The Lilies

by PATRICK MORGAN

NEIL was fourteen years old when he came to work for me in early May. “Do you know anything of gardening?” I asked him.

“I know vegetables a little, mais pas les bouquets.”

“The bouquets are more difficult. I hope to raise lilies. They are very difficult according to the books.”

“Does monsieur garden with books?” Neil looked alarmed. He sensed his job might involve book study, and school had been a hardship. “I can read, of course,” he added, and adjusted the shoulder strap of his very new overalls.

“You have overalls that are plenty big, Neil.”

“On account that they are new. With washing they will shrink.” He was glad I had noticed his investment toward his first pay-job.

Summer brought the summer residents. These migrants were very kindly toward my new interest. I hose who had old established gardens hastened to send me plants. Most of these gifts did not happen to further my work with lilies; for my books stated that true lilies were all bulbs and the genus did not include other plants that might commonly be called lilies.

One very old character, a botanist, came with a small package. “Acting man,” he said, “ you have cut out for yourself a lot of trouble if what I hear is true.” He told me he had differentiated over twenty kinds of wild roses in these parts. And he told me of many plants both native and foreign that he had cultivated. “Have you ever seen white fireweed ? ”

“ No,” I said.

“ In Maine it is not so rare, but here I have found it only once. I cultivated it for many years.” He described the mountainside, the difficult climb, then the sudden sight of white fireweed, growing on the edge of a brûlée. Against the black char of stumps he said it grew with radiance that made him think of Tennyson, and he quoted Tennyson at some length and with radiance, but, unfortunately, I never cared much for Alfred Lord Tennyson.

After we got through with that, he took pains to give me practical advice. To build my garden carefully and dig it deep and well. To plant especially lilies where they would like to grow rather than where I might like to have them seen. If I were really so foolhardy as to try my hand at lilies, to avoid buying bulbs indiscriminately, for sooner or later I would bring in diseased ones. Because of disease, it was better to raise lilies from seed, which in some cases took several years. “But,” he said, as old men will, “you are young and can afford to be patient.” He handed me the package he held. “Here. I have brought you some healthy bulbs from my garden. Six different species. I have labeled them for you. They will start you out. Good luck, though I think you are a damn fool.”

A week later, Neil was carrying out for me what my books and the old botanist had indicated as obligatory. “We must have some sand to mix with the soil,” I quoted confidently from borrowed authority which had stated that lilies were finicky about their environment and were apt to take sick unless planted in properly prepared positions. This was due to the fact that they grew from scaly bulbs susceptible to rot in soil that was soggy. These bulbs sent roots down, and many species supplemented their nourishment by producing another set of roots above the bulb. For all their delicate appearance, they had colossal appetites.

“We have some sand that the mason did not use,” said Neil. “Shall I take that?”

“No. It probably has sea salt in it. It is good only for cement. In the brook bed there are deposits of sand that will do. Then fetch from the woods some leaf mold in the wheelbarrow. Meanwhile, I will see if our seedbeds are free of weed roots.”

“Okay, monsieur.” But as Neil departed, he murmured something about most plants would toughé sans tout ça.

I spaded up the earth in the wooden frames. It was rich earth, but heavy and caked. I found several pieces of dandelion root that bled white where the spade cut them, and a quantity of black fibrous roots with little black knobs attached to them. They came from deep down. Neil had not worked the earth deep enough. I told him so when he came back with the sand and showed him the roots.

“Ah, les pissenlits et les queues-de-renard,” he said, shaking his head as he went oil again with the wheelbarrow.

Since the books said the seeds of most species are slow to germinate, it seemed wise to clean the earth thoroughly of all bits of weed root that might grow, spread, and choke the reluctant lily seedlings. As I worked, I too began to wonder how these lilies ever survived in the natural state. Cultivation made us all effete maybe.

After the morning’s work, the earth was itself a beautiful thing, as uniform as some substance bought of a chemist. Neil left for his dinner at the church bells’ ring. I stayed on to enjoy what we had created. I sifted the earth through my fingers to reassure myself of its purity. The sand had cut the lumpy stickiness of the heavy, richer soil, and the light humus kept moisture in the crumbly mixture that ran evenly between my hands and spread itself through the seed frames. This dirt was clean. How could people garden in gloves?

