Most gardeners tend to concentrate their flowering plants and bulbs in perennial borders, and this is a natural tendency since that is what borders are for.
However, when it comes to lilies, they are essentially plants best considered in terms of the overall garden, rather than as part of the border. Use them as you would azaleas – rather than as delphiniums.
True, though many are fine border plants they will be even better someplace else. They can be, and should be, to the garden what fine paintings are to a room or translated into sound – what the silvery line of the woodwinds is to the orchestra.
A Garden of Lilies
Once upon a time, in a rural village in northern Vermont, somebody planted a butternut tree. Around it, a small garden grew.
It has never been a planned garden —rather, one that has evolved with time and the varying attentions of successive generations. At some point, many years ago, a few bulbs of Lilium hansonii were set out.
They were in the sun then, but the old butternut has long since spread out over them so that, in July, literally thousands of the small, recurved, yellow blooms open and sparkle in drifting light and shadow. Needless to say, they are peculiarly lovely and satisfying in this setting.
I know of a more extensive garden with a winding driveway that approaches the house through lightly-wooded slopes in Pennsylvania. Though it is a large and planned garden, no attempt has been made for formality.
There are no clipped hedges. There are no flowering borders — simply great stretches of lawn and woodland that lead off to distant hills.
In spring, the sloping grounds that flank the driveway are afoam with the pinks, yellows, mauves, and scarlets of azaleas and as these go by, the lilies take over — great colonies of them scattered here and there.
Yellows, apricots, whites, deep reds, and violets come and go throughout the Summer. Each new group is unexpected — one comes upon it around a curve or beyond some trees as a special surprise and delight.
A Lovely Maine Garden
Probably the most beautiful, the most perfectly designed and tended garden this writer has seen is in Maine.
Since it is worthy of an article in itself, it can only be touched on here. The large garden has been carved from the woodland on a promontory into the sea.
There are brown lawns with ancient trees leading down to the blue water; there are woodland gardens so open that the horizon forms the background; there are secluded gardens where the forests are walls within, which are privacy and peace.
Azaleas and clematis dominate in their seasons, and great masses of lilies bloom throughout the Summer in all places except the spacious lawns, which are kept unbroken. Quantities of lilies have been planted in great profusion and with infinite skill.
In the woodland gardens, there are drifts and colonies of them everywhere. Sometimes they appear in the open to give a point of emphasis or color, to sharpen a line, or to make a quite unexpected picture of their own.
These are largely yellows, whites, pinks, and purples. Off through the trees, where they are seen against the blue of the sea, are the more vivid colors: Lilium tigrinum, L. superbum, and L. canadense.
In the enclosed gardens L. regale and L. centifolium, hybrids have been long established and grow to eight or ten feet against laurel and rhododendron.
Lilium auratum, L. speciosum, L. candidum, the Havemeyer hybrid, the Aurelians, and an infinite variety of others in soft or brilliant colors are planted by themselves or in borders along the winding paths.
They are never crowded, never too close to each other or other plants so that, always, each group stands out by itself and is seen quite alone.
In Connecticut
A contemporary house stands high on a bleak and windswept hill. The surrounding countryside is superb, and the hill has been left bare so as not to interfere with the view.
The garden is devoted largely to iris, and there are long flowing beds of these bucked by low-growing evergreens all along the approaches to the house.
Interplanted are L. regale, L. centifolium hybrids, L. auratum, L. speciosum, and several recent hybrids that come into flower after the iris has finished their season, thus completely changing and refreshing the garden picture.
Our grounds are relatively recent and are not. the result of a careful plan, but there have been several particularly happy periods.
The house is an informal, old farmhouse surrounded by irregularly shaped lawns that, in turn, are bordered by shrubbery that is gradually establishing itself. Lilacs and azaleas predominate.
There is no perennial border as such, but since there are so many lovely things that we are reluctant to miss, iris, peonies, dictamnus, oriental poppies, and Thermopsis are interplanted here and there against green.
We have concentrated lilies through and against the azaleas and lilacs also, and our first emphasis was on lilies for late June and early July.
It has been singularly successful, and this past year the grounds were vibrant with warm and glowing yellows, shrimp pinks, coppery-rose, oranges, starlets, and vermilions. From now on, we shall focus on the later parts of the summer.
We also have some stone steps that are flanked with large spreading taxes. Under the taxus, the lily Brenda Watts and L. superbum have been planted, and they work their way up through it year after year to hold brilliant, flowering heads high above the spreading green plumes.
We have seen three similar plantings, one in Vermont, one in Virginia, and another in Ohio, where white trumpet lilies instead were used only more nearly at the periphery of the branches so that they grow up through or stand against the evergreens.
In all of these instances, the same principle has been employed, and interest and beauty have been added to a planting that could well be either simply functional or a bit routine.
