Report on LILIES — 1955 
Looking back over the past lily-flowering season 
I find that without doubt the greatest advance was 
in good yellow hybrids of almost every type of lily 
we raise. The season opened with a beautiful stand 
of L. Golden Chalice Hybrids flowering on our 
mountain isolation farm. Coming almost one hun- 
dred percent true from seed, this lovely strain seems 
to have caught the fancy of the gardeners of our 
country. As wholesale growers we do not often hear 
of successes with our bulbs, but on this one item 
many complimentary reports have reached us. 
Then, no sooner had these golden yellow, upright 
lilies flowered, than we had the great satisfaction of 
seeing once more our new lemon-yellow Mid-Cen- 
tury Hybrids in their full glory. Prosperity, Felic- 
ity and Destiny, the three clones we have named, 
are lilies of distinction. They are hardy, of easy 
culture, tall and graceful and they have that hard- 
to-get color, a pale lemon-chartreuse-yellow that 
lights up the garden. These lovely lilies were soon 
followed by other types—the yellow Fiesta Hybrids 
with pendant flowers and by the yellow star-shaped 
uprights that we intend to classify among our 
Hollywood Hybrids. Eventually, the best among all 
these lilies will be named and, in a year or two, we 
shall introduce them commercially. 
When these later-flowering yellows disappeared 
from the scene, the new batch of Aurelian Hybrids 
came into flower—to surprise us with a really glo- 
rious group of lemon and golden yellows. Again, 
this group is as yet too new for naming and com- 
mercial introduction. We offer a few of them that 
are a giant form of what we used to call L. Henry 
citrinum. These will be found in our current catalog 
among the Aurelian lilies—‘“Sunburst Type’ — 
lemon-yellow selections. The others, which vary 
shape from the true recurved Henryi type, in colors 
that range from pure white to deepest reddish or- 
ange, to the large star-shaped flowers, to the bowl- 
shaped ones, and finally, to the true trumpet forms, 
all in similar colors, are of such overpowering 
beauty and of such richness of form and color that 
they dazzled all of us. The five hundred most beau- 
tiful among them were carefully lifted, scaled and 
will be perpetuated as clones, for further study and 
observation. The others we simply left in the ground 
in order to study them again next year. If late 
spring frosts—always a danger here among the 
foothills of Mount Hood—should not hurt the buds, 
then, next season this field of several acres should 
be one of the outstanding sights in American horti- 
culture. 
Before I leave the subject of yellow lilies, I should 
mention some exceedingly fine pure golden yellow 
non-bleaching trumpet lilies of the true Regal type. 
We have a number of them now, enough to produce 
a true-breeding strain. The day is not far off when 
such golden Regals can be supplied at a compara- 
tively low cost. 
Page 32 
Pink is the other color that has given us con- 
siderable concern, pleasure and surprises. As we all 
know, the demand for pink lilies far exceeds the 
supply. We know too that every breeder and dealer, 
as well as every customer, puts a different inter- 
pretation on what is or should be a pink lily. As 
far as true pink goes, the pink of the dog-rose or of 
tulip Clara Butt, there is, of course, no such thing 
in lilies. Of fuchsia-pink flowers we have many and 
they come in varying degrees of suffused and mar- 
ginal color accents. Out of the rather faint pink 
coloring that is sometimes found in our L. centi- 
folium “Olympic Hybrids” and in related strains, 
we have segregated and inbred a group of fine 
trumpet lilies that we market as L. centifolium 
“Pink Selections.” The best and darkest among 
them, carefully tagged while in flower and trans- 
planted in the fall of 1951, presented an entirely 
different appearance when they flowered here once 
more in 1952. They were still a nice fuchsia-pink 
and, generally speaking, had good form, but they 
were not nearly as intensely colored as we remem- 
bered them. The inevitable conclusion then is that 
the mere act of transplanting reduces the intensity 
of the color. Additionally, hot summer days and 
warm nights tend to bleach the buds, even before 
they have opened. We know, however, that we are 
on the right track with these lilies for new seedlings, 
flowering for the first time in 1952, showed a high 
percentage of better colored “pinks.” But what 
made our past season even more exciting, we found 
that in the hybrids between the best Aurelians and 
the best pinks we are getting a strain of non-bleach- 
ing pink trumpet lilies of an ethereal beauty. 
Again, we are cloning these new ones and they 
will not be put on the market until a few years 
hence. We mention them here for three reasons— 
one, because we are very proud of them. Another 
reason is to give this parentage of new pink lilies 
as a broad hint to all our friends who hybridize 
lilies as a profession or a hobby. The road to better 
pink trumpet lilies is apparently along the lines 
suggested by Monsieur Debras and by those gar- 
deners at Kew who raised the first Aurelians. The 
third reason why I mention all these fine lilies that 
are not yet for sale is to entice you to come and 
visit our farms during the 1953 flowering season. 
These lilies that we raise, however good they are, 
do not sell themselves. We need the advice of gar- 
deners from all parts of our country. We stand 
badly in need of their constructive criticism. We 
have chosen a position in this wonderful profession 
of ours and that is not to emulate the example of 
the lily specialists that cater only to the connois- 
seurs and collectors. We leave this to Messrs. Barr 
and Constable and Wallace in England and to our 
lily-specialist friends in the retail field here in this 
country. Our aim is to produce large quantities of 
easily-grown, hardy and vigorous garden lilies for 
the discriminating nurseries, dealers and mail-order 
houses of our country. To this end we have again 
