More available so mass plant them, these bulk up well
Tuolumne fawn lily or Tuolumne dog's tooth violet, comes from the Sierra Nevada foothills, California. Plain green leaves, white filaments with yellow pollen. There are usually a tiered collection of blooms on the stem which is quite a distinctive growth form among other erythroniums. An easier vibe than E. grandiflorum as it thrives in dappled shade and moist, well-drained woodland soils, naturalizing easily in shaded beds and rock gardens. The bulbs are robust and readily form offsets. Gritty humus, open woodland, moisture in summer and at other times. It flowers as the E. revoultum begin to fade away.
(E. grandiflorum has broader leaves with a harder tip as it pushed through the soil in a tubular shape and brownish margins.)
Pagoda is one from with larger flowers which is supposedly a cross with this and another probably 'White Beauty' which is most likely a clone of a clone of E. californicum.
Once it is dormant it can tolerate more drought and denser shade.
From Ian Young's bulb log; "If your garden is likely to have hot sunshine when the Erythronium are in growth then some shade from the mid-day sun would be desirable to prevent the ones particularly with broad leaves from being scorched. Their relatively soft leaf structure indicates to us that they need some shelter from strong winds which at their worst can shred and snap the leaves and flowering stem – so those species with the
larger leaves such as Erythronium tuolumnense and its hybrids need more shelter than smaller growing species.
and...
"The one thing that may prevent you from growing Erythronium well is if your garden gets very hot and dry in summer – Erythroniums can survive quite long dry periods during the summer, provided they are in the ground, but it seems that they suffer if the ground around them heats up too much – this is part of the explanation why their bulbs grow so deeply into the ground. I have been asked how deep you should plant bulbs. There is no definitive answer it depends on your garden soil and weather because what the bulbs are seeking is not simply a definable depth of soil above them but the best environment, being a combination of moisture and temperature, they can tolerate."
Ian recommends planting them with 7cm of soil on top of the bulb, at least for all the western US coast species.
You really must check out Ian's bulb log number 2016.
Nbrewbooks from near Seattle, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
