L.taliense Please tell me where you can find this description for L.taliense. I do not agree that this is L.taliense, but a variant of it. The real taliense is white. John Lykkegaard Denmark
Good point, John. I just had a look through the Flora of China - Lilium taliense description, and have to agree with you. I've done a bit of investigation and found a few questions and slip-ups that need to be addressed before determining what this plant actually is. The first problem is that this was accessioned under our old system where propagation via seed retained our accession number (followed by an asterisk) and wild collected number of the original plant. This has been changed, but plants propagated under the old system have not been updated to reflect it. So, this plant may or may not be similar to the original wild collected material, and may in fact be a hybrid. The second problem is that the parent material (the original collection) has either finished flowering or gone missing (I wasn't able to locate it with a quick walk about and am pressed for time before going away on vacation). Fortunately, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh has the same plant, so we'll be able to contact them and see if their GUIZ.123 lily is similar in appearance to this. They do accession GUIZ.123 under Lilium taliense. I also note that the final couplet on the Flora of China's Key to Lilium for Lilium taliense has the white- or yellow-flowered Lilium jinfushanense as its opposite (suggesting a similar-looking plant). Style length is 2.5cm, ovary length is 1.5cm, which doesn't seem to match either of the choices, though. A puzzle. Thanks for pointing it out. I've passed it along to other staff.
L.taliense / L.taliense var. kaichen I think the picture shows the one I nick named L.taliense var. kaichen ( it came from Chen YI`s nurcery in China named Kaichen ) and to make a long story short this species is from the Muli region in Sechuan. You are right that this one is growing in the Botanical Garden in Edingburg, from where it has been spread as L.taliense. Even more confusion has been made to this as Ed McRae described it as L.taliense in his book lately although he later has agreed to name it L.taliense var. kaichen. What make it even worse is that L.lijiangense and L.xanthellum has been suggested as this species-both lilies are totally different- but still Paul Christian showns this lily as L.xanthellum on his Homepage. Sincerely John Lykkegaard Denmark
