Daylilies have become general favorites. The plants give pleasure from when the first green spears emerge through the ground in the spring until fall.
They make a restful, green background for other plants when not in bloom. Few gardeners can resist their good nature and polite behavior. They give so much and ask so little.
Their biggest blooming season comes when blossoms are not abundant. They provide masses of flowers and elegant colors when necessary for the borders to be dull. This feature alone makes them a “must” in many gardens.
They are generally available. Most nurseries can furnish at least a few kinds. The specialists list them by the hundreds in all the choicest colors and varieties.
The newest ones are expensive while stock is being built up, but the largest numbers consist of the tried and true varieties at very reasonable prices.
Our plants increase each year and soon get large enough to divide. We are often given gift plants.
It is one of the easiest plants to grow from seeds. We get a couple of fine varieties, dab pollen from one plant to another, and seeds mature. We plant them here, and we plant them there.
Giving More Room To Grow Daylilies
Casualties are few. Soon we are searching for more garden space to take care of all the plants. It all happens so quietly that before long, the garden is cluttered with daylilies—some good and some—not so good, but all pretty in one way or another.
It isn’t easy to think of giving up a single one. But let’s face the facts.
Our gardens will be greatly improved by discarding all but those nearing perfection. They’ll have more room to grow and be all the better. There’ll be empty places for some of the fine new ones.
It’s time to harden our hearts and examine each clump carefully and critically and see how it measures up. Then use a sharp spade on those with undesirable traits.
These discards can improve the garden. Make compost of them and return them to your hemerocallis plantings to enrich the soil for better daylilies.
Selecting Perfect Daylilies
A competent judge may follow the rules in selecting the perfect daylilies, but more is needed to prove that such plants will please every gardener. Individual choices vary—we interpret colors differently.
We should keep our standards very high, but there is no need to accept plants that do not please our tastes.
But whether you like small dainty flowers or stunning large ones, bright velvety reds or soft pale yellows, exquisite wide petals, or the dramatic spider types, tailored forms, or frilly ruffled ones, be sure that the blossoms are of heavy substance.
Flowers of the graceful form may be pleasing when they first open, but if the good substance is lacking, they will wilt, curl, bleach, burn or melt entirely when subjected to the rays of a midday sun.
Such kinds, as well as those in which the blossoms fail to open far enough or those that open out too flat, should be discarded and the space given to better kinds.
We can have daylilies that have all-day glamour. Flowers that unfold perfectly retain their beauty despite the high sun, wind, or rain rate. They are as fresh and lovely at night as they were when they first opened.
Study The Daylily Flower
Study the flowers at different times during the day—early in the morning, at noon, and again at night. There is no excuse for giving space to plants with flowers that are lovely in color when they open but fade to a muddy or objectionable color during the day. But we should judge wisely.
Give plants with graceful form flowers and good substance several seasons to show what they can do. Some “sun fades” are fine if given a bit of shade during the hottest part of the day.
Again some varieties achieve their greatest beauty after hours of exposure to the hot sun, “fading” to lovelier colors than they had when first opening.
A spent appearance of the flower too early in the evening is only sometimes due to fading or lack of substance.
Some plants may open blossoms before midnight and have just as many, or more, blooming hours to their credit as those with their alarm clocks set for “after sunup rising.”
Evaluating Daylilies
Gardeners who spend more time in the garden in the evening than during the early morning hours will not appreciate the midnight frolickers. Then there are the evening beauties —opening from 4 p.m. on—some will still be fresh the next morning but wilt long before the close of the second day.
The early risers and the night bloomers may be lovely during their normal bloom and should be judged accordingly.
In evaluating daylilies, we see the “self-cleaning” point emphasized. The spent flower should drop quickly instead of hanging untidily on the bush after the next day’s blossoms open. This is a most desirable quality, but are there such plants? If there are, catalog descriptions fail to mention this neat habit.
The fragrance is mentioned, too. And there is fragrant hemerocallis. However, do not discard a good hemerocallis because it doesn’t have fragrance, but give the fragrant ones an extra point or two.
Plants should send up sturdy scapes that stand erect without staking and have good branching. Seeing the blossoms bunched closely together or all at the top of the escape is not pleasing.
It is much more desirable to have them open on different “levels.” If a plant has many well-branched scapes, each with 30 to 60 buds, one can expect three to six weeks of bloom.
For Cutting Gardens
For the cutting garden, plants with many scapes and fewer buds are preferred to those with fewer scapes and more blossoms because fewer buds are “wasted” when cutting stems.
If you find after a couple of seasons’ observation that there is a lack of balance between a plant and the number of flower stems—far too much foliage and not enough flowers—give that spot to a better plant.
The scapes should not be so short that flowers are hidden in the foliage nor so tall that too many bare flower stalk shows.
We have thousands of midseason bloomers to choose from and can be very selective. But there is a need for early ones, particularly in the rarer colors, and more and more gardeners are asking for late-season bloomers–because of the limited numbers, we judge these less harshly. Recurrent bloomers are those that bloom in the spring and again in the fall, a valuable feature.
A few hemerocallis increase by sending out spreading underground suckers and all too soon take over more than their allotted space. Such weedy ones make excellent compost.
Whether we prefer to grow them in rows to study them or value them mainly for cutting, or whether our chief interest is in their landscape value, we find that a careful survey to eliminate all but the best ones will make beauty not for a day but for many days throughout the daylily season.
44659 by Olga R. Tiemann