I don't know how to answer that question, because I've always received such excellent plants from RU. I love their collection - so many things to try. Pat talked me into Quietness. In its first season its grown like a weed and bloomed almost continuously. I'm really impressed. Pale pink and fragrant. I buy Bucks from RU - several new ones every year. The Buck roses have come to be one of the backbones of my garden. I bought Golden Unicorn this year also - what georgeous blooms. Pat got me started with Francis Dubreuill - I have two of them now. I bought Burgendy Iceberg there this year - all the good things about Iceberg plus the incredible color--iut truely is a deep burgendy color. Gruss an Aachen and Pink Gruss an Aachen. The English Miss. To be honest, I bet at least 60% of my roses come from RU. I wish I could start at the front of their catalogue and buy my way all the way to the last page.

Urgs, I just saw how huge the image was, sorry for that! @lily: I have no idea. Haweha commented my pictures on the german forum and wrote that he too had no idea who the ancestors could have been, the broad stakes are a trade of an big flowering cultivar. So perhaps they crossed a trumpet shaped specie with dutch cultivar? You might be able to find who crossed it. @Alana: Yes, I received seeds from Amputo x Sydney and Sydney x Amputo. I had so many flowers, there where 2 stakes with 3 blooms and 2 from one bulb with 4 each! I used this one for my crosses (even though it might just be a stronger clone from tissue cultivation), but I should have pollinated the other ones just to check what workes. I think I'll try to save pollen and try as much as possible. Ok, any suggestions ... finally: Amputo seems to be a Tetraploid regardless of it's fragrant looks. So it's a perfect candidate for a cross with a big-flowerig dutch hybrid. You should be able to preserve some of the colour scemes of the other parent. White flowers are often connected to a genetic defect where the plant's gene that transcribes pigments can't be read. So the other parent should be able to bring in some colours. What I'd like to try would be Grandeur, if anyone has pollen of these ... perhaps I should ask in another thread. ;)

I bought some glads from Pinetree for the first time this past year. The price isn't great compared to the bulk suppliers, but it's okay for small amounts. Selection is pretty darned good. I was pleased that the corms were healthy and a reasonable size, so they bloomed well, but the big drawback for me was that they sent them late, around late May, thereby missing my first two plantings altogether. I called them at least twice to ask for them sooner, and they were polite, but they aren't that flexible. They send them on their own schedule, period. I had ordered them by February at the absolute latest. You aren't in an ultra-cold, ultra-short summer climate like I am, so planting that late probably wouldn't a problem for you. My favorite glads source has been AMG, for great prices and big healthy corms, but selection is limited and you have to get a 50-corm minimum of each variety you order. Noweta is pretty good too, but in order to get the good commercial price, you have to get 50 of each color also. I think both AMG and Noweta offer mixes also, so you could get 50 of a mix for more variety. Noweta offers smaller amounts for home growers but the selection and price suffer. You can often pick up bags of glads fairly cheap in the spring from Home Depot or Costco. With Costco, I've found that the color/variety on the bag sometimes isn't the color/variety that's actually in the bag, but they're all useful, so what the heck. You can't really see through their bags, but I've found them to be healthy and blooming-sized. Home Depot is likely to have bigger bags of mixed colors, at the same price or cheaper than Internet/mail order sources. The bags are usually net, so you can inspect the bulbs. With any bulbs, I don't wait until they sell at late-season, clearance prices, as the bulbs can be quite dried out and less vigorous by then. I like full-sized glads for making big, full bouquets (a bouquet consisting entirely of 2-3 colors of glads is stunning, throw in some lilies and it's magnificent), but for folks who prefer smaller bouquets, the big guys may be too big. Border or Butterfly glads are better for smaller bouquets. I grow a few of those also. There isn't nearly the selection in those that the big ones have. The drawback with the big guys is that they sometimes fall over if they get much rain or just from their own weight if allowed to bloom out much. I generally cut when only one or two florets are open, so they don't develop so much weight on the stem and don't have a lot of surface area to hold rain. Some folks stake or otherwise support them. I don't, and have grown them in a constantly-windy field successfully for years We don't get much rain in the time frame that most of them bloom in, though. If you want to grow them in your garden for show rather than cutting, staking might be a good idea. Jeanne

