... the 5 Tiger Lilly bulbils I was given today? Do they need acid soil?

Doing the Happy Dance here

I assume you mean Lilium lancifolium?
They don't need acid soil and the bulbils should be planted rather shallow, half an inch or so.
Do plant them as far away as you can from the rest of your lilies as they often are infected with various viruses, but they don't show symptoms themself.

Thank you, William.

As a precaution, I will keep the pot of these babies far from my other Liliums, although the lady that gave them to me has several Liliums and had never heard of L. mosaic virus before I told her about it (it was not easy for me to explain to her how infected lilies look like).

I will go plant them right away: half an inch deep.

Thanks again!

I do like the charm of the old Tiger Lily. Have fun growing the bulbils!

Thanks Della!

They are planted and were located at a consierable distance of the other Liliums.

Sounds good, Ursula In the long run it really pays to be careful with virus, so it's good you taken precautions.

While only having one casualty among lilies to virus so far, I have previously discarded dozens of Echinacea purpurea, hundreds of Primula, many peonies and among them a tree peony. I really miss the tree peony, but it had to go. Part of this problem was probably me ignoring signs for years and years, hoping for the best and while I was doing this infected plants, possibly dating back to the previous owners of the garden continued to be a source of infection.

This year I discarded all tulips of the cultivar Jan Reus after finding just one flower with broken colors. I also discarded bulbs of adjacent cultivars, just to be safe as tulips are cheap and I handle them a lot, increasing the risk of virus transferral. So now I'm a lot tougher with this, than I used to be as I know which problems it can cause.

William, are you telling me all those gorgeous plants suffer from mosaic virus as well? That would be sooooo discouraging. To battle with the rodents that come from the surrounding woods and eat my 'gourmet' plants is by far enough trouble to me!

I don't grow tulips - they are very expensive here and there is little to choose from. Besides, I think it gets too hot for them here.

Can you please tell me some encouraging factors to keep growing Liliums?

William and Ursula: correct me if I'm wrong but I think it's now been determined that lilium cannot be infected by the tulip variety TBV, nor can a tulip be infected with the lilium variety of color breaking virus LMoV.

And virii be damned - lilies still make the heart happy!

Thanks for the good news (although I don't think anybody grows tulips around here), Lorn. What about the Peonies, etc.?

Ursula, there are so many viruses around, many of these have hundreds if not thousands of possible hosts, others are more specific in their choice. I didn't remove these plants to protect lilies specifically, rather I don't want all of my tulips or other plants to be destroyed.

Generally speaking I believe most plants are - or will soon be - infected with at least one virus. Most of them can handle this, but problem arises when they get infected with several.

Ponder the following situation, you grow some plants that are infected with one virus, then you buy other plants and these happen to be infected with yet another virus. As long as they only had one, they showed no symptoms. However arriving at their new home they soon start to show symptoms as they now are infected with two viruses and this becomes too much for the plants. In this situation one perhaps blames the grower, but that may not always be completely fair.

Sorry if you thought this was discouraging, but all plants have their problem and from what I seen most hybrid lilies are rather though as I so far had far less troubles with viruses on lilies, than on other plants . At any rate a hybrid that is very susceptible to virus, will soon disappear from commerce.

I suspect the biggest danger for peonies is that they are rather long lived, and the longer you have a plant, the more likely it is to pick up different viruses.They are however usually not troubled by insect vectors, so the biggest risk of virus transferral might be the gardener.

Don't worry about this too much as it's not worth it, you may never have a problem rather just continue to enjoy your plants. There are lily hybridizers that always keep a few virused lilies around, just to make sure that their new creations has some basic resistance.