LILIES - RHS Lily Group

century suggest otherwise as his ‘White Beauty’ is shown with a zone of purple
markings in the centre of the flower whereas today’s has orange-brown markings;
this discrepancy could however be due to the degree of accuracy of the original
artwork and/or the quality of the colour printing in the catalogue.
The other western North American species that produce offsets are
E. tuolumnense and E. multiscapoideum, and it appears that the relative
newcomer, E. taylori, might also behave in the same way. The yellow-flowered
E. tuolumnense is a superb garden plant, rapidly forming clumps and with several
bright yellow flowers in a raceme. It is little surprise that hybrids between it and
‘White Beauty’ (‘Pagoda’ is the most widespread in cultivation) are even more
prolific with offsets, although lacking some of the grace of both parents. The
species is quite restricted in the wild so is unsurprisingly not strikingly variable
but there are a few worthy of comment. Some plants of E. tuolumnense have
noticeably undulate leaf margins, others slightly glaucous grey leaves instead
of the usual clear, bright green. ‘Spindlestone Surprise’ is excellent, although to
try to define in words exactly what it is that identifies the clone is difficult; the
flower colour seems a rather clearer, brighter yellow and it is possibly flowers
more freely. The exciting discovery E. taylorii, described in 1985, also appears
to increase fairly well and consequently looks as if it might qualify as a ‘good
garden plant’. Although not unlike E. tuolumnense in general appearance the
flowers are white with large yellow centres, so large that one might equally refer
to them as yellow with white tips to the tepals.
The third of these ‘offset-producers’, E. multiscapoideum, has a choice of
epithet I have always admired. It was chosen by the eminent nineteenth century
American botanist Albert Kellogg and is exquisitely precise in its meaning; it
distinguishes between ‘multi-flowered’ (there are several suitable epithets for
this such as multiflorum, pluriflorum, polyanthum, etc.) a condition where there
would be several flowers borne in a raceme on a common stem or scape (e.g.
in some Erythronium, Fritillaria, Lilium) as opposed to ‘many-scaped’. In E.
multiscapoideum the individual flower stalks (pedicels) are long and appear to
arise at or below ground level thus giving the impression that each plant has
more than one scape. This may not be apparent in weak or young plants which
tend to have only one flower anyway. Although it appears that on publication
the epithet was spelled multiscapideum (it was first described in 1855 in the
genus Fritillaria) I wonder if that was just a ‘typo’ in the original manuscript
for it doesn’t seem to mean anything in that form whereas the ‘-oideum’ suffix
in multiscapoideum indicates ‘like’ or ‘as if’ many-scaped. All that aside, this is
an attractive white-flowered species which produces stolons rather than offsets
attached to the parent bulb so is more patch – than clump-forming. The variant
from the Pulga Bridge area of Butte Co., California, loosely known as “Cliftonii”
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