The Bulbils Are the Point
Look at that last photograph. Those little black beads tucked into the joints where the leaves meet the stem — those are bulbils. Aerial bulbs. Each one will drop off, root, and in a few years become a full tiger lily.
That is not a normal thing for a lily to do, and it explains almost everything about how this plant has traveled the world.
An Old Food Crop That Became a Flower
The tiger lily is native to China, Japan, Korea, and the Russian Far East, and it was not first grown for its looks. It was grown to eat. The bulbs are edible, and it has been cultivated as a food crop in Asia for a very long time — this is a vegetable that got promoted.
Carl Peter Thunberg, the Swedish botanist, gave it the name Lilium lancifolium in the 1790s, and that is still the correct name today, though you’ll see the old synonym Lilium tigrinum on plenty of labels and in plenty of catalogs.
It came to the West in 1804, carried by a Scottish gardener named William Kerr, who sent it from China to Kew. Kerr didn’t find it on a mountainside — he found it in Chinese gardens and nurseries, already domesticated, already a garden plant, because Chinese gardeners had been growing it for centuries before any European had a word for it. That’s a detail I like. The great age of plant hunting is usually told as discovery. A lot of it was closer to shopping.
From Kew it went everywhere, and it reached the South the way most everything reached the South: in somebody’s pocket, on somebody’s wagon, from somebody’s mother.
The Thing You Need to Know Before You Plant It
Now the hard part, and I’d rather you hear it from me than learn it the expensive way.
The tiger lily is highly tolerant of the viruses that disfigure other lilies — chiefly lily mottle virus, which is what the old catalogs meant when they said “lily mosaic,” along with lily symptomless virus and cucumber mosaic virus. Tolerant is the honest word, not immune and not symptomless: a heavily infected tiger lily may show nothing worse than a faint light-green mottle on the leaves, and most gardeners will never notice it at all. The plant looks fine. It blooms fine. It comes back stronger every year.
Your other lilies will not shrug it off. Aphids and other sap-feeding insects move the virus from the tiger lilies to susceptible hybrids, where it shows up as streaked foliage and deformed flowers, and those plants can be badly damaged.
There’s a reason the load builds up. Tiger lily is triploid and sterile — it reproduces only by bulbils and division, never by seed. Viruses ride along in vegetative propagation but generally don’t pass through seed, so every tiger lily is a clone descended from whatever its parent stock was carrying, with no seed generation anywhere in the line to reset it.
So the standard advice, and mine: plant tiger lilies away from your other lilies. Not next door. Not in the same bed. A separate part of the garden. If you grow Orientals or Asiatic hybrids or anything you paid real money for, keep some distance between them and this plant.
I’m telling you this because these pages exist for exactly this kind of fact. It’s not a reason to skip the tiger lily. It’s a reason to put it somewhere on purpose. The plant is tough, honest, and generous, and it also happens to be Typhoid Mary. Both things are true.
A Story of Sharing
One stand I found was in northeast Texas. Driving by, I saw tiger lilies surrounding every tree at this old home. I knocked on the door and an older lady and her physically fit, middle-aged son answered. I explained what we do at the Southern Bulb Company, and the son said he’d gladly share the black bulbils.
He walked around with me and explained his unsuccessful experience trying to save them. Apparently they do not like being stacked and left in a coffee can in the garage. “You can’t treat them like seeds,” he told me. “They’ll rot on ya!”
I could tell horticulture had become his passion, and I promised him I’d plant them right away. He’d served in the Army’s Special Forces. I thanked him for both — the military service and the horticultural service.
That advice, by the way, is correct and it’s worth more than most of what’s written about this plant. A bulbil is not a seed. It’s a living bulb with no dormancy to speak of. Scratch it into soil now.
Planting & Care
Planting time: Plant as soon as you receive the bulbs. If you have to delay, store them in the refrigerator — not a coffee can in the garage. Don’t plant during a hard freeze.
Location: Tiger lilies prefer a woodland setting with acidic soil and afternoon shade during their summer blooming season. Aim for about eight hours of summer sun and well-drained soil. Southern gardeners: the afternoon shade is the part you should hear. This is a plant that wants morning sun and a break by three o’clock.
Depth: Two to three times the height of the bulb. A 2-inch bulb goes 4 to 5 inches deep.
Water: Give them ample water as the foliage appears in March and April. That’s the window where you can make or break the season.
Zones: 3 through 9 — one of the widest ranges of anything I sell. This plant handles Minnesota and it handles Louisiana.
Making More of Them
Once the blooms are coming to an end, knock off the bulbils and gently scratch them into the soil. With rich organic soil and some moisture, you’ll have a stand of tiger lilies in just a few years.
That’s it. That’s the whole method. No division, no digging, no waiting for offsets. You run your thumb up the stem, the beads come loose in your hand, and you rub them into the dirt where you want lilies.
What to Plant It With
Tiger lilies are a magnet for hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies. Combine them with salvias, lantanas, plumbago, phlox, alyssum, snapdragons, pansies, cyclamen, paperwhites, narcissus, iris, snowflakes, rain lilies, crinums, and hymenocallis, and you’ll have something going most of the year.
Just — and I’ll say it one more time — not with your other lilies.
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