LILIES - RHS Lily Group

Above left, Lilium callosum var. flaviflorum at Yurigahara Park. The lily was
collected on Okinawa Island and propagated by scaling.
Above right, two different lilies share a niche together in the wild:
L. callosum var. flaviflorum (right) and L. longiflorum (left).
Their parents told me that the slope of island used to be turned pink by flowers
of L. japonicum every early May when they were their children’s age. In those
days the islanders all went up the mountain together each autumn, to clear-fell
one evergreen forest plot for firewood for cooking. This worked on a 20-year
rotation, taking 20 years to clear each plot in turn around the island. This system
was environmentally optimum for the full life cycle of the lily, from germination
to seed dispersal. But as bottled gas became common on the island the evergreen
forests were neglected, bamboo thickets covered the hillsides, and L. japonicum
rapidly lost its habitats.
Hard-up junior high school students have still been able to collect reasonable
numbers of flowering L. japonicum from the hillsides, and it’s been a tradition
to sell these to the islanders, so as to help fund the school trip. This has been
important for those old people who were unable to go to the hillside – they
could enjoy the L. japonicum season with a vase of the flowers brought by the
students. So in the hope of perpetuating L. japonicum, in gratitude for the lily’s
beauty and to follow in the tradition, the island’s people now continue thinning
and trimming in the dense jungle of evergreen broad-leaved forest, to promote
the lily’s seeding and growth.
When horses were kept as a source of power for cultivation, Miscanthus
sinensis (Japanese silver grass) and Imperata cylindrica (cogon grass) growing
on the slopes between the forest and the lowland fields were cleared out and
used for litter, thatch and fodder. Trees and branches in the forest near human
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