All photos © to Lynnette Westfall ( plantlilies.com )
by Percy H. Wright
Saskatoon Saskatchewan, September 1973
*This article is an extract from the very first CPLS Newsletter.
It gives one a strange feeling, and no little exasperation, to look back to the years when the possibilities in the breeding of lilies first began to penetrate my mind. It was about the year when the stock markets of the world were indulging in their surprising gyrations just before the Great Depression, that I was reading Miss Isabella Preston’s analysis of her attempts to intercross more or less unrelated species and felt an impulse to emulate her in her vast designs. She had assaulted the citadel of incompatibilities, and found a few gaps in the castle wall. I did not propose to do her pioneer work all over again, but rather to build on her foundations.
Miss Preston’s work at the Central Experimental Farm, Ottawa, is too often forgotten these days, simply because her success was in revealing where the possibilities lay, rather than end-of-the-line achievements. I was impressed by her work, for her interest was in roses and lilies, which happened to be my two chief interests. How well I remember the day, in early January of 1937, when I interviewed her in her office on my way through Ottawa, and her warning that, if I wished to go in for breeding hardy roses, I’d have to be a millionaire.
In a sense, I proved her wrong in that judgement, for, in spite of the Depression, the World War and the handicap of limited energy, I went ahead and devoted myself to bringing into existence new creations in these two ornamentals. In another sense, she was right, for what I have accomplished has been scarcely a fraction of what I might have accomplished had those “Hard Times” been less hard. Today, only the old people realize what we went through in the thirties and early forties. How unnecessary it all was. If only Lord Keynes, an English economist, had been born and had got a hearing, a generation sooner.
I can claim, I think, that Miss Preston got the idea of naming the lilies in the celebrated Stenographer series after the girls in the little group of stenographers in the employ of the Central Experimental Farm from our correspondence. I, somehow, had gotten the impression that the rose ‘Agnes’ (Rugosa x Persian Yellow) had been named after a stenographer there, and I mentioned this in one of my numerous letters to Miss Preston. She replied that this had not been so, but soon afterward the lilies Grace Marshall, Lyla McCann and the others appeared with the names they now bear, and the “Stenographer Lilies” were born.
At that date, I had already taken a class in genetics at the University of Saskatchewan, ...so I knew that the significant segregation that appears as the result of the interbreeding of any two species of plants or animals comes to attention, not in the first generation, but in the second, the generation now called the F2, and in still later generations.
So my plan was to cross the Stenographer lilies with one another, and hope that they had enough fertility to interbreed. Miss Preston had made a gift of a bulb or two of her originations, and I chose Grace Marshall as the female parent. At this late date, I do not recall what was the pollen parent.
From this cross came three lilies with a better red than any of the Stenographers themselves. [Of these, one survived and was named Nubian]. It, in turn became the ancestor of a whole ring of dark red lilies. It would still be a good lily, if its flower stem were only stronger.
The next advance was made with the co-operation of Mr. R. C. Palmer, Superintendent of the Experimental Farm at Summerland in the Okanagan....He put pollen of Nubian onto one of his own red selections, and mailed me the resultant seed. A portion of this seed I sent to Mr. A. J. Porter of Parkside, SK, who sowed it, and got the Flame lily and several reds which were so nearly alike that he lumped them together and called them Red Knight. As it chanced, I got credit for them rather than Palmer or Porter, with more or less justification.
Bert Porter gave me back bulbs of one of these reds, which I named and introduced under the name of Towering Turk. It is one of the few lilies of my origination that is likely to be grown and admired far into the future.
My recent work with lilies has been slowed down by two circumstances. One of these was the lack of land which was inevitable when I moved to a city lot in Saskatoon. The other was an increasing tendency to concentrate my efforts on hardy roses and apples. Today I am probably prouder of my rosybloom crabapple Thunderchild than of any other origination, with my hardy yellow rose Hazeldean as a close second.
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| TOWERING TURK asiatic lilium | asiatic lilium RED KNIGHT |
It is the fate of every new variety of plant, ornamental or useful, with rare exceptions, to survive in its descendants, and so it will doubtless be with my lilies. At least, the genes of my Nubian and Flame lilies have entered into the breeding of so many more recent lilies that it would be extraordinary if all failed to survive. ...It is much easier to raise a good lily now than it was in the early days, but much harder to get a place for it among so many real treasures.
Editor’s note: Sincere thanks to Lynnette Westfall from Valley K Lily Ranch in Alberta for providing the photographs of Percy Wright’s lily hybrids for this article.
added to the Newsletter by B. Adams-Eichendorf (CPLS Newsletter March 2016)