Description
A readily grown and superbly attractive, yellow-flowered form of the familiar garden Tiger Lily.
In good soil (adequate drainage, humus, half shade, fertility) flaviflorum makes robust, hairy stems up to 150cm tall and superb, large, showy bright yellow flowers which are spotted with deep purple-brown. In our form the spotting is concentrated more around the throat than we see in our orange forms, but this is not a reliable feature as there are several strains, clones and forms of both in cultivation. Flowering for all colour forms starts with us around mid to late August.
The yellow variety was named as Lilium lancifolium flaviflorum by Makino in 1933 and it was found to be diploid. This rather spoiled the idea, current at the time, that all Tiger Lilies were triploid and sterile.
Subsequent research has shown that lancifolium itself is a very variable polyploid species complex. The (fertile) diploid is spread across Korea and Japan largely in coastal and island areas, whereas the triploid forms, which have now spread widely across Asia, are usually associated with man.
