Lilium Candidum makes a fairly good pot-plant, if the pot in which it is placed is very deep.
This plant is grown in nearly every cottage garden, and is very cheap to purchase. About ten shillings a hundred is the ordinary price of the bulbs.
Since we wrote our account of the diseases of lilies we have heard of a new method of treating the bulbs of Lilium Candidum, when year after year the spikes become diseased. The bulbs are washed and then baked in a cool oven. We have heard that though this method does, to a certain extent, check the disease, it very materially interferes with the growth and blossoming of the plant.
Resembling L. Candidum in the form and number of its flowers, but differing from it in almost every other particular, the next lily, “The Lily of Washington,” is a species which taxes the resources of the lily-growers to their utmost.
Lilium Washingtonianum is the first lily which we meet with from the great Western Continent. It inhabits California and the North West, growing upon the rocks and mountain slopes of its native home.
The bulb of this lily is different from that of any other. It is long, oblique, and rhizomatous. Its peculiar ovoid shape is due to the fact that it grows at one end only. The flower-spike always appears from near the growing end. The far end of the bulb gradually decays as the near end grows. Bulbs of this lily are often five or six inches long and two inches broad. The only other lily which bears a bulb in any way resembling this is L. Humboldti, a native of the same places.
The leaves of L. Washingtonianum are arranged in whorls, and are quite different from any other Eulirion except Lilium Parryi, the next species.
The flowers are borne in a dense raceme. Good specimens often bear as many as twenty or thirty blossoms, but only too commonly but one or two flowers are borne on each stem.
Individually the flowers are not much, being small, thin, and of a pale purple, fading to the deeper shades of purple. The pollen is yellow. There is a variety of this species, called Purpureum, in which the flowers are upright. In this type the upper flowers look upwards, the middle ones are horizontal and the lower flowers droop. Although the variety is called Purpureum, the flowers are by no means always purple, but vary from pure white to deep violet.
Beautiful as this lily is when seen in perfection, we cannot regard it otherwise than as a fraud. It is one of the most difficult to grow; it is very liable to disease; it rapidly degenerates, and it is expensive. The bed of these lilies at Kew was the least effective of all the groups of lilies.