REPORT ON LILIES 
The 1949 growing season was, in many respects, the 
best we have encountered in some twenty years of lily 
production. Not only was the weather ideal during the 
flowering season, but it was also all we could have 
wished for during the entire growing season and the 
harvest. While many new hybrids flowered, this year 
there were no startling developments nor did we, in- 
deed, expect any. The seedlings which will flower in 
1950 should show some remarkable advances, if the few 
flowers that appeared during the past summer are any 
indication. Our hybridizing program now covers many 
new lines of breeding. The quantities of seed that we 
have raised during the past year are truly astounding. 
If we can raise all this seed to its flowering stage, then 
some magnificent seedlings must certainly occur. 
It serves, of course, no purpose to speak about these 
seedlings as yet unseen. I mention them only to you as 
an inducement to visit our farms during the flowering 
season. Why not be among the first to see these new 
lilies as they come into flower? That there will be some 
of great merit is entirely beyond doubt. During the 
1949 season, for instance, for the second time we had a 
fine batch of new golden yellow lilies, the result of 
crosses between hybrid L. tigrinum and L. amabile lu- 
teum. The strong-growing, pure golden forms of the 
latter, which we have been able to segregate from among 
thousands of seedlings, crossed with the best of our 
Tiger lily hybrids, have produced new varieties of sur- 
passing beauty. Many of them are very rapid growers 
and it will not be long before we can market them. 
Other achievements that are a definite reality are L. 
Henryi hybrids of pale but pure canary yellow coloring 
and enormous size. We flowered more than 500 of such 
lilies during the 1949 summer. Our lines of breeding in 
this strain are well established and we can make more of 
them “to order”. A few of the L. Henryi hybrids of the 
Sunburst type showed a definite two-toned effect. Sev- 
eral of them were of a delicate rose-pink coloring and 
others came in rich ivory-white color. Some of them 
were small, others large, some faded and others im- 
proved in coloring in the hot sun. Altogether this Sun- 
burst strain of ours holds promise of being one of the 
most popular garden plants of the future. 
Other L. Henryi hybrids of great merit are the series 
of orange-throated trumpet or semi-trumpet lilies that 
we call our Heart’s Desire strain. Numerous lilies of this 
type flowered for the first time during the past summer 
and the strain is now so well established that we can 
produce them in quantity. Our aim is to intensify the 
orange coloring, to keep the trumpets rather short and 
to have all the plants of good size with five to seven 
feet stems and numerous, well-placed flowers. That 
Pace 10 
many of these Heart’s Desire types have bulbils in the 
axils of the leaves, undoubtedly a characteristic inher- 
ited from a distant L. Sargentiae ancestor, is an addi- 
tional, most desirable trait. 
The Golden Clarion strain, our third type of L. Henryi 
hybrids, is withdrawn from our current offerings. We 
are making great strides with this strain, but the tran- 
sition from our old collection, which leaned heavily on 
ivory and palest yellow shades, to the new lilies, which 
are truly yellow and golden in color, is too great. We 
can now see that, compared to what it can still become, 
the old Golden Clarion strain is insignificant. We there- 
fore have concentrated on the raising of more of the 
deeper colored lilies and should have ample stock avail- 
able in the near future. 
Among the true trumpet lilies we have made several 
great advances. More and more of our work attains per- 
spective and the various types that we have set as our 
ideals are now emerging in ever increasing quantities. 
Working with these trumpet lilies makes us realize with 
regret that not more scientific work has been done to 
identify the species that are involved in these hybrid 
strains of ours. We feel almost certain that L. regale did 
not play a role in their production. Rather, lilies like 
our “Olympic Hybrids” are the result of crossing L. 
Sargentiae, a good form of L. leucanthum var. centi- 
folium and L. myriophyllum var. superbum with per- 
haps several other true species. Some forms which 
emerge indicate the possibility that L. Brownii and a par- 
ticularly beautiful form of it must have been involved. 
Be that as it may, the Olympic Hybrids that flowered for 
the first time in 1949 were more beautiful than any we 
have seen in the past. 
A field of more than seven acres, the upper field of 
what we call the Woodcock farm, was planted exclu- 
sively to Olympic Hybrid seedlings, all of them the re- 
sult of hand-pollinated crosses. It is from this field that 
we expect to make the bulk of our deliveries for the 
1950 season. No stock older than that which first flow- 
ered in 1948 is being retained, except for some especial- 
ly selected strains and clones. Among the latter are our 
Green Mountain strain and the unbelievably beautiful 
Green Dragon lilies. Quite well illustrated in our color 
poster, the latter seem to be an entirely new “break” or 
mutation. The Pink Selections continue to delight every 
visitor to our farms. Under Pacific Coast conditions they 
are of a rich and sparkling fuschia-pink, deeply veined 
and suffused throughout the entire trumpet. The de- 
scription adopted by some of our customers, “the out- 
side of the graceful trumpet has shades of purple to pink 
which show faintly through the white”, is a gross under- 
statement from our Pacific Coast point of view. There is 
