Joebass said:That is beautiful Rick! Great spotting. I have heard that some people believe that szovitsianum is just a variant of L. Monadelphum along with others......any thoughts?
I do tend to be a lumper with taxonomy, but I haven't grown L. monadelphum for that long to formulate any kind of opinion. (My first batch of L. monadelphum just up and died one winter before any flowered.) There are a lot of examples of what was once classified as a different species, and later proved to be variant of a same species. When you look at how varied our human species is, yet we are all exactly the same species (no varieties or subspecies), lumping certainly can have validity.
But sometimes I'll still use the "illegal" names, for easy differentiation in garden and garden notes. For instance, the lily that usually masquerades as Lilium tsingtauense is actually a natural hybrid of Lilium tsingtauense crossed with L. distichum and/or L. medeoloides. Rather than using that long phrasing, I'll just call it Lilium miquelianum.
