[Illustration:  SPECIOSUM LILIES IN THE SHADE.]

On the other hand, if purchased in spring, unless the bulbs have been wintered with the greatest care in damp, not wet, peat moss, or sand, they become so withered that their vitality is seriously impaired.  There are several dealers who make a specialty of thus wintering lily bulbs,[A] and if you buy from one of these, I advise spring planting.

If, however, for any reason you wish to finish your bed this fall, after planting and covering each bulb, press a four or five inch flower-pot lightly into the soil above it.  This will act as a partial watershed to keep the drip of rain or snow water from settling in the crown of the bulb and decaying the bud.  Or if you have plenty of old boards about the place, they may be put on the bed and slightly raised in the centre, like a pitched roof, so as to form a more complete watershed, and the winter covering of leaves, salt, hay, or litter, free of manure, can be built upon this.  Crocuses, snowdrops, and scillas make a charming border for a lily bed and may be also put between the lilies themselves to lend colour early in the season.

To cover your bed thoroughly, so that it will keep out cold and damp and not shut it in, is a must be of successful lily culture.  Have you ever tried to grow our hardiest native lilies like the red-wood, Turk’s cap, and Canada bell-lily in an open border where the porous earth, filled by ice crystal, was raised by the frost to the consistency of bread sponge?  I did this not many years ago and the poor dears looked pinched and woebegone and wholly unlike their sturdy sisters of meadow and upland wood edges.  Afterward, in trying to dig some of these lilies from their native soil, I discovered why they were uncomfortable in the open borders; the Garden, You, and I would have to work mighty hard to find a winter blanket for the lily bed to match the turf of wild grasses sometimes half a century old.

Many other beautiful and possible lilies there are besides these four, but these are to be taken as first steps in lily lore, as it were; for to make anything like a general collection of this flower is a matter of more serious expense and difficulty than to collect roses, owing to the frailness of the material and the different climatic conditions under which the rarer species, especially those from India and the sea islands, originated; but given anything Japanese and a certain cosmopolitan intelligence seems bred in it that carries a reasonable hope of success under new conditions.

We have half a dozen species of beautiful native lilies, but like some of our most exquisite ferns they depend much for their attractiveness upon the setting their natural haunts offer, and I do not like to see them caged, as it were, within strict garden boundaries.

The red wood-lily should be met among the great brakes of a sandy wood edge, where white leafless wands of its cousin, star-grass, or colic root, wave above it, and the tall late meadow-rue and white angelica fringe the background.