Today’s focus is daylilies, which remind me of the old joke about fashions in Beantown: Young woman gets on the train next to a dowager wearing a beautiful chapeau. Youngster says “what a lovely hat. Where did you buy it?” Matron draws herself up and says “Buy my hat? My dear, in Boston, we HAVE our hats. ”
Similarly, almost all of us have our daylilies. Brand new garden-free houses are an exception, but any place that has had time for a few things to get planted has probably been planted with a few daylilies, and since the blessed things never die, whatever daylilies you had when you got there, whatever daylilies you planted 20 years ago when you were starting out, those are the daylilies you’ve still got.
Well, there’s a lot to be said for durability, but there are two things wrong with this. One is that daylilies do need dividing. They’re not as bad as some plants I could name, but after anywhere from 5 to 10 years they tend to get crowded and flower less. Then you have even MORE of whatever, which you must either find a place for or find someone to take them in ( in theory, you could just put them on the compost but who do you know who does that?)
And of course the other wrong thing, a natural outgrowth of wrong thing #1, is that your old daylilies prevent you from planting new daylilies – or at least daylilies that are new to you. And given that there are somewhere around 50,000 named daylilies, it’s quite likely that there are several you’d rather have than the ones you have at the moment.
Just about everybody sells them, and there’s an extensive list of sources (along with lots of other nifty info.) at www.daylies.org, the website of the American hemerocallis society. But no matter where you shop, don’t forget to notice bloom times: different nurseries go into this in greater and lesser detail, but at the minimum the listing or tag should say whether the plants flower early, midseason or late. It should also tell you whether the cultivar is a diploid or tetraploid.
Those terms refer to the sets of chromosomes in each cell, and they matter to you as well as to breeders because they tell you things about plant habit:
Diploids are closer to old-fashioned daylilies. They tend to have smaller flowers and more of them, and they tend to be less imposing, easier to integrate into mixed borders, sometimes floppy but almost always graceful .
Tetraploids are – well, beefy would be a word. The plants are usually robust. Stalks are stiff. Flowers are large and substantial and often very strongly colored.
The latest prize-winning introductions can cost as much as a good Paris hat – 2 or 3 hundred dollars for a single division – but there are gazillions of others in the 10 to 20 dollar range. Plenty of places offer plants for less, but as usual, there is a bottom price below which you are likely to get either low quality, very common plants or divisions so mingy you’ll have to wait a long time before much of anything happens.
Okay, what haven’t I mentioned? If you already have daylilies, you know: deer! They eat daylilies – or, more accurately they eat the flowers. Some tips on how to prevent this will appear here next week.
In a normal year, the floral hero for early September is the brugmansia – or more properly the brugmansias, since there are 2 of them. By now they are usually 8 feet tall, very nearly as wide, and covered with giant white flowers that perfume the whole yard at evening. That’s usually. But usually, it rains once in a while.
Because it hasn’t, the brugmansias are less than stellar. It’s the lespedeza that makes you go Wow. Clover is admittedly tough, but it’s still a surprise to see the thing remaining green in every leaf and covering itself with blossoms. As the self is approximately 6 feet – in every direction – and the blossoms are like tiny magenta-pink sweet peas, the effect evokes every cloud clichaé you’ve ever heard or read. Bought it years ago from Plant Delights.
Vinnie the cat is trying his best, but we still see vole damage in the Swiss chard. There is huitlachoche ( aka corn smut) in the corn; blight has taken most of the heirloom tomatoes. Still orders of magnitude too much to eat, and too much to keep up with. Bill has been harvesting squash every day but I just turned over a leaf and found a zucchini as big as the Ritz.
Now that the narcissi are done and the honeysuckle’s over, the back edge of the property is looking – almost – like someone designed it, someone who is fond of white ( no names, please) : Russian olive and white violets are still going strong; curved hedge of old fashioned bridal wreath is full out. Mock oranges are opening and behind it all there’s a frieze of pure white wild cherry blossoms, thanks to our neighbors’ unkempt swamp.
Memorial day has come and gone, but peony-wise, not much is happening : too dry and too cold for too long. Buds are looking promising, though, and in the meantime FINALLY! – seems like it took forever – we have rhubarb…There’s a reason this stuff is called pie plant, but it’s also a great sauce for lamb and duck and rich fish like shad and mackerel; just make the same stewed rhubarb you’d make to eat for breakfast, except don’t put as much sugar in it and put in a TINY pinch of clove and not-so-tiny pinch of salt.
Those Columbines: Select columbines for spreading by marking the prettiest ones, so you – or the friend you ask for the favor – will remember to let them go to seed. (Just wrap a twist tie around the stem; if you go for a discreet stake at the base, you’re likely to miss it when cleaning up.) They cross freely, so there will be some surprises, but if you start with a preferred color it improves your odds. I’ll put a reminder in when it’s time for seed-harvesting.
Don’t forget to prune the lilacs as soon as they finish: there isn’t much of a window before next year’s flowers start forming. Make sure your loppers are well-sharpened, then get rid of weak growth and bring tall, spindly trunks down to strong young branches. Removing spent blossoms saves energy the plant would otherwise spend making seeds, so it’s worth it when they are still small, but after that it doesn’t do much except help things look tidy.
The same is probably true of rhubarb. Everyone I know, including me, pulls out flowering rhubarb stalks while they are still in bud, in order to prolong the season… and it’s true, the stems DO get stringy when the plant blooms. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that’s mostly coincidence; time and temperature are the main triggers for stringy rhubarb stalks. But what the heck – it only takes a minute ; you feel like you’re doing something useful; and the big stems make gorgeous bouquets for the porch ( bring them into the house at your peril; every one of those tiny flowers drops off when it dies.)
