The only truly mediterranean lily species is the Madonna lily, Lilium candidum – mediterranean in the sense that it is adapted to keep more or less in growth through the winter, with a basal rosette of leaves that emerge in the autumn, then sending up its flowering stem as things warm up in the spring, and dying back to dormancy in the heat of summer. But there are other species which grow around the Mediterranean. They manage to put up with the climate though their dormant period is the winter – so they tend in the wild to be confined to cooler places, in the mountains, like the red turkscap lily of the Alps, Lilium pomponium.
Some of these are worth trying at lower altitudes, so long as they can be kept in growth as long as possible during the spring and early summer, which means giving them cool shade and moisture.
Lilium pyrenaicum, from the eastern Pyrenees and one or two other parts of France and Spain, is one of the earliest lilies to come into flower, and therefore has a good chance of finishing its growth cycle before the hottest times:
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Lilium bosniacum grows in the Balkans, and has flowers of a rather more orange shade than the purer yellow of L. pyrenaicum, or of the otherwise very similar if taller L. jankae. Until recently these were all thought to be variants of one widespread mountain species, and may well one day be reclassified as that, but are all currently recognised as separate species. Here is L. bosniacum:
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My own favourite among the Mediterranean lilies is the striking scarlet Lilium chalcedonicum, which grows in many parts of Greece, and is also found in Albania. As in the other pictures, this plant was grown from seed – always the best way of avoiding virus diseases, which are the lily-grower’s plague:
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Recently I have been intrigued by the behaviour of an utterly non-mediterranean lily, Lilium bakerianum var. rubrum. It comes from quite high but rarely very frosty forested parts of Yunnan and Guizhou in China, and does not come into growth until the monsoon rains sweep past. In cultivation, it echoes this behaviour, not growing until watered, then shooting up unusually quickly to flower. Also, at the moment (late September) I have a couple of pots of seedlings of it which seem at a very similar stage of active growth as seedlings of L. candidum, whereas almost all other lily seedlings are by now long dormant. I’m sure it needs a rather humid atmosphere while growing, but even so I’m really tempted to try this in Greece, as it is such an exotic-looking plant:
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