Modern gardeners owe much the explorer Wilson, states' The Times," for he has introduced many fine exotic plants, trees and shrubs, but if in his wanderings in Western China he had never found anything except the lily so happily named regale, the horticultural world would still be his debtor.
Of the' thousands of new plants sent home from China by one collector or another, few can have taken more readily than this to their surroundings in this country, although in the case of Z. regale these surroundings are the opposite of those prevailing in the natural home of of the plant—the Min Valley, on the borders of China and Tibet, a floral paradise. In late June and July it is possible to walk for days through a veritable wild garden dominated by beautiful lilies. In the Min Valley Z. regale luxuriates in rocky crevices, sun-baked throughout the greater part of the year. It grows 3 ft. to 5 ft. tall, and has slender leaves crowded on stems bearing several large, funnel-shaped flowers, red purple without, ivory white suffused with canary yellow within, often with the red purple reflected through, and is de-viciously fragrant.
There are no Min Valleys in Great Britain, nor rocky crevices sun-baked for more than a fraction of the year, yet such is the adaptability of this lily that it is found flourishing in places so diverse as the limestone hills of Derbyshire, and the Wealden clays, the sands of Hampshire, the arid chalk bar-tens of the South Downs, and rich red loam of Somerset. Peat alone is poison to it. No more than any other lily will Z. regale give of its best unless tended, but it suffers much, and in a family whose members are capricious to a degree, stands all but alone in constitutional vigour. In this country we are singularly lucky in that the original stock of bulbs came straight from the natural home of the lily, where we may safely assume that the diseases of cultivated plants are unknown,: so that the strain is sound, and not tainted by diseases common to the Eastern nursery gardens from which so many lilies come. If our nurseryman are wise, they will raise this species by thousands, and though the price fall to a fraction of that current now, they will hold the market against the foreigner. There is no difficulty in raising L. regale from seed, and any amateur who knows the elements of propagation may try his hand at it, proceeding, ¢ as he would with the seeds of hardy plants in general. No parapher-alia is required, nor frame, nor heat; nothing but a seed bed which may be raised an inch above the surrounding earth, and need not be more than a yard square. The seed should be sown in shallow drills six inches apart, and the end of February is a better time than the present, as the seed soon sprouts, and a@ rough winter takes a heavy toll of autumn-sown seedlings.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.