Freak Show
Anne Jaeger
Take a good look at that Casa Blanca lily, will you? One hundred, yes, 100 blooms on one huge stalk. Incredible, huh? One look and it makes me wonder “how’d that happen?” Oh, and more importantly where can I get one? This photo from Lake Oswego gardener Libby Noble had me stumped. What made the lily produce so many flowers in a fan shape all across the top? Noble looked for all sorts of explanations since it first happened in 1998. She speculates: “That was the year I started using that new fertilizer….” hoping the miracle elixir might provide a reason for her beautiful lily.
She remembers this freak of nature bloomed that year and then grew “very spindly, like it just burned itself out” the next.
Nobody would have believed Libby Noble’s story of a lily with a hundred flowers on one stem, without proof. And that is how she roped me in a full five years later: “Anne, take a look at this lily I grew” Libby said as she set the hook. That was it. The hunt for answers was on.
Luckily, I didn’t have to go far. The plant geneticist at The Lily Garden in Vancouver, Washington knew all about it. Sharon Mongue (rhymes with “tongue”) does tissue culturing on the lilies bred by plant geneticist Judith Freeman. The women make fantastic hybrids that don’t appear in nature, like crossing an Oriental lily with a trumpet lily, a hybrid, called an “orien-pet.” They play with the plant on the cellular level. But what we have here is not the result of cloning in a test tube or petri dish. This freak show is the result of “gemination” which is the act of making duplicates. Now, in Libby Noble’s case, the duplicates made duplicates! As Mongue explains it “Instead of the bulb sending up three or four separate stalks with flowers growing along the top of each one, the plant glues the stalks all together into one. Think of the lily like conjoined twins.” That fan shape stalk (which is called “palmate” in the plant world) is the result of webbing all those lily stems together. Congratulations Mrs. Noble your Oriental lily has just given birth to Siamese Twins 50 times over!
Okay, okay. So that explains what it is, but not how it got that way. After all, every florist on the planet could sell a zillion of these gems created by gemination. Libby Noble would have her own cottage garden industry.
Unfortunately, germination isn’t easily replicated. The folks at the Lily Garden say they’ve seen it before and it’s triggered by chemical sprays. The herbicides mess with the plant’s genetics without killing it. Mongue says just a whiff of Round-Up or 2-4-D late in the season makes some strong bulbs go bonkers. The “damage” done by the hint of spray percolates all winter inside the bulb and alters its cells. The next year you either get quite a show or a bulb that’s a no show.
Of course nobody would purposely spray their favorite lilies. Neither did Libby Noble. After giving it some thought, Noble says the explanation does makes some sense “I’m fanatical about sprays, but I remember the neighbors were landscaping at the time and my gardeners did use some Round-Up then.” They were fighting some stubborn weeds poking out of some rocks in her garden.
Problem solved. To me, the explanation is the good news. We’ve got a need to know about lilies like this. The bad news is we’d have to darn near kill to get one!
“Your Northwest Garden with Anne Jaeger” airs at 7 p.m. Saturdays on KGW (8). Contact Jaeger through her Web site, www.gardengal.tv
