From “Lilies: The Next Generation” in Lilies: Beautiful Varieties for the Home and Garden by Naomi Slade:
“The Victorian passion for botany is legendary. Daring chaps dashed around the globe and new species poured into gardens to the delight and amazement of all who beheld them.
“But gather plants together and, sooner or later, hybrids will emerge; sometimes naturally but often as a result of an irrepressible human desire to improve on nature. While fabulous, lilies had gained a reputation for being challenging and capricious to cultivate. They were exciting; they were expensive; and they were quite likely to die on you after a couple of years. Inevitably, they attracted a certain type of well-heeled horticultural brinksmanship, right up until amenable Lilium regale emerged, bringing down both prices and the level of skill required to cultivate this most desirable of flowers.
“The backroom boys of experimental horticulture were already on the case, however, and as early as 1869, Francis Parkman, a hobby horticulturist in Boston, had successfully crossed L. auratum and L. speciosum….. Progress accelerated and by the Second World War the hunt for better, brighter, more glamorous and, crucially, more reliable flowers was well underway.
“The man who really kick-started the lily revolution was Jan De Graaff. In the late 1930s he gathered the best forms of the species and the available hybrids of the time and began a largescale programme of hybridization at his nursery, Oregon Bulb Farms. In 1941 he struck gold with ‘Enchantment’, a variety that is still with us today. The legions of plants that followed were a revelation: a reliable, spectacular and versatile legacy that has been taking the world by storm ever since.”
Hello!
This is the second of three posts with photographs of the Oriental lily Lilium speciosum — also known by the names Japanese Lily and Japanese Show (or Showy) Lily. The first post is Lilium speciosum, the Japanese Show Lily (1 of 3). As with the previous post, my photographs show this lily in a variety of lighting conditions, where fast-moving clouds switched the sun on and off, or I took photographs near the sides of their monument where they were shaded by nearby trees or by the monument itself.
Here are three photographs of that monument — one of the oldest in Oakland Cemetery, located in its nineteenth-century Original Six Acres — from a set of images we’ll explore in the third post. As you can see from the photos, approaching the monument from different sides can mean taking advantage of varying kinds of light, to produce photographs that demonstrate the effects of full sun, full shade, side-lighting, or backlighting on this lily species. These conditions provide different micro-climates for observing the lily’s growth and flowering, and also let photographers experiment with the effects of different environments on images and color reproduction.
The excerpt from Lilies: Beautiful Varieties for the Home and Garden above introduces two important contributors to early and modern lily breeding, Francis Parkman and Jan De Graaff. Parkman — more commonly identified as an adventurer, historian, and author of The Oregon Trail — was also an avid horticulturalist. De Graaff — a member of the De Graaff family whose horticultural and flower breeding businesses extended from the 1720s in the Netherlands to the mid-twentieth century in Oregon — was noted for his lily expertise, and the family business was involved in breeding and selling not only lilies, but also daffodils, irises, and tulips for more than three centuries. De Graaff’s lily expertise led him to an appreciation of one of Parkman’s singular contributions to lily hybridization, crossing the two botanically significant species Lilium auratum and Lilium speciosum — both of which contained substantial genetic material that has informed much subsequent lily development.
In his book Lilies, De Graaff describes Parkman’s contribution like this:
“Crosses between auratum and speciosum are among the most important and are the loveliest of the new garden lilies. Some have been produced in New Zealand, others in Australia, and many in Oregon….
“But it is of considerable historical interest that this cross was one of the first ever made between two species of lilies. Francis Parkman, the American historian, growing both species in Boston, pollinated a number of L. speciosum flowers with pollen from L. auratum. The cross must have been made about 1864 or 1865, for the seedlings flowered in 1869….
“Of these seedlings all but one looked exactly like L. speciosum. The one exception was spectacular, a plant with scented foot-wide flowers having segments crimson on the inside, with a white edge. Parkman increased the stock of bulbs by offsets, and then sold them, about fifty, to the great English nurseryman, Anthony Waterer. The lily was named L. X parkmanni. It became infected with virus disease and was totally lost. The cross was repeated, or one very like it, in England by P. S. Hayward in 1914 and by other gardeners elsewhere, but all these earlier auratum X speciosum lilies were lost, owing to virus disease or to some other accident. Real stocks of bulbs of such fine garden lilies were not propagated until the last decade or two.”
This excerpt acknowledges Parkman’s accomplishments, while elsewhere in the book, its cultural importance is recognized. The book’s introduction describes how “the cultivation of LL. auratum and speciosum in mid-nineteenth-century England, [created] an horticultural furore and a craze for these flowers which thus displaced the old lilies and became the lilies par excellence.”
This history, then, not only gives us a short tour through the ups and downs of lily hybridization, but also locates their cultural impact. Parkman’s original crosses were produced, then lost, then resurrected in different forms, and along the way a hybrid was produced — Lilium x parkmanni — that was distinctive enough to be treated as a separate cultivar and named after its progenitor. At the same time, subsequent expectations for lily hybrids were permanently altered from earlier, less dramatic forms to forms and colors like those of Oakland’s Lilium speciosum descendants — large, multicolored, complex, and vibrant plants that now adorn our memorial and personal gardens. That the botanical history of this turn towards more striking lilies coincided with the early development and landscape planning of Victorian garden cemeteries is something we’ll explore in the next post in this series.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
