Yes, I'll say! Especially when it's only 5'F and no snow cover--just frozen brown tundra.

I finally found my camera case ,after a week in the garden'safely' under a spare International bonnet being used for shade above the fenceline..All was safe, memory cards, batteries!

No excuses now Anthony!

I'll be off to find some pics - we need some new photos!

Tapping foot, waiting...

I wish I could say the same thing about my daylily camera. After a day out in a thunderstorm it has never been the same again. Broke my heart.

agh! The pressure to post!

Here are a pair of un-named seedlings from Neil Jordan's Tas Township breeding:



I almost posted this under the lilies and deceptive colours thread, but here it is now; Sweet Surrender:



Here's the marketing pic: http://www.tesselaar.net.au/ge...

Thought I was getting something close to white, but it's yellow, yellow... yellow. No matter which way I look at it. Somehow I overlooked the obviously badly crowded head and poorly formed flowers, but in 'person' it can't be ignored. Substance is poor, stem and foliage are just ugly. Oh well. There are lots of very disappointing cultivars out there being grown and sold by the hundreds of thousands and I'll have more to post. This is the first season in a very long time that I have dipped into the commercial market and there's been alot of 'misses' - maybe I should start a thread for "I wish I had never bought it!"?

What is the impression that newcomers get of lilies if they have never seen or grown some of the truly great cultivars and their first experience is with commercial trash cultivars....

I feel like things are being unleashed purely to be a daub of colour with no respect to form or habit. Am I just too critical?

Gleni, you might like the Christmas beetle I posted in the "what did you do today?" thread - here's another pic to cheer me up after Insipid Surrender up there!

Hey Della that is not a bad looking beetle. The colours look like diffraction patterns!!! Have you seen my Fringe Lily over at Wildflowers Forum in Todays wildflowers?

oooh... nice flower, Glen. That was an interesting excursion into a part of ATP I've never visited!

Now to wax lyrical about a new (for me) lily I'm happy to have bought. I've been so thrilled with Tiny Padhye I "made a mummy with it" (my daughter's phrase when she spies the little foil cap on a flower):



The flowers are large and present perfectly for a potting variety. They open wide and flat like a plate:



And it can make like an octopus!

That is drop dead gorgeous!

Beautiful shots Della. Thanks for sharing.

dellac said:I almost posted this under the lilies and deceptive colours thread, but here it is now; Sweet Surrender:

• Lily (Lilium 'Sweet Surrender')
• Uploaded by dellac

Here's the marketing pic: http://www.tesselaar.net.au/ge...

There seems to be a lot (mostly?) bastard childs of Sweet Surrender on the market. Mine came directly from Ruth and Hugh Cocker 10 years ago. It does have "changing" petal color depending on age of flower and the immediate environment. It does have fairly thin substance, but still holds its shape well, consequently it looks very substantive, but I would only classify it as moderate. Flowers are quite flat, and gracefully curved, not at all like yours, Della. Foliage is in no way "ugly"!



Some notes about the above pics:
--- I paid careful attention to showing the correct aspect.
--- Both flowers are correct for true flower color. Backgrounds and foliage are obviously different because photos were taken in (1)late evening shade and (2)full midday sun. Something to think about for those who might think that photoshopping to the right color green will always produce the true flower color.

I reread my post - I sound terrible grumpy don't I!

I wondered whether voicing negative criticism about a cultivar was taboo, but I don't see much of value in the 'Sweet Surrender' I purchased, except that it has secondary buds. So it sounds like there might be more than one plant going about under that name? And this or another version can produce a better plant? Maybe I need to give it another season....

Looking up some other sellers, I'm sure I have the same thing that B&D Lilies in the US sells as Sweet Surrender: http://www.bdlilies.com/l1405.... Though mine produced a tangled mess of stems rather than anything straight and clean, the flower form and colour are the same. It is still too crowded for my tastes.

Here I'm sure is one of the faux Sweet Surrenders sold by a company I've heard many complaints about on this board, and it is pictures similar to this found on google searches that may have mislead me into believing it was a much whiter, better formed flower: http://www.dutchbulbs.com/prod...

Why oh why do nurseries now sell everything down-out facing with spots as 'Tiger Lilies'? It's so wrong... *continues rant privately*

Thanks for the background info Rick - I think mine were just poorly grown examples of the real Sweet Surrender.

Hopefully some more pics to come later today!

It's ok to not like a cultivar ~ and you can talk about it too. So many of us have our gripes about Midnight, for example.

I once grew an asiatic and threw it away after one season. Uglier than a bucket of dirty socks...

Bucket of dirty socks! I'll remember that, thanks.

There are some of us that put Orange Electric (for example) in that category.

I certainly threw mine out.

I kind of put Forever Susan in that category but I guess some people like. But I haven't grown it either (I'm already money ahead!!).

Nice octupus, Della!

Tesselars , Della GRRRRRRRRR!.. absolute crap! 14 complaints back to me already

Moby, I guess I got lucky with Midnight. I got one out of six that's pretty darn good. That alone outweighed the other five lighter, nearly pink ones. At least now I know I can make more.

Anthony, that Tesselars must be a real outfit too, huh? Did you rate them in the 'recommendations' section at ATP? I don't know much about them.

Here's something worth every cent - Tiger Babies:



Can't recall how many years I've drooled over photographs of this, and finally VDQB made it available in Australia. Finally a flower and it's even more beautiful than the pictures!