This section is from the book "What England Can Teach Us About Gardening", by Wilhelm Miller. Also available from Amazon: What England Can Teach Us About Gardening.
The most gorgeous lily we have east of the Rockies is the one that has been well named Lilium superbum. It has flowers about four inches across, orange, spotted with dark purple, and of the Turk's cap type, *. e., the flowers are drooping and the petals rolled far back. It blooms in August. In sunny meadows or in garden conditions this lily may grow only three feet high and bear four to ten flowers, but in American bog gardens it towers to a height of eight or ten feet, each stem being crowned with a great pyramid of bloom, often containing twenty and sometimes thirty flowers. The species nearest like it on the Pacific coast are Humboldt's lily and the leopard lily, both of which do better in England than L. superbum.
• Not hardy North.
Second to superbum among practicable lilies for the bog garden I should rank the Canadian wood-lily (Lilium Canadense), which bears red or yellow bells in July. The European dealers take pains to separate these two varieties and they even have a third colour, viz., orange. I saw all three at Iver Heath, and it was a pleasure to see them doing better in an artificial bog garden than I had ever seen them in nature.
It is customary to speak of "bog lilies," but no one should imagine that the bulbs themselves like constant dampness. Have no stagnant moisture in a bog garden, for it breeds sourness and scum and very few plants worth growing can stand it. The ideal is moving moisture — an unfailing water supply combined with perfect drainage. The bulbs of bog lilies should be a few inches above the line of constant moisture.
 
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