July 27, 1882.] JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 71 
27th 
Tn 
28th 
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Quekett Club at 8 p.m. 
29th 
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80th 
SUN 
8tii Sunday after Trinity. 
31st 
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1st 
TU 
2nd 
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Oxfordshire Horticultural Society. 
LILIUM GIGANTEUM. 
HE demand for this grand Lily continues so 
great that its price is still beyond the means 
of the more humble class of gardeners, other¬ 
wise it might be a common ornament of cot¬ 
tage gardens, as there is nothing in its require¬ 
ments which makes its cultivation difficult. 
It is to be hoped that so many generations of 
seedlings are now in the course of development, 
that in a few years it will become common. Raising 
plants^of it from seed to flowering size requires patience 
—more patience than the writer possesses, as about ten years is 
said to be required for the work. The process has often been 
described,'and I believe'requires but little skill. A plant which 
flowered and ripened seed out of doors last year in my garden, 
but which was p grown in a pot, produced eleven flowers on a 
stem 9 feet high, and ripened eleven pods of seed. The seeds 
are so charmingly arranged in rows for counting that a very 
easy process of multiplication gives the total, and I distributed 
amongst friends who I thought would appreciate them between 
seven thousand and eight thousand seeds from this one plant. 
The bulb which has produced a flowering stem dies, as is well 
known, after flowering, but produces about five or six offsets, 
which are from three to four years, according to circumstances 
before they flower. Early flowering—I mean as regards age, 
not season—is not to be desired in L. giganteum. The more 
that luxuriant growth is encouraged by rich deep soil and by 
spring watering, the longer deferred and the finer when it 
comes the flowering will be. 
In the autumn of 1878 I bought what was sold as a “ flower¬ 
ing bulb " of L. giganteum, then about as large as and not 
unlike a large-sized bulb of Amaryllis Belladonna. I planted 
it at once in a Lily bed made on a raised terrace, and backed 
by a wall at the north end, containing good peat 4 feet deep^ 
and planted with Ericas, Andromedas, Skimmias, and such-like 
dwarf evergreens. I have dressed it annually with leaf soil, 
and perhaps a little very old decayed manure, and with soot 
to keep off the slugs. For three years the leaves grew large^ 
dying down late in summer, but this year a huge stalk appeared 
in April, being, I should say, more than 15 inches round at the 
base, and when it had grown upwards of 10 feet high it opened 
twenty-three flowers the first week in July, all equal in size. 
One of these was knocked off—my gardener suggested by a 
jackdaw settling on it, but more likely by a gust of wind. 
Five feet of the stalk with the other flowers (as I was only 
at home for one day) I cut off and took to a village flower 
show near Chester. The cutting was no easy matter ; the 
stalk is hollow, but as tough as a green Bamboo, and I had to 
notch it round with a large and sharp garden knife for some 
depth before it would break off. I had my keeper to carry it 
at arm’s length in front of him, and luckily there was no wind, 
as it would not go inside a carriage, and of course it produced 
a sensation at the Show. The stalk is so strong and the root¬ 
ing so firm, that though the westerly gales find out my Lily 
beds, and I am obliged to tie L. pardalinum from the time it 
is a foot high to the very top of the flowerstalk, I never thought 
of giving any support to L. giganteum. I have given the his¬ 
tory of this specimen from first to last, because rules for the 
general treatment of the plant may be deduced from it. 
I have often heard of two places in the kingdom where 
L. giganteum has been established in the shrubberies in quan¬ 
tity, and grows almost without cultivation. They are Merton 
Hall in Norfolk, belonging to Lord 'Walsingham, and Gordon 
Castle in Morayshire, the Duke of Norfolk’s. On looking at 
the rain chart of Great Britain it will be seen that the rainfall 
of both these places, especially the former, is below the general 
average, and both have well-defined seasons and warm summers. 
Dry winters, late springs, and genial and even summers afford 
conditions favourable to the growth of most Lilies. These 
conditions, however, are not to be found in Cheshire, where the 
wet continues all the year round, and where a month of winter 
and of summer—last August and last January for instance— 
might often change places without anything very abnormal in 
the temperature or the rainfall. Hence the cultivation of 
Lilies in the open air in Cheshire meets with very partial suc¬ 
cess, and the frequent checks with which the plants meet in 
their growth encourage the disease called “ spot.” Still in the 
same bed in which the leaves and buds of L. auratum and 
L. Ilumboldti annually decay with spot before flowering, 
L. giganteum never showed the slightest indication of spot at 
any stage of its growth, and never took to any unkindly ways. 
I now have a good stock of offsets in different degrees of for¬ 
wardness, but, as I said above, I am not anxious to hurry them 
into flower. 
As far as I can judge no choice Lily seems to have a better 
constitution or to be more easily managed than L. giganteum, 
provided it has a rich, deep, but not too heavy soil, and a 
sheltered situation. Shelter it must have, or the large fleshy 
leaves would be torn to pieces, and the long petals of the 
flowers broken off by high winds. Still, I cannot see why the 
plant should not in time find its way into every cottage garden 
which supplies the mentioned conditions. Judging from what 
1 see both in nurseries and in private gardens, I believe there 
are millions of home-grown seedlings scattered over the country 
in a more or less forward state, and are destined to produce a 
new feature in gardening.—C. Wollky Dod. 
THE LONGLEAT VINES. 
But for the fact that numbers of readers may be expecting 
me to say something now that Mr. Taylor has told us so much 
about his Vines I would not write a single word, for although 
the Editor left the question of whether it is better to restrict 
or give latitude to young Vines, the subject under Mr. Taylor’s 
hand has broadened till it embraces everything in the cultivation 
of the Vine under glass. Under these altered conditions very 
little remains for me except to compliment Mr. Taylor on the 
able way heHias acquitted himself of the self-imposed task, 
and to congratulate the readers of the Journal on the nature 
of the information which_ has been placed at their service 
No. 109.—Yon. Y., Third Series. 
No. 1765.- VOL. LNVII1., Old Series. 
