The Czech traveller, botanist and plantsman, Benedikt Roezl is known largely for the immense quantity of orchids that he collected in Mexico and in various countries of South America. He started his horticultural career in 1836 in the garden of Tetschen [Děčín] Castle, the home of Leopold Graf von Thun und Hohenstein in Bohemia (Czech Republic), then later worked for Louis Van Houtte in Gentbrugge (Belgium) in 1846 where he became the new chef de culture of Van Houtte’s école d’horticulture de Gand (Ghent).

Roezl collected in North America on his extended route across the USA in 1869 while travelling to California from New York, via St Louis, Chicago, Omaha, Cheyenne and Truckee (Mabberley 1985: 452). Roezl wrote a report of his Californian journey, including the discovery of L. humboldtii and sent it to Eduard Ortgies, Superintendent of the University of Zurich Botanic Garden and Roezl’s de facto agent, who published the account in “Gartenflora” (Ortgies 1871: 108). In it, Roezl wrote (translated from the German):

“A commercial gardener in San Francisco told me about a very beautiful lily with yellow, red-dotted flowers which occurs near Nevada City. I hired two Chinese to help me and having made the acquaintance of Dr. Tiling, a doctor who is interested in the local flora, within eight days I had many bulbs of this lily. If I am permitted, I should like to give this lily the name L. humboldtii as it was found on the 100^th birthday of von Humboldt. This beautiful lily has golden-yellow flowers with red and black spots, leaves clustered in whorls and stems five to six feet tall and bears up to 35 flowers” (Ortgies 1871: 108).

Ortgies added a footnote stating that Herr. Leichtlin handled the purchase and import of the lily whose flowers were noticeably long-lived (Ortgies 1871: 108). The Dr. Tiling mentioned by Roezl must have been the physician and botanist Heinrich Sylvester Theodor Tiling (1818–1871).

Roezl added additional information on his discovery in a short autobiography of his expeditions and collections for the “Gardeners’ Chronicle” published on 18 July 1874 (Roezl 1874). In that year, he returned to Europe to settle in Smichow, Bohemia [Smíchov, a district of Prague]. He wrote about his arrival in the USA only four years after the end of the American Civil War and having lost one of his arms while demonstrating a new sugar-cutting machine in Cuba in 1868:

“Afterwards I proceeded to New York to start on my Californian travels over the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. I discovered here the new lilies L. washingtonianum, puberulum, parvum and humboldtii; the latter I found on the hundredth memorial day of Alexander von Humboldt and hence named one of the species after him. The lily in question does not come from the Humboldt County as some catalogues assert” (Roezl 1874: 73).

Roezl’s discovery of this new species would therefore have been on 6 May 1869 although he never published a validating description of his new lily.

In the world of horticulture, the great beauty and stature of this Californian lily was very quickly recognised. Roezl’s collection crossed the Atlantic to Europe in the same year that it had been collected. It was first validly named Lilium humboldtii in Haarlem, The Netherlands, in 1870, some five and a half thousand miles from its native habitat in the Sierra Nevada. Jacob Heinrich Krelage, son of the nurseryman Ernst Heinrich Krelage (1786–1855), was a keen and very successful commercial grower of bulbous plants. He placed two advertisements in the “Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette” on 22 and 29 October 1870 for his E.H.Krelage en zoon nursery listing Lilium humboldtii as a new and interesting Lilium. His description in both cases was short: “from California, 5 feet high, golden flowers spotted with purple, £1 each” (J.H.Krelage 1870: 1402; 1435). There is, however, just enough descriptive matter to satisfy Art. 38.1 of the International Code of Nomenclature (ICN; Turland et al. 2018). Art. 38.1 is “one of the most difficult provisions of the ICN to apply” (J. Wiersema, pers. comm., 24 May 2021), thus the authors of this note affirmed with a number of experts involved in the current ICN, including Dr John Wiersema (US) and Dr John McNeill (E), the sufficiency of J.H.Krelage’s brief description which predates that of the English nurseryman William Bull of King’s Road, Chelsea in London. Bull, whether aware or not of Krelage’s acquisition, provided an equally short description of this recently imported Californian lily less than three months later, on 14 January 1871 (see Typification below).

