Growing Wisdom with David Epstein

Hi, I’m David Epstein. This is Growing Wisdom and sometimes here on Growing Wisdom, I just like to tell you about a plant or variety of plants or in this case a bulb that I just really like and it’s Fritillaria.

We have Fritillaria imperialis and Fritillaria meleagris. As you can see they’re just very different looking. I love the imperialis because it’s so tall. It grows to be about 4 feet tall striking orange flowers. You can see the foliage is just beautiful. The one problem is you might have a problem with the lily beetle. That’s the red beetle that tends to eat the leaves on Fritillaria and tends to also eat the flowers. You can see that this particular flower has been eaten a little bit by lily.

One of the things that you might notice with Fritillaria is it tends to smell a little bit, a hint of skunk and that can tend to keep some critters away so it’s also a good plant for that as well. Fritillaria, plant them in the fall you’ll enjoy them in the spring.

Come back every week for all of our tips and some helps here at Growing Wisdom.