Planting Lilies in Pot or Garden

 Lilies provide beauty wherever they're grown. But not all those with a green thumb (or who desire one) are lucky enough to live in a suitable USDA hardiness zone. Sometimes, a container is just the answer. Others prefer their flowers to bloom outdoors to liven up the display around the house. Here are a few warnings and guidelines for both groups.

Container gardening provides for the ultimate control of soil pH and moisture, soil and air temperature, and control of light. But where lilies are concerned there are a few things to watch out for.

One important aspect is what you might least expect: lilies require cold. "Huh?" you say. "How can a flower that loves six hours of sunshine per day, and grows up to eight feet high in tropical environments, want cold?" The answer is simple: they don't grow all year 'round.

Lilies, like any plant that grows from a bulb (like irises, for example), need to go dormant in the winter. The flowers wilt and drop. The leaves wither and go yellow or brown. The stalks become woody and stiff. This is the time when you want to deadhead those blooms, snip off the leaves, and clip the stalk at ground level.

Then the bulb concentrates its sugars and spends the late fall and winter preparing for spring. Bulbs spend very little time doing nothing whatever, and only in the coldest environments. When the ground warms up again, the bulbs begin to extend roots out to draw nutrients from the soil. Remember, at six inches under the earth there is practically no light so the effect is due mostly to temperature, with a nudge from genetically controlled timing.

That cold snap, therefore, is essential to the natural cycle that lilies use to reproduce a stalk and hence buds and, ultimately, flowers every year. Even those lily species like Martagons that require several years to produce the first blooms still go through this process annually.

Those conditions can be difficult to attain in a container. Few gardeners are going to want to allow even a portion of their houses to reach 40F/4C or lower to stimulate the lily bulb to do what it needs to do.

One way around the difficulty is to go ahead and plant in a container, then leave the pot outside in the late fall and all winter. Once spring arrives, you can bring the pot inside, if growing inside the home is your preferred method.

That only works, of course, if your outdoor temperatures cooperate six months out of the year. As an alternative, it is possible to pull up bulbs in the fall, then store them in a cellar or refrigerator until it's time to bring them out again. Some hothouses, despite the name, use this technique.

All this is simply to point out that, while container gardening has many advantages, it does present certain constraints. For the gardener willing to do a bit of homework and make the effort of special arrangements, container-grown lilies are a possibility. And no one will question whether it was worth it when they see the results.

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