Toward evening we planted the seeds in careful rows. There were over thirty little packages whose contents, for the most part, seemed identical but whose typed inscriptions gave specific names to each and a vague assurance that some future season might be brightened by tall, short; early, late; umbels and sprays of nodding or upright pink, red, orange, yellow, and white bloom,

“They all look pas mal pareil,” said Neil with some suspicion.

“The priceless ingredient is the integrity of the maker,” I quoted from my soda bicarb container.

Neil stopped work and looked at me. “Comment? ” he said.

“Let it pass. Imagine, instead, if all these seeds should grow.”

“That,” said Neil flatly, “is scarcely to be expected.” He was a realist-little-given-to-speculation, who took life in whatever way it came. But within his acceptance, he had managed to maintain a style that gave him character. When I first saw him, he was riding cowback toward the village, past our field. I mentioned my memory of this.

“People did find it curious,” he said, and explained it was his allotted job to fetch the family cow from pasture each evening. She was a brindled beast of little pedigree with a docile look and a crumpled horn. On his daily chore, Neil had developed the habit of breaking off a willow shoot as he went up the road, and of accustoming the cow to ride him home on her rump as he switched her occasionally on the rear for tempo, occasionally on the side of the neck for direction. The cow apparently accepted everything much as Neil did, but with less style. The cow seemed world-weary. Neil did not.

At the beginning and the end of each row, I had Neil place little stakes on which to impale the seed packages for identification. While he was cutting these to appropriate lengths, and sharpening the ends, I fetched my textbooks, in which I remembered something about disease that attacked seedlings.

The only encouraging sentence in my reading was “Lilies are seldom attacked by insect pests.” They were, however, susceptible to contagious diseases. One came from overexposure to continued damp. The patient’s foliage became blemished and the plant looked generally peaked. If recognized early and properly medicated, this disease was controllable. For the other disease, a virus infection, science offered no cure. Afflicted plants died a lingering death; slowly but surely their parts contorted into wizened shapes. After a visitation of this virus, the soil was no longer habitable to lilies and must needs be fumigated before starting afresh. Gooseberry bushes and possibly other plants were suspect of acting as Typhoid Marys. I turned to the pages that dealt with infancy. “Damping off,” it said, “may give trouble and kill a good many seedlings.”

“Oh, well, we will have a Saint Bartholomew’s Day,” I said, apparently out loud.

“It does not fall this time of year, monsieur. Next week is the Fête-Dieu, after which comes the Saint Jean. I have marked all the rows for now, with their proper packages.”

“Then water the beds. And tomorrow morning ask at the general store for a box of Semesan or we may have Saint Bartholomew’s Day early this year.”

2

THE seedlings, some of them, grew into plants; a few flowered. As they flowered, I was able to identify them again, for the paper packages carrying their names had disintegrated the first, winter. By degrees, Neil transplanted them to permanent quarters. We now had some twenty species that showed a willingness to live in the land. Most of these had orange flowers in spite of what the catalogues said to the contrary. One species in particular was a discredit to its heralds. This was the amiable lily, Lilium amabile, described in all books as grenadine red. It turned out to be closer to tangerine juice than to grenadine in color, and in spite of its disarming name it was an aggressive, heavy orange, not merely a bright orange. It grew handsomely, however.

“Neil,” I said, “everything turns out orange in our gardening.”

“Only those flowers God made that way, monsieur. Did not a few last year flower big and white? And there were some small pink ones a travers the others. Besides, there are still several rows too little yet to flower. Perhaps another season they may produce more to monsieur’s taste.”

“I hope so. Meanwhile, we have enough to begin on.”

“To begin what?”

“To begin hybridizing. We can cross two species.”

“ How does monsieur expect to do that ?”

“By taking the pollen on these things from this flower and putting it like this on the central part of this flower.” My demonstration seemed to me miraculous, as if I had spent my life mismarrying lilies. Luckily, as the books had said, “the parts are large and easily recognized.” Neil looked unimpressed.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“No. One must keep taking all the pollen parts off the spray of the female as the blossoms open, to ensure cross-fertilization.”

“How does one know that flower is female?”

“It is both male and female. That is why you have to keep the pollen parts removed.”

“ Je ne comprends pas.”

To my surprise, I found my next step in raising lilies was to give a basic talk to this French Canadian boy on the facts of flower life. That evening, he checked with monsieur le curé to make sure I had given him straight facts. Only then did he believe that flowers, too, had sex.

