magnolialover said:'Robina' has a low virus threshold here. Bought it on two separate occasions only to have the same outcome, trash can. Can't say any lily gets more than two chances here. Just not worth the trouble, no matter how seemingly beautiful. There must be something in the bulk of the pink OTs background, making them more susceptible.

Very nice visual example, Lorn.

I read something on Guntis Grants site about pink and pink-white cultivars being more susceptible to virus. Now this wasn't specifically about OT lilies and google translate works really bad, (and I certainly can't read Latvian so I could have misunderstood something) but I just thought I'd mention it anyway, in case you are interested: http://www.daugmaleslilijas.lv...

lilymanrob said:

I sleep fine, take a chance on what? I like them with or without the virus.

Others have explained this better than I ever could. Whatever you decide, I wish you good luck with them.

i take on board comments made re viruses.

What do you mean Rob?

I love it: a translation from English into English!

So glad I clicked this thread.
My Robinas reached a height of 78 inches the first year



It was stunning.
Now it is barely 4 feet and virused. I tried to deny this but guess I will toss them


Most of my lilies only last 3 or 4 years in spite of fertilizing and deadheading they just peter out.
Voles take out some also.

Joebass said:What do you mean Rob?

oops sorry i missed this..

it means i hear what you are saying, and will consider the arguments made against lily virus.

I couldn't tell if you meant you "take on" as in disagree or take on as in take in the info. Haha

ge1836 said:

Most of my lilies only last 3 or 4 years in spite of fertilizing and deadheading they just peter out.
Voles take out some also.

I couldn't have said it better! It just seems to me that most all new commercial cultivars created in the last 20 years or so have a relatively short life expectancy. The exception being, those developed by Judith Freeman. And, I place the blame squarely on the cut flower side of the lily business where they only care about selling budded stems at 30 months or less. Just think about it: I started a mass planting of 15 Robina back around 2006 or 7. Today, I only have one left! Compare that to an old Silk Road that stayed planted in the same hole from 1990 to 2013, when I lifted and separated it into about 40 individual plants. I'm sure several long lived old cultivars come to your mind as well. I doubt that any of the new cultivars I have in my garden today will still be there in my garden or anyone else's in 2040.

And so it is that every Fall, I still look forward to seeing what's new and beautiful in the catalogs and always find some ' I just gotta have' . Only now, it's with the understanding that whatever I buy today--may not be here 5 years from now.

Lilies just don't seem to have the number of small scale people working on them for garden presence. As you say, Lorn, it is all for cut flower, nothing else. There are a lot of times I wish we had the number of small scale lilium people as do the daylily people. There are so many opportunities in that field, no worry about cut flower there when your blossom lasts one day. It has to be bred for garden.

It is my wish that more people make their work available and sell for themselves, rather than take all to Dutch Market. We need more people like Judith, in my opinion. Hybridizing their own for garden presence.

I'm really trying to stay away from those new Dutch lilies, especially those pink ones. When my right hand starts to click my left hand gives it a good slap.

I usually need my "slap" in the middle of winter. In my experience with a lot of these new OTs, I might as well just burn my money in the fire pit. Save me the agony later when I have a paisley bloom pattern (virus waste).

I think when lilies are compared to daylilies, the daylilies win where it comes to ease of breeding. Most cultivars cross easily, seeds are big, no need to maintain a little bulb. The fat roots of daylilies are much easier to maintain. I'm not familiar with diseases of daylilies, other than rust. Lilium fields must be chemically fumigated prior to planting a crop of bulbs. Then there is virus and botrytis, lily beetle and so forth to be concerned about.

I think that if lilies were as easy as daylilies then there would be more backyard lily hybridizers.

ge1836 said:

Most of my lilies only last 3 or 4 years and they just peter out.

They're getting too old, literally. Some more I want to say about the life expectancy/life span of a lily. No lily bulb lives forever. Even in a perfect setting of all the best conditions it will die of old age eventually. It was explained to me once about what happens to the various cell structures of the bulb as it ages through each succeeding season and I grasped what I could. To make a long story short, essentially what happens is cell division becomes more irregular and new cells also become irregular shaped in increasing numbers making it less efficient and more difficult for the bulb to conduct essential functions at optimum. The plant languishes in a downward spiral.

How is this relevant to the backyard garden OT's of today? Because most OT's out there in the 'dry goods', bare root, pack of 3, market segment are outgrowths of the cut flower sector--where slow growth and maturity are not a benefit. They could care less about longevity because once the flower is cut, the bulbs are destroyed. They do every thing they can to breed, select and grow short lived plants that artificially age before their time just to beat that 30 month number. If the pedicels are a little too long to fit in a shipping container, but appears to be good for a backyard garden, package it and ship it for that purpose--then depend on customer feedback on garden hardiness and longevity.

