Like the neighborhood ice cream truck, summer flowers announce themselves loudly and insistently. My front borders are screaming with tall Shasta daisies and multi-colored coneflowers. Standing head to head with all those daisy-flowered amazons are the daylilies, which are among the best-loved early to mid-summer plants.
I have lots of daylilies, but I have forgotten most of their varietal names. This is easy to do because there are thousands of named cultivars and many of them look very similar to each other. Hybridizers, both amateur and professional, abound, and some of them are extremely prolific. Modern daylilies bear small, medium or large flowers, with single or double petal arrays. The petals can be long, slender and gently curved, as on the “spider” types; or, rounded and ruffled, like those adorning the hybrids bred by the late Charles Reckamp. Daylily colors range from near white through all shades of pink, orange, peach, yellow, gold, bronze, purple, red and near black. Some are bi-colored, with contrasting “eye zones” or bands of color towards the center of each flower.
Like everyone else in the United States, I have a few ‘Stella de Oro’, the first reblooming daylily. ‘Stella’ was bred by an amateur hybridizer named Walter Jablonski, given a name similar to a popular cookie and introduced in 1985. The small, golden yellow blooms are pleasant, but ‘Stella’ conquered the world with its reblooming habit. Given enough water and regular deadheading, the tough little daylily will produce lots of flowers over a long growing season. ‘Stella de Oro’ is so popular that it should really have its own reality show.
‘Stella’ has also begotten numerous reblooming offspring, which are offered by garden centers, mass merchandisers and catalog vendors.
My favorite daylily is ‘Hyperion’, introduced in 1925. Its petals are yellow and relatively slender, curving gently back. The plants are about three feet tall, but what makes them distinctive is the fragrance. Many daylilies are beautiful, but have little scent. ‘Hyperion’ is different. It is also elegant in its simplicity. There are times when I love the big, fluffy-headed doubles, but I always return to the less blowsy charms of ‘Hyperion’. If I could only have one daylily, it is definitely the one I would choose.
Several years ago I went through a Siloam daylily phase, during which I coveted the smallish, bi-colored daylilies bred in the second half of the twentieth century by Mrs. Pauline Henry of Siloam Springs, Arkansas. Mrs. Henry, who died in 2000, registered 490 daylily varieties with the American Hemerocallis Society. Many of them are uncommonly lovely, including ‘Siloam Double Classic’, with small, double pink blooms. and ‘Siloam Ury Winiford’, which bears cream flowers with purple-black eye zones. Mrs. Henry’s ‘Siloam David Kirchhoff’, named after a fellow daylily breeder, is pale pink-purple, with a slightly darker eye zone outlined in dark purple. The inner throat of each blossom is pale green.
When my infatuation with Mrs. Henry subsided, I developed a yen for the big, romantic daylilies of Brother Charles Reckamp, a breeder and member of the Society of the Divine Word, based in Techny, Illinois. Brother Charles’ daylilies bear witness to his dyed-in-the-wool romanticism. The petals are wide, with little or no backward curve. The colors are soft pastels and the petal edges are heavily ruffled. I bought the very expensive ‘Charlie’s Dream’, a ruffly peach confection, because its colors were so beautiful. Brother Charles died in 1996, but some of his daylilies are still available. Roy Klehm of Song Sparrow Nursery in Avalon, Wisconsin, was a longtime friend of Brother Charles and has continued his daylily breeding work. When you page through the Song Sparrow catalog, you can see the proliferation of romantic ruffles on many Klehm introductions.
Daylilies, which grow best in full sun with well drained soil and ample moisture, have many strong points. Beauty and toughness are chief among them. When they are happy, the clumps increase, but for continued abundance of bloom, you should divide them every few years. This requires only a spade and your fingertips, as the daylily tubers are easy to divide once the clumps are dug up. This ease of propagation sometimes makes it easier to justify the purchase of an expensive new introduction. However, if you are on a tight budget and fall in love with a ruinously expensive daylily, a little online research will almost always net you a specimen—usually an older variety–that looks almost the same but costs a lot less.
The one daylily downside is that the blooms are so short lived, making them less desirable as cut flowers. Still, if you have a lot of daylilies, you can cut an entire scape, with an open flower plus several well-developed buds. This will give you several days of lovely blooms.
The American Hemerocallis Society has a list of daylily sources, available on their website at http://www.daylilies.org/AHSsources.html. I also like Oakes Daylilies, PO Box 268 – 8153 Monday Rd – Corryton, TN 37721, (800) 532-9545, www.oakesdaylilies.com. Free catalog. Find another good selection at Klehm’s Song Sparrow Nursery, 13101 E. Rye Road, Avalon, Wisconsin 53505, (800) 553-3715, www.songsparrow.com. Free catalog.