There are times when forgetfulness stores up some lovely surprises.
A few years back we bought a batch of lilies and planted them around the place, a bit of henryi here, a few candidum there and some regale in the corner by the seat. Some did, some didn't, but on the whole the operation was, and continues to be, a success. Except, this year, three unusual and, to be honest, temporarily unknown plants appeared in the Jewel garden. They had a self-assured rosette of deeply veined, spatulate leaves in a deep matt green, and this was followed by a long stem with more tiers of leaves appearing up its length.
We were entranced. What nobility of form. What elegance and drama - and all achieved without a hint of flower. If anyone was foolish enough to think that plants need colour to be fully decorative let them just look at this and rearrange the whole structure of their aesthetic standards. And then, as if this was not enough, they each produced a mass of hanging boiled-sweet-shaped flower buds that opened out to be - a martagon lily.
It turned out that Sarah had planted them three years ago and forgotten about them. As the Jewel garden gets planted and replanted every year, this is understandable. They were just a dab or two of paint on a canvas that is being built up layer upon layer. The first year they did nothing, last year they were so pathetic that I certainly did not even notice them but, after three years, they have come miraculously of age.
I realise that I am supposed to know about such obvious things as martagon lilies, but I didn't, had never consciously seen one outside the pages of a book before and am delighted that not only have I made their acquaintance but that such treats are still available to surprise me in my own back yard.
Each individual flower is a Turk's cap type, in that its petals hang straight down before curving right back to form a turban and expose the dangling stamens hanging below like the claws of an arcade grabber. Up to 50 of these hang from each stem. They are a shocking pink with deep plum speckles at their base and orange anthers. Quite the wrong colours for the jewel garden, of course, but I am increasingly getting bored with the restrictions of that game. Rigour can become an end in itself if you are not careful and the accidental is always so much more perfect than the most carefully contrived good taste. There is a white form, L martagon var album, and a rich maroon one, var cattaniae.
Martagon lilies are one of the easier ones to grow and will naturalise in long grass or dappled woodland. Our three seem very happy in the lee of a tall east-facing hedge and they are ideal for growing beneath trees or between shrubs. The martagon grows wild from Spain right across the Caucasus to Siberia and it is claimed to be a native in a couple of woods in the Wye Valley, which is just down the road from here, as well as in Surrey.
In the walled garden of Wisley the regal lilies have just finished flowering, but they have - as ever - been astonishing for the past month or more. The regal lily was discovered by Ernest Wilson in 1903 in a steep Chinese valley where, according to Wilson's own account, 'In summer the heat is terrific, in winter the cold is intense, and at all seasons these valleys are subject to sudden and violent wind storms... There in June, by the wayside, in rock crevices by the torrent's edge, and high up on the mountainside and the precipice, this lily in full bloom greets the weary wayfarer. Not in twos or threes but in hundreds, in thousands, aye, in tens of thousands...'
He brought some bulbs home and since then it has been the most popular garden lily and the easiest to grow. The buds are pinky purple flushed with a touch of grey, sticking out at right angles to the stem like speed-boat hulls and then opening white with a yellow flush at the base of the petals. The scent from these voluptuous trumpets is as full-throated as nightingale song. We grow ours in a very sunny corner, in the company of Acanthus spinosus and the rose 'Charles de Mills', and for a month in midsummer this is as opulent as an English garden can get - yet the plants take all the wet and cold and wind that this garden absorbs each winter without any trouble at all.
Rummaging through old notes I see that I wrote in these pages six years ago: 'L henryi is easy to grow on anything but very acidic soil but has large tangerine flowers that are scentless, which seems to be pointless.' What was I thinking? Eight feet tall, orange, easy to grow? I should have planted them years ago but made up for lost prejudice and time by planting a 100 bulbs in the damp garden this spring. The idea is that their scentless orange will work alongside the egg-yolk orange of the Ligularia x palmatiloba and 'Othello'. Most of the henryi are up, but none yet flowering as I write. They are nothing like the promised 8ft, but the martagon experience gives me confidence that after a year or three they will do their orange thing as lustily as they surely can.