Dear Marie-Paule
>I have a problem with a white lelie(it is a hardy one) of which I do not
>know the name, on the stems(in the armpits) hanging small bulbs of seed. I
>think that for this reason none or few flowers come to flower,can't I
>better throw away these bulbs?
It is really hard to give meaningful advice when we don't know if
your lily
is really a lily, and not a calla lily or lily-of-peru, or something
else. We can
only guess if the plant is/should be flowering now, or some other time. In
other
words, what follows may be completely wrong, but it is probably the best I
can do without further information.
Assuming it actually is a lily, the small bulbs in the leaf axils
are called
bulbils. They are vegetative reproductions, like divisions. Seeds come
only from
flowers, so they can't be seeds. At the end of the season, the bulbils can be
planted, and will produce small copies of the mother, which will probably not
flower for a couple years.
Many lilies will produce bulbils, most often asiatics such as L.
lancifolium,
as John B. mentioned. Trumpet lilies do so occasionally, especially if
they have
L. sulfureum or L. sargentianum in their ancestry. Bulbils are
particularly likely
to form if the mother bulb is too small to flower this year, but growing
vigorously.
Thus, throwing away your lily is probably (yes, probably) the wrong thing
to do,
it is growing vigorously but too small to flower this year, next year it
should flower
normally.
It might be worthwhile to go to an internet search engine such as
http://www.images.google.com/ and search for "white lilies" or the like, and see if
anything
is similiar to your lily. The PBS Wiki is another place to look at images of
lilies, and perhaps you could tell us it resembles some particular image. If
you type in bulbils instead of "white Lily", you will find images of lilies
with
bulbils, and can make a guess if that is what your lily has.
Ken