We grew up with two horticultural aunts. One maintained acres of country gardens and orchards, the other likewise but was also a florist, nursery owner and RHS addict. Both gardened from mail order catalogues. Pat, the nursery aunt, would pay me in out of date seed packets to help in the nursery.
One day when I was around 10-11yrs she came to our primary school with home-harvested trumpet lily seed for our class to start as a science experiment. We got a packet each and started them in ice cream containers. They grew! I was so excited. The summer I turned 12 enormous soft yellow trumpets bloomed for me and I was hooked. I pestered Pat to take me to the meetings of the newly formed North West Tasmanian Lilium Society which she helped found. She showed me how to hybridise and I raided her and my other aunt's garden for pollen and lilies to pollinate. My first cross was Trenwell x Pink Champagne. She showed me the Golden Ray Lily Gardens catalogue and I spent an enormous $30 of my hard earned calf-rearing money. She gave me Let's Grow Lilies for Christmas of 1984 and R.M. Withers Lilium in Australia the year after.
Those first hybridising efforts grew some babies I adored. I wanted to name a lily for her, but the time had come to leave for university and I took my favourite babies with me in pots and tendered them in rental accommodation. That first summer holiday there was adventure on offer and I left my babies in the care of my dear and trusted land lady. When I returned every one of them was dead. I learned that now nice a person is has no bearing on their ability to notice a plant in need of watering, even when they commit to the responsibility to water beforehand.
It was hard starting again while moving from rental to rental, and there have been a couple of periods when I gave up, but I always started again with stuff of mine that had survived back on the farm and material gifted me by lovely lily mentors of the NWTLS, even after Pat died.
I still have to name and register a lily for Pat. One year soon.
