Daylilies (hemerocallis) are perennials with real stamina and are of the easiest possible culture. They bring bright clouds of beauty to northern gardens when midsummer’s heat is at its fiercest.
Southern gardeners prize them for both floral and foliage effects. In their gardens, the evergreen varieties show splendid fountains of green year-round.
Daylilies For Every Gardener
During the past 15 years, hybridizers have produced a revolution in daylilies—designing them in shapes, sizes, and colors to suit every gardener.
Daylily fashions range from starry miniatures to sylph-like spiders, wide-petaled amaryllis forms, and flowers with perky twists to their petals. Some non-conforming types have unique contours and colors.
If you’re not content with single flowers, you can choose double day-lilies to enhance your garden.
Spider Daylilies
If you fancy slender petaled flowers, then you’ll enjoy the spider daylilies. A classic example of this type are the following:
- ‘Kindly Light,’ with each narrow petal slightly twisted and beautifully ruffled.
- ‘Garden Portrait’ has a delightfully cool green overcast to its spidery petals and ‘Shirley Wild,’ an informal spider, bears fragrant nine- to ten-inch flowers.
- ‘Summer Orchid’s’ cool yellow flowers have pale green throats and each narrow petal is frilled and recurved.
Thumbelina, Skeeter and Green Elf
If you prefer miniatures and small flowered sorts, then ‘Thumbelina’s’ tiny golden trumpets should suit you fine. Its low 12- to 15-inch stapes make it ideal for the front-of-the-border material.
Miniature melon pink ‘Skeeter’ produces a heavy crop of adorable flowers. ‘Green Elf’ displays lovely miniature green-gold flowers on fairly tall stems. Finally, flower arrangers find the heavy textured two-inch flowers of ‘Golden Chimes’ ideal for designing.
Green-Eyed Giant
The pale yellow ‘Green-Eyed Giant’ is a fabulous creation with a rich bronze eye zone and a bright green throat.
While we find devotees of both extremely large and unusually small daylilies, the majority of gardeners seem to prefer medium size flowers. For them, the choice of fashion right daylilies is limited only by garden sizes and budgets.
May Hall and Rare Edition
A new daylily with a unique contour is luscious lavender-pink ‘May Hall.’ This gorgeous creation resembles an exotic tropical moth perched atop a daylily scape. ‘Rare Edition’ has rose-colored crepe textured petals striped with a white midrib.
Genevieve Cotton, Playboy and Theme Song
Southern gardeners will be thrilled with pastel yellow and pink `Genevieve Cotton’ of spectacular triad form and pinched tipped petals.
Evergreen ‘Playboy’ is rich golden orange with a face nearly as flat as a Dutch amaryllis. ‘Theme Song,’ another evergreen, combines both forms, for it is flat and triangular.
Hawk-eye and Shenandoah
Marvelous in texture and pleasingly wide petals are golden orange, red-brown throated ‘Hawk-eye,’ and bright yellow ‘Shenandoah.’
Multnomah and Hall Croft
‘Multnomah’ of rich apricot has an overlay of pink. Its broad petals flare, and its sepals recurve. ‘Hall Croft’ is a magnificently proportioned full-blown pink with a pale golden throat. Again, wide petals, some of which recurve, give it a very special style.
Melodist and Veiled Beauty
Ivory and pink ‘Melodist’s’ long, rounded lower petal bursts like a bubble from its golden center. ‘Veiled Beauty’ is an exquisite blend of cream, pink and pale yellow with wide, wide petals and tightly twisted sepals.
Crestwood Ann
`Crestwood Ann,’ a new tetraploid daylily, is a heavy-textured pink of amaryllis form with a prominent lavender midrib.
Quiet Hour
That hybridizers have truly arrived at elegant lavenders is evidenced in ‘Quiet Hour,’ a pure orchid suffused with near violet.
Double Daylilies
If you prefer doubles, start with a new day lily such as `Dr. Stout’s Double Gold.’ Or turn to an older one, the golden ‘Daily Double.’ Coming soon will be doubled in every color and form. Dr. James F. Miles of Clemson, S. C., has bred thousands of double daylilies.
While this has been a hobby, he intends to share these charmers with other gardeners. Some of his doubles resemble daffodils, others have the petal-on-petal camellia form, and others are shaggy carnations.
They are colorful, too, in shades of yellow, gold, orange, pink, and red.
Ultra Easy To Grow
Daylilies are so sturdy they can be planted or transplanted even during the blooming season.
One of the best ways to decide on styles and colors to fit your garden is to visit commercial gardens during the blooming season and carry budded and flowering plants right home to be planted into your garden.
Watering and Fertilizing
Like most other perennials, daylilies respond to watering and fertilizing by producing more and bigger flowers and greenery foliage. Fertilize them two or three times a growing season with any good all-purpose fertilizer.
Propagating Daylilies
Propagate daylilies by dividing clumps when they become too large, usually about once every five to seven years.
They can also be started by rooting proliferations. These are the small plantlets that appear on the stapes of wide varieties.
Cut off proliferations and root them in sand, vermiculite, soil, or water. When they are rooted, establish them in a nursery row. They usually flower in the second year.
Growing Daylilies
Growing daylilies from seed is fun, but results are unpredictable, so if you seek special forms or colors, buy named clones. Start seeds indoors in pots or flats and move the seedlings outdoors when the weather warms up.
Seed germinates in 2 to 6 weeks, and seedlings bloom in 2 to 3 years, depending on the care they receive.
Diverse Planting ideas
Achieve a stunning oriental effect by planting a single daylily clump near a dwarf conifer and encircling the plantings with a layer of polished pebbles. Use daylilies as specimen plants to highlight driveways, walks, or garden gates.
Mass them for banks of color. Use miniatures at the foot of a trellis of roses, clematis, or morning glories. Depend on evening bloomers such as ivory yellow ‘NightHawk’ to add splendor to the patio or poolside plantings.
44659 by Peggie Schulz