Almost any kind of lily that's tall enough to cut is my favorite. I don't tend to grow a lot of plain oranges or pinks as those are very common and cheap at the supermarket. For the same reason, I don't grow Stargazer much, but all other Orientals that are tall enough are fair game. As long as it's tall enough, how much you like its looks, and how well you can combine that color with the rest of your flowers, are good criteria. I find that the LA hybrids aren't a whole lot stronger than plain Asiatics, whose petals are easily knocked off when open. If you'll be selling them, cutting with only one or two flowers open helps that somewhat - if the petals on the open flowers get knocked off, at least there will be more flowers. Another option is to sell them with more flowers open but only in arranged bouquets, with the lily stem in the center, to protect it. Harvesting them open, without knocking the petals off, is tricky. Orientals and trumpets are somewhat tougher. Trumpets and down-facing flowers can be more of a challenge to arrange than upward-facing types. Also, you might want to beware of varieties that get just too big for the bouquets that you sell. For instance, I grow a bright yellow Asi-florum called Golden Tycoon that produced 15+ large flowers per stem at two years old. Only the hugest bouquets can accomodate that. One stem is a bouquet all by itself, in fact the flowers are so big and so close together, it's hard to arrange anything else with it. I've found that there aren't that many customers who like single-stem bouquets. Then there are some very open types, like Arabesque, an Orienpet, that make great big gorgeous downward-facing flowers spaced very well apart on the stems. Gorgeous and airy and graceful in the garden, but too big and too far apart for arranging. A single stem on a two-year-old plant ends up being a two feet+ wide and very gangly. If you can see photos when you're shopping, try to notice how sparsely arranged on the stems the flowers are. Bear in mind that you should leave about half to two-thirds the stem when you cut, unless you pull the entire bulb, so it's best to choose varieties that will be twice as tall as the stem length you are looking for. Florists want ultra-long stems but you needn't be limited by that unless you plan to sell to florists. On some of the varieties that get too big too fast, like Golden Tycoon, you can slow them down somewhat by cutting off a larger proportion of the stem. There are hundreds and hundreds of good varieties. I've listed some that have worked out well for me below, but they are only a few of so many good varieties. The only one I've ever grown that I find simply unusable is a pale pink Asiatic name Pink Superior, which isn't. Superior, that is. The flower is a nice pale pink the day it opens, but starts turning ugly shades of brown and gray the very next day. There is generally only one flower, or none, on the stalk that looks nice. I think it is a florist version, and maybe the flowers look better when cut with no flowers open, then opened in the cooler, but for someone growing them outside, they're a waste of time and space. I've noticed that the general public often refers to any Oriental lily as a Stargazer. I think the growers impregnated that name on their minds a little too well! Sometimes it helps if you educate the customers that ALL Oriental lilies are fragrant and long-lasting like Stargazer. Asiatics and Asi-florums: High Class (red), Gironde (barely-tall-enough yellow), Volendam (orange), Sorpressa (white), Centerfold (white and burgundy), Salmon Classic (peach), Fangio (purplish red), Ercolano (white), and yes, even Golden Tycoon, but only because I did sell some very big arrangements. L.O. Triumphator -it's expensive but WONDERFUL! Orientals: Muscadet, Salmon Jewels, Aubade, Boogie Woogie, Chambertin, Willeke Alberti (a pristine pink-and-white), Casablanca, Siberia, and no doubt I'm forgetting plenty others. Stargazer is a good cut but I only grow a few for reasons stated above. Dizzy is impressive by itself, but I've found it hard to combine with other colors. Those are only the ones I've grown and remember at the moment. They're no better than hundreds of others. Jeanne