Lilies: How baby lilies relocate, 1 by wallaby1

wallaby1 wrote:
Leftwood, I had been thinking of the vertical lines on my Lilium bulblets, I know they are not contractile, but do wonder if there is another means of expansion in the absence of contractile roots.

kooger, thanks for all the info, and inspiration, now we will all have to try it!

intercessor, that is a great link on the srgc! And people kill ants, little do they know what damage they may be doing to their natural environment. My neighbour only has to see an ant and she poisons them, they do go into her house but she keeps honey close to the back door, I couldn't even try to tell her to change her habits!

I have had a steady increase of ants in my garden over the last 3 or 4 years, this year I have ant mounds by the dozen in some places, but they do me no harm and I'm sure they have their uses. I took a palm from it's pot last year in the greenhouse, out fell an ant's nest with all their pupae. I placed the plant back, the ants went to work and gathered up all their young into a pile next to the nearest pot to it with another palm the same. Then they proceeded to move them systematically back into the original pot. What marvellous co-ordination they had, safety first, I felt they were extrememly good parents! Some buttefly or moth caterpillars are also taken to ant's nest by the ants, they then proceed to live on the pupae, nature is so complex!

It was interesting to see how the bulbs elongated themselves trying to go deeper. I had taken a young bulb from the side of my Hymenocallis Sulphur Queen, it was difficult to remove from the pot so I dug down, sliced between the parent and the bulb, and pulled. There was a small base in place which appeared to be making nodules ready to root, and a couple of layers of bulb around it which had detached. I planted it at about the same level as it had been, the leaves remained green for some time then died back a week or so ago, although the parent bulb hasn't gone dormant. I lifted it as I was sending it to someone. The intact bulb in the centre had elongated quite a bit, leaving the surround detached layers much higher. The basal area had also grown noticeably more bumpy nodules, ready to take root. It would seem to me that the energy in the leaves, which were reasonable in size, had transferred to preparing the bulb and roots for growth, exhausting the reserves, then dying back. A good reason not to cut off the leaves? I have heard so often that you should cut off leaves in order to preserve energy, I'm not so sure.

LAKelley, so nice to have your Grandmothers plants, and you are so lucky to have a Crinum amabile! It was a C X amabile with purple foliage I had longed to have, and the purple one I had and stupidly lost was a heartbreak! It was doing OK for a start, then suddenly gave up the ghost, just too cold a winter for it, I would bring it inside if I had the chance again!

One I bought last year was C amoenum which looks similar to your other one, very pretty, it didn't do much last year at all, a mature bulb can take some time to re-establish and last summer was cold. This year it has started to move, and is just putting on a bit bigger green leaves. The two I had survive from young plants I got in early June last year were on finger thicknes, they have really started to put on some good growth. They are Ellen Bosenquet and Summer Nocturne.

Here is C amoenum

http://aolsearch.aol.co.uk/image?query='crinum amoenum'

This I took of my two young ones, the smaller one in the middle is C amoenum