Suppose this day is the 1st of November. We are going to-day to a sale of lily bulbs. What lilies shall we get? How shall we choose our bulbs? What price ought we to pay for them? Let us glance through our gardening books and see. What do these books tell us? Nothing whatever! Or rather nothing which is of any value. You will find so little information about lilies in books on gardening, and that little is so full of errors, that it is best to ignore it altogether, except in the case of lilies which are commonly cultivated. And there is no practical book upon lilies alone before the public. Elwes' _Monograph of the Genus Lilium_ is a good book in its way, and the plates are excellent, but the information is much too scanty, and it is also out of date. As this book is not published by any house, is out of print, and is very rarely met with, and as its price is about £12, we may well say that this volume is impracticable. Wallace's little volume on _Lilies and Their Culture_ is twenty years old. There is practically no satisfactory book about lilies, and it is to fill this blank that we write these papers. Our knowledge of the subject is mainly the result of actual experience, for we have grown eighty-seven distinct varieties of lilies, to which is added a little information obtained from books tested by ourselves, and a good many valuable hints derived from gardeners and others who have devoted some of their time to the study of these plants. Determination will solve nearly all difficulties. We have been to the sale and bought our lilies; now how are we to grow them? In pots? In the ground? Will they grow out of doors, or must they be kept in the greenhouse? When we first took up our hobby we could not have answered these questions, but we can do so now, for we have found out these points for ourselves, and are more than satisfied with our results. Upon arriving at the conclusion, that if we wished to cultivate lilies we must find out all about them, we got a large note-book, and therein we kept a record of the year's work. We will describe this book a little later in the year, when we will not be so busy in the garden. For the lily grower, November is one of the busiest months in the whole year. It is during this month that most of the planting should be done, for though lily bulbs are perhaps better planted a month or two earlier than this, they are exceedingly difficult to obtain until November has begun.