Jacob Krelage waited another four years before writing a full account of L. humboldtii in his “De Tuinbouw-Illustratie Tijdschrift voor Tuinbouw en Plantkunde” (“The Illustrated-Horticulture Magazine for Horticulture and Botany”). He also included a plate (see Fig. 1) to accompany the comprehensive descriptive text and provided much valuable information about its history (J.H.Krelage 1874: 138, t. 31). Of further interest, the description, published by J.H.Krelage in 1870, is attributed to E.H.Krelage en zoon, but without specifying any individual of the business as the author of the name. Therefore, we have invoked external evidence (ICN Art. 46.9) to establish that J.H.Krelage was the only extant member of the Krelage firm (E.H.Krelage having died in 1855) and is, therefore, the author of Lilium humboldtii.

The French botanist, Pierre Etienne Simon Duchartre, was one of the founders of the Société Botanique de France in 1854. From a young age he had been fascinated by the morphology of the genus Lilium and, in particular, its bulb structure. He wrote extensively on the species that were cultivated in the garden of the bulb connoisseur Max Leichtlin in Karlsruhe. His articles, each entitled “Observations sur le Genre Lis”, appeared in nine separate instalments in the French “Journal de la Société Impériale et Centrale d’Horticulture de France” Ser. 2 in vols. 4 and 5 (Duchartre 1870; Duchartre 1871). In the seventh of these instalments, he wrote (translated from the French):

“Lilium humboldtii is one of the most beautiful discoveries made by Benedikt Roezl and one of the most precious introductions into the garden of Maximilien Leichtlin” (Duchartre 1871: 94).

Duchartre added that on 14 May 1870 Leichtlin had written a letter to him informing him that B. Roezl had found the plant at Devil’s Gate, in a ravine that ran alongside the Pacific Railroad next to a river with many rapids, before arriving at Wintah Station from where the train goes on to Mormon City. This misleading information, imparted second hand from Roezl via Leichtlin, has been the source of much confusion and is discussed below under the heading The Utah Mystery.

Duchartre also added that the description he is providing was based on two young and rather meagre specimens which he owed to the kindness of his great friend M. Leichtlin and explained that his friend Leichtlin had witnessed the species come into flower for the first time in the month of July 1870 (Duchartre 1871: 95). Finally, Duchartre provided a comprehensive Latin description and diagnosis in the firm belief that, judging from his earlier correspondence with Leichtlin, the plant known as “Lilium humboldtii Roezl et Leichtlin in litt.” had not yet been formally described. He added after the description:

“Hab. in Californiae montibus Sierra Nevada dictis, ubi a cl. Roezl detectum est ab eo cum cl. et amicissimo Max Leichtlin communicatum (v.v.c.)” [It grows in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where it was found by the famous Roezl and it was communicated to me by him along with my great and famous friend Max Leichtlin. v.v.c.] (v.v.c = vidi vivam cultam: I have seen it alive in cultivation) (Duchartre 1871: 97).

Duchartre had maintained a long correspondence with Max Leichtlin (see below) in Karlsruhe [formerly Carlsruhe], also with J. H. Krelage in Haarlem and with the great nurseryman Louis Van Houtte in Gentbrugge (Duchartre 1873a: 2). Two years after his informative paper on L. humboldtii (Duchartre 1871), he repeated the salient extracts from that paper in a separate article that he wrote for Van Houtte’s journal “Flore des Serres”. A coloured plate (see Fig. 2) of a plant that had been cultivated in Van Houtte’s garden was included (Duchartre 1873b t. 879).

Amongst Duchartre’s correspondence, now kept in the Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden, is a handwritten note on L. humboldtii including a sketch by him of the bulb, which showed Duchartre’s particular interest in bulb diversity within the genus. The note simply says (translated from the French):

“On the 19 February 1870, I received by the post from Mr. Max Leichtlin of Carlsruhe, a beautiful lily bulb with the following letter: “I am sending you today a bulb of the rare, new L. humboldtii of this magnificent genus. The bulbs came to me from the Sierra Nevada of North America. You can see at first glance the singular growth next to the developing bulb which sinks into the soil each year. It has orange flowers spotted with purple and carries sometimes as many as 30 flowers of a quite remarkable beauty. P.S. my plant only provisionally carries the name L. humboldtii.”