One day, I returned from a walk to find I had callers whom Neil was showing around the garden. As I approached, the lady all in while tottered toward me on very high heels. She had an expensive French look. Her husband looked French too. He was a head shorter than she but held himself very straight to give his inchage its utmost. He bounced toward me on springy step and was quick to explain his visit. A most important petition to the local government, on some vital cause or other, needed signers. We sat down on the lawn chairs while he gave me the works. His manner of speech bristled like his little mustache as he explained and expounded the importance of his mission, with side references to his own importance. I paid more attention to his fantastic Gallic mannerisms than to his theme, which bubbled out in dramatic flow from some deep spring of conviction. His wife relaxed, accepted a cigarette.

Having run the gamut of his speech without pause for paragraphing, this rapacious little man continued, “And you are interested in plants. Here in Canada our climate does not favor them much. They flower late and are soon killed by early frost. Is that not it ?”

Finally called on to participate, I said he was correct in regard to annuals. I was interested in perennials, especially lilies, some of which did bloom early.

“Do you hear, Roseanne? He interests himself in lilies, some of which bloom early. Do we have lilies in our garden?”

“J’adore les lis,” Roseanne said, undulating slightly in her chair, “but we have not any in our garden.”

“They are beautiful,” I said, “but hard to grow.”

“That is it,” said the little man. “Roseanne, they are difficult. Because of our climate.”

“No. Anywhere they are difficult,” I said.

“Then they are capricious,” said the little man; “like women.” He gave me a wink, his mustache bristled, and he shot a look toward his wife, who happened to be preoccupied in appraisal of her nail polish. “Beautiful and capricious,” he said, looking toward heaven this time.

“I hope to strengthen them, however, by hybridizing.”

“The lilies — or women?” With this, he was self-delighted. His wife managed to speak. “Raoul is always spirituel like that,” she said.

“No. But tell me, now that we have made our little jokes,” he said, “what you intend to do with this hybridizing.”

“To get more vigorous plants and flowers of finer color. But it will take time.” I explained roughly the process of hybridizing, which seemed to interest the little man a lot.

“So,” he said, “like a true American you hope for bigger and better lilies with this hybridization.”

“If I am lucky. One must work with them for many years.”

“Of course,” said the little man, with a studied look, “until they get the habit.”

3

THE next spring brought surprises. Several rows of retarded seedling lilies raised flower stalks. The winter casualties were light. In mid-June the first buds of the Caucasian lily opened. The great strawyellow blossoms of waxy sheen hung in graceful elegance, but smelled as strongly scented as a slut. Then came the delicate lacquer-red sprays of tiny coral lilies in great profusion. But strongest, most variable, and of least refinement were the large heads of chalice-flowered lilies whose color ranged equivocally from yellow through orange toward red.

“Monsieur will not find these rows much to his taste,” Neil predicted.

“Can’t say as I do, though they grow the best of any. They ought to make a tough parent to some hybrid. But they vary so much I can’t tell them by name.”

“In your books, maybe — ” Neil was changing his opinion slowly about knowledge stored in books.

“I am not assez botaniste to tell even from the books. There are several sorts that resemble each other closely.”

“Some of these,” said Neil, “have woolly buds, some smooth.” He was beginning to get the hang of botany. “But the color does not vary in accordance with this.”

“I think the best thing is to work for color and cross the yellowish ones together; also, the reddest ones together. I shall cut the orange ones for the house so they will not participate.”

“Monsieur has little taste for orange.”

As I cut the flowers, I thought about this. Orange was not a fashionable color, yet I hoped I was not simply a victim of current trends in good taste and unwittingly subscribing to fad. Possibly orange lacked or possessed some character that all other colors opposed. If so, this would be an easy justification of a prejudice; to put the blame on the color. But to segregate one color as inferior, and prove it, would be difficult at best. Another angle might be that orange seemed the commonest color in lilies, therefore of less worth. But again I hoped my values were not those of the collector, who bases his on scarcity above beauty. I thought I was free of this charge because I liked one species frankly orange, bright and gay. But these flowers that I was cutting were equivocally orange; they lacked authority in their blends, and hovered between the forthright extremes of yellow and of red. Nor were they uniform. Though strong, their color implied some weakness. So, to restore to them their ancestral strength and recast their character was my ambition. My preference of color seemed based on the establishment of a crisper order.

