Last autumn I bought a few bulbs from Guntis Grants. I really loved many of them and I thought I'd start a special thread as to keep the images together. I'll add more images later on, and also plan to build on this thread in future years. Of course if anyone else has images of his hybrids this is a good place to share.


Normally I don't like fading in lilies much but 'Rakaris' above is an exception as the fading reveals the underlying yellow tones.




A young stem of 'Ačkups' that should have many more flowers in the future


Māsa Lapsa has small flowers, but they have a very nice warm tone that stands out in the garden.


Again a lily that has some fading tendencies, so it's possible that a more sunny position would have given a whiter appearance, more like what I've seen in Guntis own photos. However I liked this complex color as well.


Punktiņa has rather large flowers with small spots. Produces a great number of bulbils.

I enjoyed your additions of Guntis Grants lilies to the database. I added a few details to the database, feel free to change any of my additions since you are growing them and see them up close.

I particularly liked Dziesmas Ceļš with its combination of regular spotting and tango spotting. It reminds me a bit of Belo Horizonte.

Guntis certainly has created a lot of colorful hybrids. He seems like a walking encyclopedia of lily knowledge as well. I have about a dozen of his Div. VI crosses growing from seed that just past (n + 1). I may get some maiden blooms next spring.

Great photos - thanks for sharing, William. I particularly like 'Ackups' and 'Punktina'.

Thank you, Connie. I appreciate your additions!
'Dziesmas Ceļš' is very interesting and I like it a lot as well!

Lorn, I hope you will get lots of maiden blooms next year . If Guntis is an encyclopedia of lily knowledge, well then he has some similarities with you!

Joshua, thank you, I'm so glad you enjoyed the photos. 'Ačkups' has an elegance that is very easy to appreciate and 'Punktiņa' is a personal favorite as I love white lilies with spots.

Nice. 'Rakaris' reminds me a little of 'Gayles Favorite' 'Ackups' is a stunner! Thank you for sharing

William thank you for sharing!

I've enjoyed these lily pictures, William. Thank you for sharing.
Dziesmas Cels' stands out to me. Lovely flowers!

I'm with you on this, Joshua - love 'Ackups' and 'Punktina'!

Thanks so much for posting, William. I've pored over the pics on Guntis' site and made wishlists... and thought about importing some. But, as always, the complexity, cost and failure rate of getting through Australian Customs has so far overwhelmed me. Would love to hear and see more of how they grow for you.

Thank you Dave, Mike, Tracey and Della

Della, I can't even imagine the difficulty of importing lilies into Australia as I believe your rules are very strict . Fortunately for me importing from Latvia is very straightforward as there is no customs restrictions whatsoever for lilies inside the EU. However I do know the feeling one gets when looking at lily cultivars that are hard to obtain, as I many times have literarily drooled over the beautiful images posted on this forum from every corner in the world. Of course I want them all . Who wouldn't? I do look forward to post more about Guntis lilies and their performance as I learn more about them.

Lilies with an overlay of color(s) can be very difficult to capture with the camera. Good job, William!

Notice how Pakaris and Rudens Ogle have a unique kind of spotting - not flecks like with tango type lilies and not spots as we normally see, either. I am not sure if this is the only way, but one what to achieve this is crossing a tango type lily with one that has genes for spots or brushmarks at least somewhere in its background. But of course, there will be a wide variation in the progeny, too.

I am a little bit saddened that the original names of foreign (to the English speaking world) lily cultivar names aren't preserved. Dziesmas Ceļš and Ačkups, for examples. Most of the time for cultivar names (not lilies), it is permitted to anglicize a name and take out or substitute those "funny looking" letter characters, but the inaugural name is still preserved as the original, and it often adds to the flavor and intent of the name in general use.

Unfortunately, the rules set out by the International Lily Register state "Cultivar epithets are written in Roman type", so there is no other option.

In the natural world, every species is named in a universal language, Botanical Latin. This is a good thing, since these plants are not invented by humans. But when we create something new outside of nature, that is a different circumstance, in my opinion. Many thanks to the Lily Data base moderators who realize this value of inaugural names, and put them under "synonyms" in the data base. At least they are not forgotten forever.

