any advice to fix a dying lily?

by ashley
(augusta, ga, usa)

hello, a friend of mine gave me tiger lily bulbs, told me to plant them in a pot and that they like direct sunlight and plenty of water. i left them in the sun yesterday and they started turning brown and yellow. when i looked on the internet, it said they like shade. any chance i can correct this error? where should i put them in my house/yard to help them recover?

Doug says that lilies in the south are often grown with a bit of mid-day shade to ease their heat tolerance. In the north, we grow them in the full sun (but then again, we don't have your heat). :-)

Will they live? It depends on how badly they've been heated up, dried out and how unhappy they are. You may have got the pots too hot for them and slightly cooked the roots (depends on the colour of the pot in the sun - darker pots can heat up pretty good).

If they were my bulbs, I'd get them into the ground about now in a spot where they got mid-day shade but decent sun for 8 hours day on either side of the heat of the day.

And I'd cross my fingers that they'll forgive me. :-)