Trillium seedlings

[Roderick]

Hi!
 
I was given some unlabeled Trillium seedlings a few years ago.  Two are now in flower.  As a Trillium tyro can anyone help me by giving them a name?  One is very dark and the other more or less yellow with purple marking, but the floral details seem the same.   Roderick

[Lesley Cox]

Easy to be wrong here but my thought would be forms of Trillium chloropetalum. Mmmm?

[Paul T]

Given they were seedlings, and I assume from someone's garden, then they could easily be garden hybrids and therefore almost impossible to sort out without seeing the parents.  They're beautiful, regardless of what species they are. 

[Lesley Cox]

Actually, hybrid trilliums are much less common than people assume. Most stick to themselves but there is a lot of variation within species.

[TheOnionMan]

Actually, hybrid trilliums are much less common than people assume. Most stick to themselves but there is a lot of variation within species.

I beg to differ, there is lots of documented evidence of Trillium hybridization. Fred and Roberta Case's book Trilliums speaks to the issue of natural hybridization.

[Lesley Cox]

OK, I'll take your word for it Mark. It doesn't happen so much in NZ gardens. I guess what I was readly saying was that if someone doesn't recognise a plant right off, the reaction is "Oh it must be a hybrid." Not necessarily so.

[Paul T]

And in Trilliums, even if it isn't a hybrid a lot of people can't be sure anyway, as so many of the species are so close to each other.  Often people need to know the provenance of the original plant in the wild to be able to tell what species it is.  I think I recall reading at one point where one species occurred directly across the river from another species, which looked superficially very similar.  Which side they came from determined which species they were named.  There wasn't much chance of separately identifying them by eye.  Sometimes the species differentiation comes down to the length of the stamens etc.... I've even seen arguements going on about it. 

Trilliums unfortunately are a very muddled genus, at least to the average person like me. 

[TheOnionMan]

I have an entirely different impression of the genus.  My take on it is the genus is fairly well understood, with the taxonomy relatively settled without much of it being controversial or in dispute. Subdividing the genus into groups or interrelationships, is less understood. Of course, like any large and complicated genus, there can be finely delimited characteristics for the species.  There is also much discussion, including in Flora of North America (FNA), about when the distributional range of some species overlap, they can hybridize and intergrade, perhaps leading to the "muddle" being mentioned; FNA speaks of Trillium flexipes hybrids with T. erectum that "occur only along the contact zone between T. flexipes and T. erectum".

FNA also reports "many [trillium] species hybridize, especially within the T. erectum group" and "hybrids between T. vaseyi and T. rugelii occur frequently", the latter are two utterly different looking plants, no fine lines of distinction between these two.

The book Trilliums by Fred and Roberta Case gives many details of hybrids, including hand-made crosses for scientific purposes in support of the possibility of certain plants in the wild representing natural hybrids.

There are Asiatic trillium hybrids too, such as T. x hagae (camschatcense x tschonoskii), T. x miyabeanum (apetalon x tschonoskii), T. x yezoense (apetalon x camschatcense), and others.

If anyone doesn't have the Trilliums book, it is highly recommended.  In fair use provision, I have scanned the book cover with a clump of gorgeous pink grandiflorum, and a photo inside of hybrids between T. erectum  and flexipes that arose in the Case garden.

from Trilliums, by Frederick W. Case Jr and Roberta B. Case, Timber Press, 1997, ISBN 0-88192-374-5

[Paul T]

McMark,

Actually being over there probably helps you get a handle on this.    I just have to go by some of the arguements etc that I've seen on Trillium-L over the last decade or more that I've been on it.  They can definitely get a little tetchy about species differentiation at times.    Much more refined here thankfully. 

[Shadylanejewel]

Roderick - Regardless of what species your seedlings are, they've grown up to be very beautiful!  Whoever gave them to you was very generous.