Lilium

Asiatic hybrids are the easiest lilies to grow and among the first to bloom - rigid, unbranched 3-4 foot stems carry large, mostly upward- and outward-facing flowers 4 to 6 inches wide in nearly every color but blue, often with dark basal spotting. The flowers are showy and good for cutting but, unlike most other lily groups, usually have little or no fragrance. Every part of the plant is dangerously toxic to cats.

Canada lily (Lilium canadense) is the best native lily most gardeners have never grown, and the honest reasons for that are worth stating before the flowers are. It is genuinely uncommon in the nursery trade, it takes several years from seed to a flowering bulb, it resents being moved once settled, and in the wild it is going backwards. Wikipedia records heavy white-tailed deer browsing in developed landscapes as a population pressure, and both the Native Plant Trust and Utah State University Extension name a second and newer one: the lily leaf beetle (Lilioceris lilii), a Eurasian scarlet beetle established in North America since 1943 and now in nine provinces and fourteen states, has been recorded feeding on Canada lily specifically. Its larvae are the destructive stage and they feed under a shield of their own wet excrement, which is both the identifying feature and the reason people miss them until the stem is skeletonised. Set against that, the plant itself is superb. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center describes a 3-to-8-foot stem carrying tiers of flat, whorled, lance-shaped leaves and up to twenty nodding flowers in June and July, yellow on the outside and reddish-orange with dark spots inside, each hanging on a long arching pedicel. Go Botany names the ruby-throated hummingbird as its pollinator, which is exactly what a nodding, long-nectaried bell with recurved tepals is built for. Two practical facts separate it from the tulips and daffodils it shares a bulb bench with. Its bulb is a naked stack of loose scales with no papery tunic, so it dries out in storage and must go straight into the ground. And it is a stem-rooting lily - the Flora of North America treatment records stem roots present and often very many - so it is planted deeper than its own size suggests, which is the difference between a plant that persists and one that quietly declines. Note also that Missouri Botanical Garden's Plant Finder, primary source for most records in this catalog, carries seventy-eight Lilium entries and no page for this species, so this record is built on the Wildflower Center instead.

Easter lily reaches most people the way almost nothing else in this catalog does: as a forced gift plant in a foil-wrapped pot, in full white trumpet in March or April, months before its real season. Left to itself in a garden Lilium longiflorum flowers in July and August, and Missouri Botanical Garden files it under the plainer name trumpet lily. Everything about the pot version is engineered - bulbs lifted in autumn from a narrow strip of the California and Oregon coast, cooled, potted, held under a temperature schedule that lands the buds on a date that moves by up to five weeks a year, and kept short with growth retardants. That is why the plant you were given is 16 to 20 inches tall and the same plant in the ground is 2 to 3 feet. The single most important sentence in this record is not horticultural. This is the species behind the veterinary literature on feline lily poisoning: every part of it, including the pollen and the water in the vase, causes acute kidney injury in cats, less than one leaf can be enough, and untreated cases die in 36 to 72 hours. It is also the lily that enters houses in quantity, which is the whole problem. If there is a cat in the house, this plant does not come in the door. Beyond that, be clear about what it is not. It is not a hardy garden bulb in the way the regal lily in this wave is - Missouri Botanical Garden rates it zone 4 to 8, which is the most generous number in circulation for a subtropical island endemic, and much US extension guidance says 5 to 8. It is not a widespread wild species either: Kew's native range is the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, southern Japan and the Philippines, and nothing else. A globally traded flower with a natural range you could drive across in a day.

One of the oldest cultivated garden flowers, the Madonna lily is a stately summer bulb that sends up a tall, leafy stem topped by a cluster of broad, outward-facing, pure-white trumpet flowers with golden-yellow anthers and a powerful sweet fragrance in early-to-mid summer. It is grown for that classic white trumpet and heady night scent. Two things make it unusual among garden lilies: its culture is the reverse of nearly every other lily (it is planted shallow in late summer and forms an overwintering leaf rosette), and like all true lilies every part of it is highly and often fatally toxic to cats.

Regal lily (Lilium regale) is the trumpet lily that actually works, and the two hard cautions come first because they are the ones that decide whether you should plant it. Every part of a true lily - tepals, leaves, stem, and the loose orange pollen that drops off the anthers onto a windowsill or a cut-flower table - causes acute kidney injury in cats, and the dose is small enough that grooming pollen off a coat has done it; in delayed cases the reported mortality runs from 50 percent to total. And Missouri Botanical Garden names the lily leaf beetle (Lilioceris lilii) outright in this species' problems list, which for gardeners across the northeastern United States and eastern Canada is now the defining fact of growing any Lilium at all. Past those two, the news is unusually good. Regal lily is the easiest and most forgiving of the trumpet lilies: strong 3-to-5-foot stems carrying up to 25 white trumpets 6 to 8 inches long, yellow in the throat and flushed purple outside, powerfully scented after dark. Missouri Botanical Garden records it as more drought tolerant than most lilies, it accepts limy ground that Oriental lilies refuse, and it is one of very few lilies genuinely worth raising from seed - sow it and you can have flowers in the second or third year, from a plant that carries none of the mosaic virus its sibling the tiger lily spreads. The whole garden population descends from one Sichuan valley. Ernest Henry Wilson found it above the Min River in 1903 and went back in 1910 for 6,000 bulbs; a landslide caught his sedan chair, broke his right leg in two places, and left him with a permanent limp he called his lily limp.

Tiger lily (Lilium lancifolium) is the lily you should think hardest about before planting, and the reason is not the plant itself. It is a near-universal symptomless carrier of the lily virus complex, above all cucumber mosaic virus, the pathogen gardeners know as lily mosaic. Tiger lily shrugs it off and looks perfect while carrying it; aphids move it to the Asiatic and Oriental hybrids nearby, and those streak, mottle, distort and decline with no cure available at any price. Missouri Botanical Garden's own note on the genus is blunt about that asymmetry: prompt aphid control is highly recommended, since there is no cure once infection occurs. The long-standing advice in lily circles follows from it - keep tiger lily well away from other lilies, or do not grow it at all near a collection you care about. Everything else about the plant is easy. It is a 3-to-6-foot stem-rooting lily with nodding, unscented, orange flowers heavily spotted in near-black, recurved right back on themselves, opening in July and August. It is one of the toughest lilies in cultivation, hardy well into the cold north, and it is the only common garden lily that reproduces from BULBILS - small purple-black bulbs formed one to three at a time in the leaf axils, which drop, root and become new plants. The North American plants are almost all sterile triploids, so seed is not the story; the bulbils are, and they are also how it escapes. Kew's rows flag forty-one introduced occurrences, from Alabama and Louisiana to Maine and Ontario and across much of Europe and Russia. Two more things belong on the label. Every lily in this group is severely toxic to CATS, including the pollen. And Lilioceris lilii, the scarlet lily leaf beetle, has spread across the northeast and eastern Canada and will strip this plant to bare stems.