Lycoris squamigera is a tough one!

When I left the garden shown in the Lycoris squamigera in a country garden series, I was carrying a bag of Lycoris squamigera bulbs. My hostess offered them to me with the comment that they had been dug earlier in the spring. As she returned from the house with the bulbs, my expectations rose because she had a plastic grocery bag with what seemed to be a muskmelon-sized lump. As soon as she handed the bag to me, my hopes were dashed: the bag weighed about as much as a peanut and, as a discrete squeeze revealed, seemed to contain only chaff.
When I got to the car, I took a closer look. Yes, the bulbs were extremely desiccated; but they seemed to have a solid core. Maybe a bit of life lurked in some of them.
I soaked them at the first chance, and something amazing happened. Within a few hours those bulbs went from featherweight ghosts to heavy, plump, seemingly normal bulbs. I was amazed, although I should not have been. I’ve known Nerine to do the same thing: shrink down from a two inch diameter bulb to a pencil-thin core during the dry season and then miraculously plump up with the first good soaking.
Those Lycoris squamigera bulbs are not wasting any time: they are already sprouting new roots!

Lycoris squamigera in a country garden

At about this time last year I stumbled upon a small country garden full of Lycoris squamigera. A knock on the door of the house did not bring an answer, and I was reluctant to enter the garden without permission. It was very tempting, especially since the garden was unfenced and very welcoming.

I was in the same area this weekend and took a detour from my planned route to see if I could find this same garden this year. Not only did I find it; this time the mistress of the garden was on hand to invite me in and tell me a bit about the history of the garden and its plants. I was probably there for about two hours: an hour and forty-five minutes chatting and fifteen minutes photographing plants.

I would not be surprised to hear that others have seen similar gardens in the small towns nestled in farming country across the land. The garden I visited Friday was bright with phlox, August lilies, physostegia, perennial herbaceous hibiscus and balloon flower. But the real show came from the hundreds of Lycoris squamigera.

I hope everyone enjoys these pictures. They are a glimpse of a form of gardening which is probably slowly disappearing. And only someone with very deep pockets indeed would be able to plant Lycoris squamigera in this quantity now.

For more images, take a look here:

http://jimmckenney.com/Lycoris%20squamigera%20iacg.htm

Be sure to click on the images to see the enlarged version.

Lycoris longituba

The genus Lycoris has had an interesting history in our gardens. Some, such as Lycoris squamigera and L. sanguinea, were well known in New England gardens a century ago. Others, such as L. radiata, became naturalized in the Gulf states. L. squamigera became the common Lycoris of the North and L. radiata became the common species in the South. Other species were imported occasionally, but the stocks were typically mixed, there were the usual problems with accurate nomenclature, and commercial nurserymen here in the US did not take them up enthusiastically. Nor, it seems, did the gardening public. Was there ever a "Lycoris Society" ? I don't think so. One Sam Caldwell made a stir about forty years ago by showing a nice range of hybrids. Few people back then had ever seen a Lycoris seed, much less a home grown hybrid. Nothing permanent seems to have come from Caldwell's work.

Now there are probably more varied Lycoris available than at any time in the past. Hardy yellow-flowered Lycoris, long a holy grail of Lycoris enthusiasts, are now readily available. More to the point, there are now several Lycoris forms readily available which set viable seed: these promise an even brighter future for these plants in our gardens.

The plant shown here, Lycoris longituba, is a relatively new arrival in my garden. These were obtained in 2007 and are blooming here for the first time this year. This Lycoris longituba is said to be a good species, good in the sense that it sets viable seed which, if grown on, produce more Lycoris longituba. But from what I've read, the cultivated stocks seem to be variable.

The catalog description led me to expect white-flowered plants. Indeed, from a distance they do look white. But close up it becomes apparent that the color is more complex: the white is suffused with orange and yellow, giving an orange-juice-in-milk effect. It's very beautiful.

The fragrance of this one is pleasant, a quality it does not share with all of its relatives. The plant we call Lycoris squamigera, for instance, has a scent which to me is the scent of vinyl.

For the future: there are at least two different (purportedly) yellow-flowered species growing here: I'll show those when and if they bloom.

What triggers bloom in Lycoris? So far, it seems to be an unsolved mystery.

Oporanthous bulbs

I think I stumbled on a useful word the other day. I had to make it up, but since I did that in the conventional way, it would not surprise me to discover that someone in the past had already wandered down the same path. The word is oporanthous, meaning flowering in late summer, and it describes exactly those late-summer blooming bulbs such as Lycoris which catalogs tend to misleadingly describe as autumnal. It was a question about the meaning of the word as a Latinized botanical name which led me to it; I merely anglicized it.

We don't really have a term to describe these plants, and there are several of them. A collected suite of them in a corner of the garden makes for a rush of interest before the main flush of autumn bloomers begins. Autumn doesn't start until the third week of September, and many of the plants which deserve to be called oporanthous have finished blooming in our climate by then.

Under my conditions, Lycoris are the preeminent oporanthous bulbs. Earlier this week I drove back out to western Virginia to photograph the plants of Lycoris squamigera seen there last weekend. This area is about one hundred miles west of home. I found the plants without trouble, but I had overlooked one important consideration. The small town where I was searching was essentially a bedroom community: I knocked on four doors without a single answer. I wasn't about to barge into gardens uninvited (although none was fenced), but one of the gardens was attached to a deserted house up for rent. That one I did enter and photograph. In that garden the Lycoris squamigera had been planted in a long row in a field; the row was perhaps a hundred feet long and full of bloom from end to end. I caught the plants in full bloom. They were shorter than the plants in my home garden, and the color of the flowers was a bit different, too: the pink buds showed a stronger blue flush (but not as much as is seen in Lycoris sprengeri) and the flowers in full bloom had a pink color with an underlying tawny quality in contrast to the relatively pure, cold pink color of the flowers of the plants at home. All of the plants seen in flower in this town seemed to be the same, and all together I saw hundreds of blooming scapes, perhaps a thousand. As I stood there looking at the plants, I could not help laughing: they reminded me of an incident many years ago when I was offered some pink-flowered bearded iris with the caveat that they were the color of women's undergarments.

Although I didn't get photos of the well placed clumps in better tended gardens, I did get photos of the plants in the field row.

If you have only seen Lycoris squamigera in bloom as a single blooming stem, you probably have no idea of the powerful presence it can be when blooming in its hundreds. I've known and grown this plant all my gardening life, and I'm still impressed whenever I see a freely flowering planting. And there is something touching about these mass plantings because in many cases the person who planted them is probably long gone. Such largesse is not achieved overnight. Further evidence that the plants have outlived their planter is suggested by the often odd ways they relate to the gardens which now surround them: they have the potential to be a dominant garden presence during their season of bloom, but as often as not seem to be placed as an afterthought. But the Lycoris were probably there first, and the garden which now surrounds them is probably the afterthought.

An old seed catalog I have (do any of you remember the Rex Pearce Seed Company of New Jersey?) offers seed under the name Lycoris squamigera - with the warning that supplies are dependent on their Chinese supplier. I have never heard of this plant setting viable seed, but the ways of nature are often mysterious.