Gardening is suffused with actions based not on reality and best practice but misinformed common knowledge. (If I use the phrase ‘Old Wive’s Tales’ I worry about the insult to old wives who are as wise as old men.) How to grow snake’s head lilies (Fritillaria meleagris) is one of these. They’re British natives. People have seen them in Cricklade, meadows by the River Lugg in Leominster and at Oxford. If you’ve seen them in Europe they grow in grassland and scrub. Their British status is suspect and at least in one case it’s proven that they were planted.
The problem with Britain is the wet summer – at least, the not reliably dry summer.
Bulbs have evolved to cope with dry summers and many bulbs like tulips and frits die of wet in summer. If and when the plants which are/were thought to be native were naturalised I reckon they were naturalised in meadows like the ones they were seen in abroad and, to do them justice, they survived. But, the only reliable way to ensure a dry summer rest in Britain is to plant them under deciduous trees.
In such conditions the light penetrates the canopy when they are growing in late winter and spring AND the soil dries out as soon as the trees get growing and they start sucking out the moisture.
There’s another fact that has to be coped with. I recently did a straw poll of about 140 plant enthusiasts about 40% of whom grew them. Most grew them under trees but not all. Some grew them in rough grass and some in flower borders.
The consensus was that they are tough, grow and self-seed spreading steadily more or less anywhere. But establishing them is only easy if you obtain growing plants and plant them out. Bulbs don’t work consisting as they do of loosely assembled scales which can fall apart, get damaged and rot almost immediately. One person had established a thriving population from seed but the seed had been gathered and sown fresh from a local source.
