LILIES - RHS Lily Group

I love Dr North’s lilies, especially ‘Ariadne’, and my admiration increased after
visiting him and his wife, Marie, in Scotland many years ago. Chris and Marie also
stayed in my home in Oregon, en-route to their son’s wedding, years and years ago
and it was a delightful visit. As a reminder of these enjoyable times, I still have some
of his original lily slides, given to me when I was editing the NALS Yearbooks.
Chris really inspired me to breed with L. lankongense, something I am still
doing. I have found his ‘Ariadne’ (from which I have bred ‘Beguiling’, ‘Descant’
and ‘Heirloom Lace’) to be the most disease-free (and virus tolerant) of all the
L. lankongense hybrids. I think it has enough davidii to over-ride the virussusceptibility
of lankongense, and just enough lankongense to over-ride davidii’s
susceptibility to botrytis in our climate.
I did my first embryo cultures in 1971, so isn’t it a testimony to the influence of
Dr North’s work that I’m still breeding with many of his originals!
I’m also working with Barrie and Nigel Strohman in Neepawa, Manitoba to
help them propagate as many of Dr North’s hybrids as possible. I can start tissue
culture from just a bit of a bud or scale bulblet then send the test tubes to them – or
others – to grow out. I am keeping a little “mother stock” of these clones so there’s
always a healthy reservoir.
With reference to Barrie and Nigel Strohman, I was introduced to them by
Charlie Kroell at the Diamond Jubilee NALS Convention, which was held in
Edmonton, Alberta. Barrie and Nigel spoke about the collaboration with Judith
Freeman (referred to in the last paragraph) and expressed a desire to obtain more
North Hybrid bulbs. It is heartening to report that a number of other lily growers
also expressed an interest in obtaining bulbs, hence my undertaking to put them
in contact with Kirstie McManus, as, undoubtedly, the source that could supply
them with the widest range of cultivars. While discussing North Hybrids with these
growers I opined, and they agreed, that having more cultivars to work with could
– a few years down the line – result in lily displays at future NALS Conventions that
would both extend and enhance the already impressive displays.
The history of the North Hybrids has had and, hopefully, will continue to have
many contributors, but few are as important as Peter Waister as the following
salient points from an e-mail he sent me indicates:
When I retired from the Scottish Crop Research Institute, in 1988, I started a
nursery mainly to propagate the North hybrids. There was little commercial
interest from the larger propagators at that time because the lankongense hybrids
were not mass market in the sense of being florists’ lilies.
I obtained virus-tested stocks of the “North Ladies” series from the Glasshouse
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