Roger wrote: " It's very common for sterile triploids to resort to vegetative propagation." Roger, in the natural course of events virtually all lilies - diploids, triploids, tetraploids and others - propagate themselves vegetatively. The old growers had a bag of tricks for enhancing this natural tendency - tricks such as lopping off the inflorescence early in its development or ripping the stems out and heeling them in horizontally. The bulbil bearing characteristic in lilies does have a genetic basis: review the breeding history of mid-twentieth century lily hybrids and you will become aware of several breeding lines which were characterized by the bulbil bearing characteristic. And the lilies in question were not necessarily triploids. Typically these breeding lines had the old triploid tiger lilies in their background. Jim McKenney