| told you wrong |
[Jun. 22nd, 2008|03:48 am] |
The clusters of Rhododendron micranthum flowers have become less globular, and more like there's a peak at the north pole.
Told you wrong that the trumpet Lily wasn't going to open today. It was partly open by daylight, fully open by early afternoon. There is only one plant with one flower. The stalk bows near the top to make the flower horizontal. It would be six feet high if it didn't bow. With the bow, it's more than four feet but less than five. The trumpet shape of the flower is long, fairly broad, not tubular, practically to the base. The petals (by which I mean petals and sepals, and eschew the term "tepals") recurve, they don't reflex, not very far from, but not too close to the tips. The flower is white, with lots of yellow in the throat, especially toward the base, and on the back green stripes along the petal edges. My bet is it's Lilium leucanthum. Typical, not v centifolium. A very beautiful Lily. More Lilies to follow, including other trumpets..
Now about Lily books. The best is Growing Lilies by Derek Fox, who lives near where the late Don Mann used to. Christopher Helm, 1985, ISBN 0-7470-1008-0. (My copy was kindly given to me by Kath Dryden after I was dumb enough to buy Lilies by the pot boiler Richard Bird.) Lilies by Edward Austin McRae, and The Gardener's Guide to Growing Lilies by Michael Jefferson-Brown and Harris Howland get it right when they copy from Fox. There are other species for which they've done original work, and other areas where they are commendable, but leucanthum is a book job, and the latter spells it "leucanthemum". Their carelessness is not as consequential as that of the surgeon who worked on my hernia (will need to have it done a third time, by another surgeon), but they left readers misinformed, and missed an opportunity for a significant update. (Fox was correct at the time he wrote that the typical variety had been lost to cultivation. It was since reintroduced from China.) |
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donhackenberry's journal
