the turn of the twentieth century by Ernest H. Wilson (1876-1930), one of the greatest plant hunters of all time. Wilson, who was English by birth, trained as a botanist and first visited China on behalf of a renowned English nursery, James Veitch and Son. Subsequent trips were underwritten by Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum and the many Asian expeditions earned Wilson the nickname “Chinese” Wilson. Shortly after discovering Lilium regale and arranging to lift and ship many dormant bulbs back to the United States, Wilson was caught in a landslide, sustaining a serious leg fracture. The bone was set by a local mission doctor, saving the botanist from an amputation, but resulting in a limp that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Some sources say that he referred to this affliction his “lily limp.” After six expeditions to sometimes wild and dangerous parts of the Far East, Wilson became director of the Arnold Arboretum. Ironically the intrepid botanist and his wife were killed in a Massachusetts car crash in 1930. Fortunately for the horticultural world, Wilson’s many discoveries lived after him. Regal lilies, for example, remain popular on their own and have also been used to breed all kinds of trumpet-type varieties.
So why think about regal lilies now, when it’s too late to order or plant them? Because they are so beautiful and distinctive that no garden should be without them. Make a note to yourself to try them next year. And even if you really don’t want regal lilies, the end of the growing season is a great time to take stock of the plants that inhabit your garden space. If there is something that you have been longing to grow, chances are you can find a space for it. All you have to do is look around you.