Gadenin日本語Get the appA lily bulb is a living thing with no wrapper
Pick up a daffodil or a tulip bulb and it is dry, brown and sealed inside a papery tunic. A lily bulb is nothing like that. It is a tight stack of fleshy overlapping scales with no skin at all, and it is never truly dormant in the way a tulip is. Leave one on a shelf in a warm room for a fortnight and the outer scales go soft, wrinkled and brown, and what you plant is a bulb that has already spent a large part of the reserves it needed for its first season.
So treat a lily bulb as you would treat a bare root plant rather than a packet of seed. Plant it the day it arrives if you possibly can. If you cannot, open the bag immediately, check that the packing material is barely moist rather than wet, and keep the whole thing somewhere cold, dark and around 35 to 40F (2 to 4C). A refrigerator drawer works, well away from ripening fruit, whose ethylene damages flower buds inside the bulb. Days are acceptable, weeks are not.
Before planting, look the bulb over. Firm, plump scales with a few pale root initials at the base are what you want. Peel off any scales that are brown, slimy or dry as paper; the bulb underneath is usually sound. Blue green mold on the outside is generally superficial and rubs off. A bulb that is soft right through to the basal plate, or that has a hollow, discolored center, will not recover and is best not planted at all.
Bulbs bought loose from an open bin late in the season have almost always been allowed to dry. They flower weakly in their first year even when planted correctly, and that failure is not your planting technique.
Plant deep, because the stem does most of the rooting
Most garden lilies produce two entirely separate root systems. The first grows from the base of the bulb and anchors it. The second, far more important set grows from the buried section of stem above the bulb, and those stem roots do most of the feeding and take up most of the water during the growing season. Plant shallowly and there is no buried stem for that second set to form on, and the plant runs permanently short of food and water while carrying a heavy head of flowers.
The working rule is to cover the bulb with soil to about three times its own height. For a bulb 2 in (5 cm) tall that means 6 in (15 cm) of soil over the top of it, and for a large bulb it can mean 8 in (20 cm). Deep planting also keeps the bulb in cooler, more evenly moist soil through summer, holds tall stems upright in wind, and protects it from being sliced through when you plant something else in the same bed.
There is one group that disagrees. A minority of lilies, mostly the white trumpet kinds grown for scent, make no stem roots at all and produce a flat rosette of leaves at ground level in autumn. Those are planted with the very top of the bulb barely 1 in (2.5 cm) under the surface. If your bulb came with instructions saying to plant shallowly and to expect winter leaves, follow them; for everything else, go deep.
Drainage matters more than richness. Lily bulbs sit in the soil all year and rot in ground that stays wet in winter, so if your soil is heavy, dig a generous quantity of grit into the planting area, or plant on a slight mound, or use a raised bed. A handful of coarse sand or grit under and around each bulb, so it does not sit in a puddle in its own planting hole, is worth the small effort.
| Item | Most garden lilies | Shallow rooting trumpet types |
|---|---|---|
| Soil over the top of the bulb | Three times the bulb's height, typically 6 to 8 in (15 to 20 cm) | About 1 in (2.5 cm) |
| Stem roots above the bulb | Yes, and they do most of the feeding | None |
| Spacing between bulbs | 8 to 12 in (20 to 30 cm) | 10 to 12 in (25 to 30 cm) |
| Best planting season | Autumn, or early spring if the bulbs are fresh | Autumn |
| Winter appearance | Bare soil until mid spring | A flat rosette of leaves at ground level |
| Container depth needed | At least 12 in (30 cm) deep | At least 10 in (25 cm) deep |
Putting them in
Choose a spot with sun on the flowers and shade on the roots. Lilies want at least six hours of direct sun on the upper part of the stem, but the ground around them is best kept cool and shaded by low planting or by a mulch. Full blazing sun on bare soil dries the bulb zone out in midsummer and shortens the flowering season noticeably.
Plant in a group rather than a line. Three, five or seven bulbs set 8 to 12 in (20 to 30 cm) apart in a loose cluster look far better than singles dotted about, and the stems support each other in wind. Do not crowd them any closer than 8 in (20 cm), because still, humid air trapped between stems is what starts fungal leaf disease.
Do not add fresh manure or strong fertilizer to the planting hole. Lily bulbs are prone to basal rot and contact with anything actively decomposing invites it. Well rotted compost forked into the general area is fine; a concentrated handful dropped in under the bulb is not.
- Open the bag the day it arrives Check the bulbs for firmness and the packing for moisture. Dry, dusty packing means the bulbs have been drying too; barely damp is correct. Plant now, or refrigerate for a few days at most.
- Dig one hole for the group, not one per bulb Take out a single area 8 to 10 in (20 to 25 cm) deep and wide enough for the whole cluster. It is quicker, it lets you loosen the base properly, and it gets every bulb to the same depth.
- Improve the base and set the bulbs pointed end up Fork grit into the bottom of the hole if the soil is heavy, then stand the bulbs upright 8 to 12 in (20 to 30 cm) apart with the flatter basal plate down and any root initials spread out.
- Backfill to three times the bulb height Cover so there is soil equal to about three bulb heights above the top of each bulb. Firm gently with your hands rather than treading, which compacts the ground the stem roots have to grow into.
- Water once and mark the spot Water in to settle the soil, then push in a labeled marker. Lilies emerge late, and an unmarked group is exactly what gets forked through when you plant annuals in spring.
What to write down on planting day
Record the planting date, the exact position of each group and the depth you actually planted at, measured from the finished soil surface to the top of the bulb. If a group comes up short and thin in its second year, that one number tells you straight away whether shallow planting is the reason or whether you should be looking at drainage or at the bulbs themselves.
Note the size and condition of the bulbs when they came out of the bag. Small or already softened bulbs commonly give one modest flower in their first season and only reach full size in the second or third year. Without that note, a normal first year looks like a failure.
From the first spring, log the date the shoots break ground for each group. Lilies emerge late and unevenly, and having last year's date beside the position stops you from digging into a group that is simply running to its usual schedule.