Looks Like A Lily Year

A USDA hardiness map shows a long frigid finger of cold reaching from the high wilds of the Adirondack Mountains nearly to the Pennsylvania State line.  Our garden is centered near the southern tip of that cold.  Killing frost is likely here for most of the month of May.  Last season early extreme warmth drew the lilies from the ground many weeks before their usual emergence time.  Our attempts to provide frost protection for that many weeks stressed both plants and gardener.  This year our late Spring has kept the lilies safely in the ground until just recently.  The first picture shows eight emerging lilies and a marking stone.  It also shows a covering of reground tree bark mulch from a local lumber mill.  All of these factors worked together to delay emergence until a more seasonally correct time.

These lilies are planted in a three gallon pot.  Clustered together, all thirty pots of these lilies can be covered with a single tarp.  When frost is less likely, the plants will be removed from their pots and placed around the garden for the remainder of the growing season. Fall will see the best bulbs returned to pots in preparation for the Winter.  This year the mulch blanket held frost in the ground until just recently.  It will be a far easier task to transplant these short lilies compared to last year's nightmare of trying to unpot fully grown plants with exposed buds.

Our first lily is still hanging on here.  One bulb has become two and this earliest riser will be covered in place when frost threatens. Sometimes being short is an advantage.  A 5 gallon pail should be large enough to cover this lily.  Other lilies could similarly hold a spot in the garden if other plants are kept far enough away to accommodate a covering 30 gallon trash can without damaging the nearby plants.  That requires a lot of bare ground.

These Simplon lilies tested my courage.  The original three bulbs had become at least six and the strength of will had to be found to dig them up and pry them apart.  All three bulbs Fall placed here are growing with one having divided over the supposedly dormant time of late Fall and Winter.  The second planting of these bulbs is just now starting to push the mulch aside so the number of survivors there is for the moment unknown.  At the time the moment of separation seemed violent but it appears that the bulbs healed the wounds.

With more than three dozen groups of lilies scattered about, one would think that no new ones are needed.  Want trumps need here and our two kinds of new lilies are just now pushing through the soil. Proud Bride is a shorter white variety that could replace L. longiflorum as our forced Easter Lily.  This year our Easter lilies displayed splendid green growth and a total lack of flowers.  When their die down is complete, we will look to see if sizable bulbs followed the no flowers year.  Table dance, I am ashamed to admit, was selected in part for its name.

We have recently seen a male oriole flying across the garden.  His flashy orange and black plumage is an eye catcher that is pleasing to see but we remember the damage done to our lily buds and flowers by a family group of these same birds a few years ago.  The following year wire cages with bird netting were placed to protect the remaining flowers but that is both unsightly and extra work.  If this bird is nesting nearby, we may return to the ugly cages.

The Trouble With Lilies

The storm system that pounded Oklahoma is now driving our weather.  Thunder and lightening with torrential downpours and fierce winds were with us.  Our power outage lasted only a few minutes and the tomato plants were twisted about.  The tomatoes have been righted with only one torn stem showing the hammering that they took.  This storm's impact on the lilies will hit tomorrow night.

The monster storm from the south has been blocking cold air from the north.  The hot system will pass by opening the door for the mountains of cold air that have piled up.  We can expect three nights of freezing overnight temperatures beginning tomorrow.

The lilies have loved all of the rain and the warm air growing daily.  Some will no longer fit under the buckets that have protected them from earlier frosts.  The orange spotted lilies shown above will fit under the new trash can but the leaves will contact the sides of the can.  Flower buds should be safe but the leaves in contact with the sides of the can may burn if the temperatures are low.

Our two surviving Farolito bulbs are confined to one pot.  This lily has buds now.  If common sense held any sway here we would get rid of this lily as it blooms way too early.  This pot will be lifted again and spend the next three cold nights in the basement.  That may not sound so bad but the three gallon pot is filled with water saturated soil.  This old man will have some trouble pulling this pot from the ground by its rim.  I wonder what combination of colorful words will fill the air with the attempt.

These Simplon lilies have exceeded their catalog description in height by a factor of two.  Last year they exceeded six feet tall.  The original three bulbs now number six mature bulbs with many daughter bulbs potted up in the sod house.  The new can will not cover  all six plants.  It would have if the plants had grown straight up from where I placed the bulbs last fall but that did not happen.  Some combination of two shorter buckets may provide the necessary frost protection.  If we can get safely past this next period of frost, these six plants will produce more than one hundred huge pure white sweetly scented flowers over a period of several days.

Thirty-three pots of lilies fill the sod house.  These plants are still short enough to cover in place with a tarp.  The browned leaf tips are scars from an earlier frost experience.  New leaves have grown out above the damaged leaves and by the time the flowers appear no one will notice the low brown leaf tips.  We always remove the plants from the pots when we set out the lilies in the garden trying to preserve the structure of the clump.  This year I expect that we will have more than one clump fall apart as it is shaken from an inverted pot.  More colorful phrasing is expected.

Twenty different varieties of lilies too tender to grow here cannot be justified by any logical explanation.  We really should grow fewer, but a new variety purchased this spring is just now breaking the surface in its pot.  What combination of color and scent will this new arrival tease us with this summer?  Therein lies the problem.  Lilies are simply much too beautiful and sweetly scented to not exist here.  We will have to face this year the overwhelming numbers of daughter bulbs that will appear.  How many lilies is too many?