Sunday, January 23, 2011

Madonna Lily

What’s happening: Pampas grass plumes have been cut down. Men beginning to prune their apples. Grey smoke from burning was visible everywhere yesterday.

What’s still green: Moss, evergreens, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, grape hyacinth, sea pink, stickseed, gypsum phacelia, blue flax, vinca, snakeweed, broom senecio, strap leaf aster, chrysanthemum leaves; young chamisa stems; new growth on Jupiter’s beard.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, beardtongue, heath aster leaves; rose stems.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; pyracantha leaves bronzed.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, Christmas cactus, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Saw the rabbit twice at the usual time in the morning when the temperature was just above freezing; another day it came out an hour later.

Weather: Morning temperatures generally a bit warmer; last snow 12/30/10; 9:12 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Madonna lilies are one of those short branches towards the top of the Lilium family tree reserved for nature’s experiments. Most of their annual rites we observe are events that make them a family outcast: they go dormant in August, put out overwintering leaves in fall, produce the only white, trumpet-shaped flowers in Europe in spring.

Lilies are thought to have emerged in the Himalayas and moved from there to Asia and North America. The red Lilium martagon, with its Turk’s cap flowers, moved to Europe where it became the most widely distributed of the lilies. Later, the orange colored bulbiflorum moved into central Europe. Then, the remaining European lilies, all reddish, moved west from the Caucasus.

Somewhere on the west coast of the Balkan peninsula Madonna lilies appeared, genetically close to two others known only in Turkey, ciliatum and akkusianum. They were valued by the Minoans of Crete at least 3700 years ago, and may have been spread through their trade network to nearby Anatolia and the Levant, where they still grow wild today.

Through time and cultivation the common white lilies, with three petals and three sepals, lost their ability to produce seed and were perpetuated by bulbs dug and replanted during the short period of dormancy. More efficiently, Turks and others now produce Lilium candidum commercially by growing bulbs from scale cuttings.

Bulb scales are the modified leaves that surround the central geophyte core that contains the makings of the stem and flower. Above ground, leaves interact with the sun and carbon dioxide to produce food for the roots; below the surface they slowly release stored carbohydrates to maintain the plant during difficult times.

Since leaf cells tend to be porous, stored carbohydrates are modified to make them less water soluble. In Madonna lilies, foods are stored as waterproof starch grains in the leaf scales which dissolve when the sap chemistry changes with cold temperatures. Mannose is the form of sugar released.

The autumnal basal leaves supplement the stored reserves. Other lilies react to the cold by producing stem roots between the top of the bulb and the soil line. Madonna lilies are the only ones to use the leaves that are now turning red from the cold in my yard. They’re also the only ones that need to be planted shallowly and left alone.

The new season’s stem leaves begin forming in the bulb axis in November, while the next season’s bulb begins forming in December. The flowers begin developing in February. By April, the bulb’s reserves are exhausted, and the roots and above ground parts take over sustaining the plant.

While the cultivated plant has become sterile, some of the wild subspecies are still able to produce seed, especially salonikae found on the northern coast of the Aegean. When the seeds are ripe, they germinate as soon as they’ve undergone a cold period. The low temperature isn’t required to break dormancy, as it is with many plants, but simply is required to stimulate growth.

Both seedlings and bulb cuttings produce flowers in two years, assuming optimal conditions. When weather is less favorable, the plants spend their resources producing new bulbs, not flowers and seeds.

I bought my Madonna lilies in 2003 from a usually reliable supplier. However, something went wrong and I didn’t receive them until mid-November. The bulbs must have been kept cool enough in transit so they continued their internal development using only the stored reserves, which, of course, are always strongest in new, nursery-grown stock.

Still, nothing appeared for five years. Then, a pair of leaves broke ground in April, and two dark stems emerged with leaves in June of 2008. Naturally, they didn’t flower and I planted something else in their place that fall. Who knows what leaves grew the following June. Certainly nothing appeared this spring.

The first sign the original bulbs had survived underground was the five sets of basal rosettes I noticed this past December. Almost every one has a secondary pair of leaves near the main rosette, suggesting there is both a large bulb underground and a smaller one that hasn’t yet built up enough critical reserves to stand alone.

If sufficient cold in October is all they’ve been waiting for, this could be their year to bloom. But first, the leaves and flower buds will have to survive the treachery of a New Mexico spring. There’s a reason they throve on the moist, limestone soils of England when they finally reached that island sometime before John Gerard describe them as common in 1597, and there’s a reason they’re a marginal survivor here.

A aberrant love for cold is only part of the story.

Notes:Dafni, Amots, Dan Cohen and Imanuel Noy-Mier. "Life-Cycle Variation in Geophytes," Missouri Botanical Garden Annals 68:652-660:1981.

Gerard, John. Gerard’s Herball, 1597; reprinted as Leaves from Gerard’s Herball, 1969, from a 1929 edition by Marcus Woodward.

Ikincil, Nursel, Christoph Oberprieler and Adil Güner. "On the Origin of European Lilies: Phylogenetic Analysis of Lilium Section Liriotypus (Liliaceae) Using Sequences of the Nuclear Ribosomal Transcribed Spacers," Willdenowia 36:647-656:2006; relies on Richard William Lighty, "Evolutionary Trends in Lilies," North American Lily Society Yearbook 31, 40-44:1983, for biogeography.

McRae, Edward A. Lilies: A Guide for Growers and Collectors, 1998.

Oldfield, Sara. Bulb Propagation and Trade, 1989.

Parkin, J. "On a Reserve Carbohydrate, which Produces Mannose, from the Bulb of Lilium," Cambridge Philosophical Society Mathematical Proceedings 11:139-142:1902.

Photograph: Madonna lily leaves, possibly from a daughter bulb, 22 January 2011.

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