LILIES - RHS Lily Group

Greece . . . . . . . . . . S.C. Atchley of the British Legation in Athens, future author of
‘Wild Flowers of Attica’.
India . . . . . . . . . . . . E.P. Long, Superintendent of the Government Gardens at
Simla and Delhi and C.C. Calder, Director of the Botanical Survey
of India.
And, in a category that would best be described as peripatetic, the famous plant
collectors George Forrest and Frank Kingdon Ward.
The first regular meeting of the Lily Committee was held on 11 January 1932. The
two most important subjects of discussion were the Lily Conference, scheduled
for 1933, and the contents of the first Lily Year Book. Among the proposed
contents were articles on the garden cultivation of each of the three relevant
genera, on commercial lily growing and on a lily disease; a bibliography of the
three genera (which dwindled, in the event, to a list of books in the Lindley
Library – the comprehensiveness of which can be gathered from the fact that it
omitted Redouté’s Liliacées); and a particularly ambitious project, ‘A list of species
of Lilium, Nomocharis and Fritillaria having against each species (i) a reference
to a description, (ii) a reference to an authentic plate, if one exists, (iii) the habitat,
it being indicated throughout whether the plates are coloured or not and whether
the works concerned are in the Lindley Library’. This one also dwindled as what
appeared in the Lily Year Book was a list of illustrations of lily species. The Year
Book was eventually published on October 1932 and by 22 nd November it had sold
531 copies – and nearly double that by the following March.
Two sub-Committees were set up to prepare for the Conference; one for
exhibition and one to commission the papers to be presented. The most important
of these were Krelage’s historical article on the early distribution of lilies in
Europe and Daniel Hall’s article ‘A Survey of Lily Soils’ (written in collaboration
with M.A.H. Tinker). The Lily Conference was held on 11 to 13 July 1933. Ellen
Willmott reviewed it for the Gardeners’ Chronicle, quoting the Abbé Souillet:
“He cannot understand how England could ever have been called perfide Albion,
as he found it the reverse. He was amazed by the magnificent display of lilies in
the hall…Were it not that the Lily Week had made such an indelible impression
he would have thought it the ‘dream of a Terrestrial Paradise’.”
The schedule for the competitive classes for the 1932 Conference show is of
interest, particularly in contrast to the present status of lilies at RHS shows. In
fact the competitive element has all but disappeared from exhibits of lilies in the
United Kingdom although it has become dominant in the shows of our friends
in the lily world overseas, particularly in North America, Australia, New Zealand
and Europe.
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