Nippon

'Nippon' is another of the varieties that doesn't match up to the picture on the package. When we bought it we were taken by the red edging of each of the petals. Of the couple of dozen flowers we have seen so far, only one plant has produced a flower that comes even close to the one on the package. It's the one you see here. All the others are lacking the red edging. Hopefully they'll show the red edging maybe next year?

What caught our eye about this variety was the red edge to the petals, never saw anything like it. It was quite the disappointment therefore when the actual blooms showed precious little in terms of the red edge.

We had 'Nippon' planted in a number of locations, including some in our frontyard; that's one of the ones you see here. They grew a bit larger here, both in terms of bloom size as well as length of stem. We did not see any hint of the red edging on the face of the petals, but you can see a trace on the backside of it on the one below, shot in backlight.

We planted 5 'Nippon' bulbs in one pot and imagine our surprise when one of them proved to be something pretty pink. Haven't the foggiest what it is, we'll see if we can figure it out somehow. It has been suggested it might be 'Sorbonne', but we'll have to do some more comparing here I'm afraid.

The pot these were planted in did not fare that well in 2004; the 'Nippons' were very small and the pink was no screaming hell either. Guess it's replenish/refresh time in the fall! We lost 1 Nippon outright, the others had smallish blooms and a low number of them, like maybe 3 per stem:) But at least they are all developing nice seedpods. Matter of fact, this year (2004), we have let a fair number of lilies develop seedpods. It'll be interesting to see what they grow into: a replica of the plant they grew on, or did the pollen come from a neighbouring different variety; time will tell.

In 2004 a few of the bulbs planted in the yard didn't come back up, but this one here, in the frontyard, tried to make up for that with this huge stack of blooms, some of which were easily 7 or 8 inches!