LILIES - RHS Lily Group

Trumpet lilies
Walter Erhardt writes about the history of this group of lilies.
HE TRUMPET LILIES ARE, due to their high bud count, good garden plants. Provided
Tyou
have a light soil – they are robust and fool proof.
The description for lily hybrids from division VI is misleading, as they are not
all funnel or trumpet shaped. Pod and turban shaped blooms are also common,
depending on the ancestry of the particular parent species.
The development of the trumpet lily began by accident. In 1903, the renowned
English plant-hunter E. H. Wilson found Lilium regale, the regal lily, and
L. sargentiae in the Chinese province of Sichuan. It was not until 1910 that
sufficient quantities of these bulbs came into Europe and the USA to allow
propagation of the species to begin.
At the Farquhar nursery in Massachusetts both species stood so closely side
by side that cross pollination occurred and a natural hybrid of both Lilium regale
and L. sargentiae as parents originated in 1916. It was named L. x imperiale and
its appearance was deemed to be in between both parents. Later this hybrid was
often repeated, for example by Isabella Preston from Ontario. She called her
most successful seedling ‘George C. Creelman’, and later this same cultivar was
frequently used by continental breeders in their hybridisation programmes.
In 1913, Professor F. Scheubel was carrying out some experimental hybridisation
crossing Lilium regale and L. sulphureum. Using L. sulphureum as the mother
parent he obtained seedlings similar to L. regale, but blooming two weeks later
and having a greenish throat. The stock was sent to England and was sold by
businesses as L. x sulphurgale. Professor J. W. Crow, also from Ontario, started
hybridising L. x sulphurgale and ‘George. C. Creelman’; the Crow hybrids thus
obtained were then sold under the name L. x glorosium. These hybrids had a
greenish throat and their white was more ivory coloured. As America began to
crossbreed these hybrids with L. x imperiale, the outcome was a plant 150 to
270 cm tall, white, with a dark chocolate coloured exterior.
The actual breakthrough came in 1925, when E. Debras in New Orleans was
experimenting to see if he could obtain a hybrid between Lilium sargentiae and
L. henryi. Two lilies could not have characteristics more opposed: the first having a
white funnel-shaped flower, the other being an orange turk’s-cap lily. This hybrid
was named after the Latin name for the city of Orleans. Lilium x aurelianense or
aurelian hybrid and it bloomed for the first time in 1928. Coincidentally L. Fritsch
in Rastatt in Germany, developed exactly the same hybrid in 1932, never having
heard of aurelian hybrids before.
By backcrossing with its parent hybrids and continuing to add other funnel
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