scvirginia said:The photo is from 1915, and when published in The Gardeners' Chronicle in 1920, apparently was still unnamed. 101 years on, it probably has a name, though I don't know what it is...
The source of this lily, as with most Chinese lilies introduced elsewhere in the world, was E. H. Wilson.
Australis said:I guess one thing to keep in mind was that at the time a lot of these plants were just being discovered and their knowledge was far less comprehensive than ours is now. I've see the same thing in orchids when I've read up on their history; plenty of plants were given varietal or species names when often they were just variations within a species (colour forms being a common example that doesn't really warrant a separate taxon).
I don't think we're going to get a concrete answer, but I think we can narrow it down based on the descriptions of the plant and bulb, at least.
Lucius93 said:Thx Virginia.
I think we should not break our heads about this lily because it's clear to me that even authors don't know what they are talking about. The early info about Chinese trumpets are all over the place and sometimes they use different name for every color variety. They even use wrong synonyms as you can see in tha last post. Leucanthum var. chloraster is synonym of var. leucanthum and not var. centifolium. Centifolium has brownish, pinkish or purplish reverse with green vein. So it's very variable. Var. leucanhum has greenish reverse. Lilium sulphureum always produce bulbils so trumpet without bulbils is not sulphureum and so far there is no sulphureum reported in Gansu. They also stated that sulphureum is not variable species which is again wrong. You have many color variations of that species: some are completely sulphur yellow, some has white flowers with yellow throat and some even has green reverse. All of these variations produce bulbils.
One more thing. They mentioned this mysterious lily doesn't produce any offset bulbs which is characteristic of leucanthum, a lily from Gansu.