During the summer months, Neil became enthusiastic. He crossed several species on his own. The books had said to cover the hybridized flower with a paper bag against repollination by vagrant bees. But Neil maintained that on windy days such added bulk might break the slender stalks, lie preferred to depollinate the unused flowers and, every morning as new blossoms opened, remove the anthers still unripe. One afternoon he came to me with a troubled look.

“I have done a bad thing, monsieur,” he said.

“Nothing serious, I hope.” I saw he was upset. “It is this,” said Neil. “Today I forgot to geld the lilies.”

That fall, he harvested the seed. Not many pods developed, yet he was proud. In his enthusiasm, he had used some species that do not set seed readily. The coarse chalice-flowered lilies yielded best. Neil mixed the seedbed soil and planted his small harvest with a certain tenderness.

4

AFTER a mild winter with little snow, spring came early. But the spring rains were excessive. They continued beyond their worth and heralded in a cold spell that held growth in abeyance. Neil said it was because the moon was a month late; now in May we had the April moon. Certainly the earth looked as though heaven’s clocks were running slow. The cure was patience according to what Neil had heard.

But patience did not save the early-flowering lilies. Their buds drooped, their foliage blotched. Disease had hit the garden. We applied medicament as the books prescribed, not knowing if this were the fatal pest or the blight brought on by excess dampness.

“I wish your moon would get a move on, Neil.

“It will catch up only in August. There are two moons that month.”

“Do you get this stuff from books?”

“From my grandfather.”

Unable to refute such authority, I changed the subject. “These plants look better. I don’t believe we will have to fumigate the earth and start anew.”

“Tant mieux,” said Neil, the peasant.

Though June was nearly flowerless, the later lilies bloomed profusely. The summer sun routed the last traces of the blight.

In July came the ladies. The social season had brought American guests to Roseanne, who called up. Charming people. So interested in gardens. Might she bring them over?

They came one hot July afternoon. Roseanne’s ladies wore assorted print dresses, eminent hats, and practical-looking shoes. Two of them said they were members of a New Jersey garden club, the third said she came from Westchester. Their conversational attack was reckless.

Roseanne, hatless and with restyled hair, was again dressed in white. She complained of the heat, drew a chair to the shady side of the lawn, and fed me to her guests.

I led them through the garden. Their attention pounced from this to that as they interrupted each other, spreading their enthusiasm thinly. Their three thoraxes chirped along in one incessancy.

I showed them Farrer’s lily, the marbled martagon, whose delicate small Turk’s-cap flower is marbleized with purple. It elicited a chirp about some elfin sculptor. I pointed out the Turk’s-cap of Byzantium, whose first glossy wine-dark blossoms were just opened. She from Westchester began to take notes on a tiny pad.

Hybrids? Was I hybridizing? Why did they not know about this? How? When? Where? Which? Who and whom? The absurdity of their three thoraxes, the leveling of all values, the staggering tempo of their onslaught, led me to address them as from a platform, in the hope that garden club lectures had disciplined them to moderate quiet.

This, I said, is Lilium candidum, the Madonna lily, that breeds only in the wild strain. Then it grows with dark stalks, in Salonika. Once, a hundred years ago, it had a bastard, the nankeen lily, that came to people’s attention in Germany. There is reason to believe it was sired by the scarlet Turk’scap of Greece.

These, the tiger lilies, set no seed, but contrive to reproduce by self-developed bulbils. See, these black and shiny balls already set at the leaf joints will roll to earth when ripe and colonize this space.

Those are Henry’s lily, so sensitive, it is said, that they will fertilize if stimulated by a brush or dust or any lily pollen, yet always reproduce their kind.

Those rows of plants with leaves in whorls have Turk’s-cap flowers in a wide range of color; they breed together freely. But here are prudes with no response. They will not bear.

I paused, a little out of breath. New Jersey murmured it was time to go, and reluctant Westchester folded her scribbled notes.

Scarcely had they departed when Neil, carrying a limp glove, confronted me. “Your visite has dropped this in the garden.”

“I wonder to which one it belongs,” I said.

“To the one who still has its mate, probably,” he replied, with Gallic logic. “Did they find the lilies of consequence?”

“Yes,” I said. “They were interested since they were members of a garden club.”

“Some day, maybe, I shall read books on gardens and join such a club. But it will all cost more money than I can afford, no doubt.”

“Neil, are you asking me to raise your wages?”

“I would not refuse such an offer. This botany is a hazardous profession compared to farming but opens wide opportunity, it seems. Does Madame Roseanne by chance also belong to a botany book club, monsieur?”