My new variety of lily plant originated as a seedling selected from a group of seedlings planted by me at Sandy, Oreg., in the course of breeding efforts carried on by me with the object or producing new lilies in orange color tones marked with conspicuous "brushmarks". Among other things, I wanted lily plants well suited for forcing for out-of-season cut flower production, an advantage heretofore unknown in the lily breeding art.
The group of seedlings from which the present variety was selected resulted from my crossing the clonal cultivar `Connecticut King` as the seed parent and as the pollen parent, a mutant "brushmarked" clone selected from a group of Lilium leichtlinii var. maximowixzii f. unicolor.times.Lilium dauricum f. unicolor, F2.
The flowers of this new lily variety are characterized by their large size, and upright orientation, and a soft melon-orange color accented by conspicuous plum-red "brushmarks", unique in this type of lily. This new seedling was asexually reproduced by me at Sandy, Oreg., by bulb scale propagation with very satisfactory results and accordingly successive generations of this new plant were produced by me and under my direction at Sandy, Oreg., by bulb scale propagation and by natural propagation from bulblets. The successive generations of this new plant have demonstrated that the novel and distinctive characteristics of the plant hold true under asexual propagation from generation to generation and appear to be firmly fixed.
This new variety has demonstrated that it possesses all of the desirable characteristics of excellence of form, color, and habit and that it is well suited to forcing out-of-season when the bulbs are dug at the appropriate time and properly precooled. I have found that October-dug bulbs, properly precooled and potted in January, will flower in an average of 80 to 85 days when grown under glass in western Oregon with no supplemental lighting and at moderate greenhouse temperatures.