British garden expert Keith Wiley visits the Pacific Northwest in a search for the demure bulb Americans call the trout lily or the dog-tooth violet. NPR's Ketzel Levine hunts along with him.

See a photo gallery of images from The Garden House

In Hot Pursuit Keith Wiley captures his quarry: the fawn lily.

Erythronium oreganum This little Northwest native likes life in moist, well-drained, open woodlands.

May 6, 2003 -- They traveled six thousand miles from England, rented a car, then drove another two thousand miles up and down the Northwest coast. They went from the redwood forests to the Olympic Peninsula and reveled in what they found: Erythronium, a demure little bulb.

Keith and Ros Wiley of The Garden House in Devon, England, travel the world looking at plants, though rarely for one particular genus. In fact, Keith already grows what may be the world's largest concentration of erythronium, but knowing them as well as he does has only fueled his passion for this plant.

"Just look at them!" he says, standing ankle-deep in a field of fawn lilies. "They're carpeting the woods... like thousands of Chinese lanterns balanced on frail stems hovering over the ground."

Erythronium -- its common names are trout lily, fawn lily, adder's tongue and dog-tooth violet -- is almost exclusively native to the United States. More than a dozen species of this ephemeral spring bulb nod their demure heads in open, moist woodlands around the country. The West Coast species -- including E. californicum, E. revolutum and E. tuolumnense -- come in nodding, lilylike flowers ranging from pink to yellow to creamy white. On the day Ketzel caught up with the Wileys, they were on bended knees before Erythronium oreganum, its flowers barely flushed with color and its centers a rich butter yellow.

"I'm shaking with enthusiasm!" said Keith. "I can't stop my leg shaking. And it's not nerves. It's the excitement of all the ideas. We're on the verge of a revolution in gardening, if only we look around us. So many ideas."

The gist of Keith Wiley's gardening philosophy is this: don't look at other gardens for ideas, look to the natural world. Use your eye as if you were a painter: view the scene, capture its essence and interpret it with plants that grow well in your own backyard. "They don't have to be wild flowers," says Keith. "You can use plants that have the same shape, but maybe a bigger flower, a brighter color." What matters is the density of the plantings, the texture, the light.

"And don't worry about color combinations!" he adds, arguing against bookshelves worth of advice. "Nature doesn't worry about colors. Clashing colors make each other sing!"

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The Garden House ("the garden of my dreams" says Keith), in the west of England, is open from March 1st to October 31st.