Lorn and Rick. As always, most valuable advise!
Lorn, it makes sense to cut a bit higher up the stem and I'll do so in the future. Yes, not to concerned about Botrytis in the autumn and your advise about spraying in the spring is for sure a good one. Copper fungicides are however no longer sold to the home gardener here. I could get ingredients to do my own Bordeaux Mixture, but I'll probably try some preventive spraying with baking soda and soap weekly instead as I seemed to have
some success with it this year, even though I started very late in the season (after symptoms were visible) and only continued until bloom.
Rick, I have a couple of pruners already, but getting a few more seems to be a very good idea! I believe for instance Tobacco mosaic Virus is supposed to survive up to 50 years in dried leaves, but I assume it would last much shorter in the garden and of course most viruses would go inactive long before that.
Going back I see I was very unclear in my writing
. I didn't mean to say that the actual removing of stems caused the leaves to spread around much, but rather that waiting too long made them fall of by themself and that in turn made them spread in the wind all over the place, thus risking eventually ending up in my compost.
I have no problem pulling the stems from the Asiatics, but not sure I could manage that with the OT lilies, not before winter/spring when they are more decayed anyway.