Yep! We're the suckers/beta testers. Reminds me of the Microsoft business model.

Roosterlorn said:

They're getting too old, literally. Some more I want to say about the life expectancy/life span of a lily. No lily bulb lives forever. Even in a perfect setting of all the best conditions it will die of old age eventually. It was explained to me once about what happens to the various cell structures of the bulb as it ages through each succeeding season and I grasped what I could. To make a long story short, essentially what happens is cell division becomes more irregular and new cells also become irregular shaped in increasing numbers making it less efficient and more difficult for the bulb to conduct essential functions at optimum. The plant languishes in a downward spiral.

How is this relevant to the backyard garden OT's of today? Because most OT's out there in the 'dry goods', bare root, pack of 3, market segment are outgrowths of the cut flower sector--where slow growth and maturity are not a benefit. They could care less about longevity because once the flower is cut, the bulbs are destroyed. They do every thing they can to breed, select and grow short lived plants that artificially age before their time just to beat that 30 month number. If the pedicels are a little too long to fit in a shipping container, but appears to be good for a backyard garden, package it and ship it for that purpose--then depend on customer feedback on garden hardiness and longevity.

Does scaling a bulb/forcing another bulb to grow from meristematic cells reverse senescence in lilies? I'm guessing it should, otherwise all clones would perform terribly as the cloned bulbs would already be as senesced as the original bulb.

I am still not sure what a virused lily looks like; do they have splotchy blooms? And what do you mean lilies die of old age? Of course you keep planting the new divisions, right? If every new bulb was the same age as the original, it wouldn't be possible to have a lily business. They all would have died of old age. Maybe I just don't understand what you mean?

Yes, you do ---you just said it in a round about way. In that whole first paragraph above, I'm speaking about the aging process of a SINGLE LILY BULB, not an entire population or group. I'm eluding to the fact that older, vintage hybrid bulbs like Silk Road will live carefree for a good 20 years or more in the same spot while many of the newer hybrids look like they're 80 years old in less than 5 years.

As far as virus and diseases go, I think they get a lot more attention and discussion than they deserve. It's not something a backyard gardener needs to learn all about before they start gardening. They are, in fact, quite rare. Believe me, if you have a lily that comes down with a virus, you'll see it--it'll look sick compared to others and you'll know something is obviously wrong. But, in the meantime, if you want to study up on them in your sparetime, etc., Google 'lilium virus' and 'lilium diseases' for illustrations and so on. It's not something a person learns overnite.

caitlinsgarden said:I am still not sure what a virused lily looks like; do they have splotchy blooms? And what do you mean lilies die of old age? Of course you keep planting the new divisions, right? If every new bulb was the same age as the original, it wouldn't be possible to have a lily business. They all would have died of old age. Maybe I just don't understand what you mean?

Roosterlorn said:Yes, you do ---you just said it in a round about way. In that whole first paragraph above, I'm speaking about the aging process of a SINGLE LILY BULB, not an entire population or group. I'm eluding to the fact that older, vintage hybrid bulbs like Silk Road will live carefree for a good 20 years or more in the same spot while many of the newer hybrids look like they're 80 years old in less than 5 years.

As far as virus and diseases go, I think they get a lot more attention and discussion than they deserve. It's not something a backyard gardener needs to learn all about before they start gardening. They are, in fact, quite rare. Believe me, if you have a lily that comes down with a virus, you'll see it--it'll look sick compared to others and you'll know something is obviously wrong. But, in the meantime, if you want to study up on them in your sparetime, etc., Google 'lilium virus' and 'lilium diseases' for illustrations and so on. It's not something a person learns overnite.

Thanks for the clarification, Lorn! I'm new to working with plants in general. I'm more used to working with animals and animal tissue. When culturing animal tissue even stem cells senesce, leading to cell lines that perform worse than cell lines produced from younger stem cells. The capacity of plant cells to regenerate is astounding!

Yes, a very good explanation, Lorn, and it saves me from opening a thread to satisfy my curiosity on a related question. I have for some time wondered why the Dutch hybrids are so much easier to establish and performs much better the first year, but some from the US often seem to take more time to establish. While I had made the connection that there are different objectives in the breeding of these lilies (no one would want a lily for cutting that didn't perform well the first year, but this is less important for a garden lily), I had never thought about the life expectancy of the bulb itself and the implications this has for garden use.