Rick, we have William to thank for entering the diacritical marks as synonyms in the database. The problem with the diacritical marks is that the search engine for the database does not recognize them. So if you search for a name that has those marks you will not find it. It is perfectly ok to use them here in the forums, I just copy and paste. However, I have not checked to see if the search engine for the forums will find them. It seems less important in the forums than in the database anyway.

Rick, indeed that spotting is one thing that I really liked with those two cultivars, so thanks for the explanation of how this can be achieved. 'Rudens Ogle' should also with increased bulb size develop a large number of flowers and secondary buds.

Zuzu and Connie gave invaluable advice on how to enter the Latvian names as correctly as possible in the database as I was unsure of how to do it and had to ask in the Plant Database forum.

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'Vezuvs' is very free flowering with a huge inflorescence. If I remember correctly it had 21 flowers. Lots of secondary buds and even a tertiary one! Not bad for an Asiatic tango lily. Guntis himself claims 18-28 buds, so there is still room for improvement for mine.
I didn't measure the flower size, but Guntis has it at 16 cm/ 6.3 inches. I think mine were a bit smaller than that, but still good sized.


Not the largest flower or most striking color, but I really liked 'Morzes Kods' for its pattern.



An individual flower of 'Trejdeksnis'. Hard to photograph the whole inflorescence in the spot I had it, but In time it should have up to 21 slightly nodding flowers.



A bonus plant.


Also a bonus plant.


Vairāk Saules - this was another bonus plant and I haven't found any about additional info about it, therefore I have chosen not to import it to the database. This year it was quite short, but a nice warm color.


'Zvaigznu Cels'. Google translates the name to "Star Trek". I think the flowers may have some difficulty to open perfectly, but this hybrid should have around 30 flowers on a mature bulb.


Large flower. Glowing color.


'Zvaigžņu Sagša' was fantastic at its best. It has to be said that it's a bit prone to fading, but the the flower is large and the color isn't the more common pink/yellow, rather a pink/apricot combination and had a striking and exotic presence in the garden. Except for its unusual color it was more looking like an Oriental lily than an Asiatic. The following picture shows its fading tendencies better. 'Saldās Atmiņas' at the bottom:



Saldās Atmiņas on its own:

Some very nice lilies william. Thank you again for sharing.

Dave, Guntis was the first one to teach me the fact that all tetraploid 4n are not all 100% 4n. Never assume that everything is 100% 4n or 3n. There never is 100% conversion. Most commercial tetraploids in the marketplace today run about 75 to 85 % 4n, some in the low 60 % range even, with the remainder being 2n and 3n or chromosome missing, etc. Tetraploids never really worked out good for the forcing and cut flower industry because their consistency for flower color and growth rate varies with mass high speed cloning. Also, for the backyard gardener, It's fairly common knowledge that tetraploids, on the overall, have an average life span of 6 to 8 years, after which it's all down hill. There are exceptions, of course. It's worth noting that Guntis Grantis still does his cloning the reliable old fashion way by manual scale cloning.
EDIT: Test report removed. Not intended as a permanent reference but only a temporary discussion aid. If you need a particular result, Tree Mail me.

My favorite is Vezuvs'. It has the cutest candle buds and inflorescence structure befitting of these flowers. It looks like the primary branching off the central stem are in tiers! It would be interesting to see how it looks when the secondary buds are blooming.

Lorn, that's some interesting info. How does one find out the ploidy percentage? I have read before that they are never 100% when doing a ploidy conversion. Which makes a bit of sense. They are originally diploids. I didn't know that they had a shortened life though. Is the result the same if you take 2 cultivars with a high 4n percentage and hybridize them?

I think there is still a lot of work that can be done with ploidy. Maybe through generations of breeding with high percentage 4n? They would be as close to 100%. But that would take many generations to accomplish. Maybe then they could have a longer garden life. But then again maybe not, having multiple extra chromosomes, which in turn expels more energy for the plant every year, might not be a way to get around that.