The illustration of the bulb drawn by Duchartre in pencil also bears a short note by him (translated from the French):

“Lilium humboldtii (provisional name) sent from Carlsruhe by M. Max Leichtlin on 19 February 1870. The bulb is as I received it. The bulb is situated on the side of a stem fragment from under which emerge several now dried out roots. It has the general form of a martagon with large scales, thinner, almost flat, whitish, rather speckled towards the top”.

Max Leichtlin was one of the greatest growers of rare bulbs during the 19^th century. He was the third son of Eduard Leichtlin, founder in 1823 of a successful paper-making business with his brother in Karlsruhe. Max Leichtlin briefly joined the family business before beginning his lifelong career in horticulture, first as an apprentice in the gardens of the Schloss in Karlsruhe for the Grand Duke of Baden, then he went to the Königliche Gartenakademie [Royal Garden Academy] in Potsdam. In 1850, he travelled around Europe and South America to enhance his botanical knowledge, returning to Europe in 1856 (Hooker 1883: 1; Nelmes and Cuthbertson 1931: 223). He worked for two years in the nursery of Louis Van Houtte in Gentbrugge. On the death of his eldest brother, Leichtlin rejoined the family paper business until leaving the business again in the 1860s in order to lay out his own garden near to the Stadtgarten Karlsruhe [now Zoologischer Stadtgarten] where he cultivated many rare plants. His garden included some 250 different lilies, many acquired from his ever-burgeoning list of cosmopolitan contacts, Roezl being one of them. Leichtlin also distributed plants amongst his correspondents including to Duchartre in France and Eduard Regel (see below) in Russia.

Leichtlin had to leave Karlsruhe in 1873 owing to development in the southern part of the city. He moved to Baden-Baden 40 km south of Karlsruhe where he acquired a new garden near the Neuen Schlosses and continued to grow his rare and unusual species. His reputation by this time was huge and he was given honorary fellowship of the Royal Horticultural Society in London as well as being awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal by the Society. Leichtlin produced from this garden a series of sale catalogues of the plants that he grew there. It is worth noting that, in his first list of Lilium, he credited his friend Duchartre with the authorship of the name “L. humboldtii Duchartre” (Leichtlin 1874: 16), but later, in his undated list of “Lilien”, he attributed the name to Roezl as “L. humboldtii Roezl” without any description or additional information in either case (Leichtlin suppl. 1: 2, pre–1873).

Eduard August von Regel was a prolific German horticulturist and botanist who worked during his early career in botanic gardens in Göttingen, Bonn and Berlin. In 1842, he was appointed head of the botanic garden in Zürich. In 1852, he founded and edited the magazine “Gartenflora”, in which he described several new lily species. In 1855, he became a research botanist at the Imperial Botanic Garden in St Petersburg and, from 1875, he was its director and remained so until his death.

In vol. 21 of his “Gartenflora”, he described Lilium humboldtii with a fine coloured illustration (Regel 1872: 161–163, t. 724, see Fig. 3). This must have been sent to him courtesy of Louis van Houtte as the same image was reproduced a year later for Duchartre (Duchartre 1873b t. 879, see typification below). Regel more or less repeats the text previously published by Duchartre (Duchartre 1871: 94–97), but adds some important information regarding the source of his own plants of the species from which the plate was prepared. His text included (translated from the German):

“We owe the depiction of the beautiful lily that our table presents here to our honoured friend Leichtlin. The bulb shown at c in the table is based on a living specimen in the garden. B. Roezl discovered this excellent and beautiful lily in California in the Sierra Nevada at Devil’s Gate, a wild mountain valley through which a river with many rapids falls, along which the Pacific Railway runs through the mountains. Mr M. Leichtlin bought from Mr Roezl all of the bulbs which he had collected, with the exception of a few specimens, which were obtained through the intermediary of Mr M. Leichtlin for the Imperial Botanic Garden in St. Petersburg”.

Regel’s comments on the provenance of the species once again have added to the confusion surrounding its origin. It seems that he is describing the Devil’s Gate in Utah, but mistakenly placing it in the Sierra Nevada in California. This error probably occurred from misinformation supplied to him by Leichtlin (see The Utah Mystery below). In addition, it is not clear in which garden the living bulb shown at c was in cultivation (but see discussion on the illustrations in Typification below).