This disease is caused by three or four causes. If the bulbs have been planted in a poor or dry soil, or if the spot is unsuitable, you will lose many of your lilies from this cause. Bulbs which have not been properly ripened often disappoint you in this way. Again, if you delay planting your bulbs till February or March, you must expect to be treated in this way. But the most common cause of all is the presence of mildew among the scales. You can guard against this by paying attention to the methods described in our last number. There are three other ways by which lilies may disappoint you. They may either not come up at all, or they may come out but fail to produce flowers, or they produce flowers which are damaged and are deformed or discoloured. The first of these untoward results is usually due to the bulb having rotted in the ground. You can do nothing for this but bear the loss philosophically. You should remember, however, that some lilies, especially _Lilium Longiflorum_, often lie dormant for a year, but come up the next year better than ever. No lily will flower every year, and some lilies require a year or two to get accustomed to a new home. These will not flower the first year. As a rule, when a bulb does not send up a flowering shoot, the bulb itself grows to a very large size. It is most annoying to see a lily which promises well belie itself and produce either a deformed or a cankered flower. The cause of the first is almost always green fly. To this we will refer later. The cause of the latter is either too poor soil, abuse of liquid manure, or continuous rain just before the flowers open. Lilies like the rain. If the weather were arranged to please a lily, it would rain every day from the time when the shoot appears till the flowering period has arrived. But lilies object to rain from the time that the buds begin to change from green to white, or whatever colour the bud will eventually become, until the flower is fully opened. It is here that lilies grown in pots have the pull over those grown in the open ground, for if a spell of rainy weather occurs at the wrong time, the pots can be taken indoors or placed under shelter, which is impossible in the case of lilies grown in the open. But something can be done for the lilies which are exposed to the weather. The buds can either be wrapped round with oiled paper, or else they can be sheltered by an old umbrella tied to a stick. By this latter means we have saved many valuable lilies from disaster. Lilies vary much in their powers of enduring excessive rain at the flowering period. _Lilium Auratum_, _Candidum_, and some others are nearly always ruined when they happen to flower in a spell of rainy weather. _Lilium Giganteum_, _Concolor_, _Tigrinum_, and many others stand rain at their flowering time with ease.