The Call of the Hemerocallis

 

By Bess Taylor

 

 

My original garden plan did not include the Hemerocallis, or daylily. I saw them everywhere and simply thought that they had been done so often that I didn’t have to bother with them. “Why be like everyone else and have daylilies in my yard?” I thought foolishly to myself, as I was still young and foolish at the time. So I planted all kinds of things that I thought weren’t everywhere else. I planted lots of English cottage garden plants. I planted perennials to last for years and annuals to fill in until the perennials got established. I waited. I watered. I watered and waited more.

 

April and May passed with their daffodils, lilacs, peonies and irises. Then June came and as I gazed out at my masterpiece, I saw… not much. The little annuals I had started from seed had sprouted and were several inches high, their tiny baby greeneries reaching happily to the sky. The perennials looked like bushy green wreaths strewn about in the garden beds. The only color other than green I saw was the yellow and white of the honeysuckle as it engulfed the hedgerows. Everything else seemed to be simply producing leaves and biding its time.

 

Whenever I drove about the luscious piedmont countryside however, I couldn’t help but notice the generous heapings of daylilies blooming in the gardens, by the driveway entrances, even in the median strips. And they were not boring, they were beautiful- even the plain old orange ones. In the sunshine they were as magnificent as goblets of gold. I realized that I had made a mistake. I did too need daylilies.

 

That fall I ordered and received some “native daylilies” from a mail order catalogue. I have since learned that daylilies are not native to our part of the world at all, but originate from Asia. They were brought here long ago and decided they liked it here and were going to stay. The most common kind is Hemerocallis fulva or tawny daylily. It grows and spreads so well that some gardeners consider it to be a pest. This was the first kind of daylily I bought, and somehow I had the foresight to give it it’s own space, away from the perennial beds, where it would surely have taken over by now. I have two long beds of it on either side of my main beds, where it forms low, grassy hedges. In June it bears brick red-orange flowers on yard-high stems and though they are not unusual, they are just as elegant as any exotic lilies and I love them.

 

Hemerocallis are not hard to grow. Most can take less than perfect soil and some shade. When we got our first batch of rhizome roots they looked like strange little clusters of smooth, plump peanut shells. My husband and I split them up. I dug out a careful bed, removing all the sod and churning up the soil for easy root growth. My husband laid down wet newspaper over the grass and dropped the rhizomes through little holes he had dug through the paper and into the ground. I was sure his bed would be somehow stunted, but next spring, up they sprang equally on both sides. It was one of those rare garden cases where careful planning and hard work didn’t made the least bit of difference.  I would have been annoyed if I wasn’t so busy admiring them.

 

Since that time, I have collected several different kinds of Hemerocallis. Some are tall, some short, some pastel, some bright, some bicolored, some fragrant, every one interesting in it’s own way. And June in my garden has never again lacked drama.