Successful Instances of Border Lilies
Several successful instances of borders devoted to lilies have evolved from like plans. I remember a relatively long border on sloping ground against a weathered stone wall in Montreal.
It is perhaps 4′ feet wide but largely irregular, with a billowing mass of Euonymus fortunei vegetus and low-spreading junipers from which the lilies rise at irregular and open intervals.
The other border is in Virginia and is more formal in design. It is placed against a clipped hedge, carpeted in low Euonymus fortunei minimus, and edged with a dwarf pungent box.
The lilies are mostly white. more closely planted and more regularly spaced. Both borders are in light shade and are amazingly successful.
From the descriptions given of actual garden sites, several principles fundamental to the truly fortunate use of lilies in the landscape are clear.
The first is simplicity. The lilies are never crowded and never cluttered with other flowering plants or even with other lilies.
The next principle is that the feeling is generally one of display — the lilies are left to stand pretty much alone in almost every instance. They rise from a base of foliage.
The third principle is that of versatility, for while lilies are dominant, they are flexible in the extreme.
Border Gardening
In addition to these observations, ilies can and should be used in the perennial border. However, certain circumstances peculiar to border gardening should be understood.
The border is the one place in the garden most frequently re-arranged, and the use of the hoe and spade is an everyday affair.
New plants are constantly being added in fall or spring when bulbs are dormant, and injury to lilies and other choice bulbs is almost inevitable unless they are carefully marked.
Likewise, competition from other plants in the border is keen, and the varieties selected should be vigorous, decisive, and clear of color.
The best lilies for this location are the following:
- Gay and early Lilium elegans
- L. umbellatum group
- L. candidum
- L. regale
- L. auratum
- L. henryi and many of the new hybrids
- Notably Brenda Watts
- Coronation
- Enchantment
- Campfire
- Parade
- The Duchess
- Dunkirk
- Barbara
- L. tigrinum
Possible combinations are infinite, and any number of associations will present themselves from one season to the next.
It is suggested that, in the process of formulating new groupings and making fresh color patterns, wherever possible, the perennials should be moved rather than the established lilies.
For once established, lilies are best left quite alone.
Great Species and Hybrids
A great many species and hybrids are of such subtle quality that they need special attention in placement. This care is worth the thought is given for the sake of the plants themselves and because of what they will do in certain situations.
Both L. japonicum and L. rebellum are delicate pink trumpet lilies. Both will take some shade as well as moisture.
Both should be seen alone, preferably against green, gray, or gray-green. Just as an orchid loses from having a gardenia placed next to it, these also do not need to be “arranged.”
All that is necessary is to make it possible for them to grow, and they will be the major garden joy of the year when they are in flower.
The same is true of the Backhouse Hybrids and L. Martagon album. All of them like partial shade and will reach six to seven feet when established.
The color range is from white, pale yellow, coppery-pink, and lustrous copper to deep mahogany.
If anything so subtly luminous can be called arresting — these lilies certainly are, and they do make anything near them seem a little drab — if indeed one can look at anything else at all.
For this writer’s taste, L. canadense, L. superb-um, and the hybrid T. A. Havemeyer are in the same general category — lilies for accent, for sharp, clear, well-defined grace, and not for combination with ether plants.
Some Pleasing Lily Combinations
On the other hand, many lilies which are striking when used alone are equally good in combination:
- L. candid rising from apricot violas or with delphinium or Thermopsis caroliniana;
- L. regale with delphinium, with pink polyantha roses against purple Clematis jackmanii;
- L. auratum with a few pale pink phlox or the second flowering of delphinium, or
- L. henryi with bronzy helenium and mauve asters.
In placement, certain cultural requirements should be borne in mind. Lilies will, for the most part, take light but not dense shade; they insist on drainage; they prefer space around them; they profit by but do not insist on a ground cover.
These generalizations, together with the garden pictures described, give several specific ideas.
For the small garden, the following possible uses are suggested.
1. Drift lilies under scattered trees on the lawn or in the woodland garden.
2. Use them to sharpen a distant corner, give clarity or bring it into focus.
3. Accent horizontal line with long, flowing drifts of the cup-shaped lilies or a vertical line with tiers of Turks-caps.
4. For bold and Ilea ranks or masses, plant them against a wall or clipped hedge.
5. Group your favorite kinds against and through irregularly shaped shrubbery borders.
6. Interplan them with peonies or iris.
7. Arrange them to rise from low-growing and spreading evergreens.
8. Grow them in a border devoted primarily to lilies.
9. Place them in 1 perennial border.
10. Finally, wherever and whenever on the grounds, there is space and need for delicacy, vitality, or the particular luminous quality of beauty that only lilies have. That’s the place to plant them.
44659 by Alan Macneil