A long time ago, someone actually planted a tawny orange daylily\u2014Hemerocallis fulva\u2014on purpose.\u00a0 I am sure the individual in question planted only one and was amazed five years later when it had morphed into an enormous clump and threatened to devour the entire garden.\u00a0 That is what tawny orange daylilies do.\u00a0 At this time of the year they are everywhere, re-earning their long-held nickname, \u201cditch lily.\u201d<\/p>\n
They bloom ferociously in my yard, though I have never planted any.\u00a0 I assume that either a passing bird dropped the original seed or one hitchhiked back from our summer cottage and planted itself in the border.\u00a0 For some reason I haven\u2019t yet pulled out the clumps that have sprung up by magic in several different parts of the garden.\u00a0 Laziness has something to do with it, as always, but other considerations come into play as well.\u00a0 There are so few things in this life that come as easily as tawny orange daylilies.\u00a0 It is probably bad luck to destroy one of them\u2013something akin to looking a gift horse in the mouth.<\/p>\n
Despite their ubiquity, these early summer beacons are not native to America.\u00a0 Hemerocallis fulva is native to Japan and, like other species brought for ornamental purposes, has made itself perfectly at home in the New World since the nineteenth century.\u00a0 According to the indispensable Hortus Third<\/em>, the tawny daylily has given birth to at least two cultivated varieties, one with variegated leaves and another, \u2018Flore Pleno\u2019 or \u2018Kwanso\u2019, with double petals.\u00a0 I have seen \u2018Flore Pleno\u2019, but have not set eyes on the variegated variety.<\/p>\n Though \u201cditch lilies\u201d have not been favored by poets, they have been recognized by garden writers.\u00a0 The greatest American practitioner of that art, Henry Mitchell, allowed that common tawny orange daylilies were \u201chandsome enough, massed with blue hydrangeas.\u201d\u00a0 He was not fond of \u2018Kwanso\u2019 though, calling it an \u201cintensely double, mop-headed form.\u201d<\/p>\n The late Cassandra Danz, who wrote under the name \u201cMrs. Greenthumbs\u201d, made a blanket observation that covered the tawny orange daylily along with every other cultivated hemerocallis, when she noted that all daylilies look orange from a few feet away.<\/p>\n Of course ditch lilies look orange even if you are passing them at fifty-five miles per hour.<\/p>\n Like almost everything else, they have their good qualities and one of them is erosion control.\u00a0 My sister and I installed a few transplants to a naked hillside on our central New York State property, in the hopes of preventing mud cascades in the rainy season.\u00a0 We also planted a cotoneaster; one of the newer, less prolific roses of Sharon; and a few white and pale yellow daylily varieties for contrast.\u00a0 Ten years later, only the rose of Sharon is visible, soaring above a solid mass of tawny orange daylilies.\u00a0 Instead of being deluged by muddy water in the spring, we are now permanently deluged by daylilies.\u00a0 The well-mannered yellow and white plants have been subsumed and the cotoneaster struggles along.\u00a0 Occasionally a tendril surfaces, bearing the characteristic red cotoneaster fruit.\u00a0 I am going to have to remove at least twenty daylily plants to give the cotoneaster enough room to thrive.\u00a0 It will probably be easier to move it to a safer location\u2014after making sure that not a single daylily root clings to it.<\/p>\n Ditch lilies also attract pollinators and tolerate clay soil, drought, air pollution and browsing rabbits.\u00a0 The tender buds are tempting to deer, but even those voracious plant devourers don\u2019t seem to deter daylilies for long.<\/p>\n As with all invasives, daylilies migrate, colonizing every available space and outcompeting native plants.\u00a0 According to the Invasive Plant Atlas of the United States, <\/em>Hemerocallis fulva has been reported as \u201cinvasive\u201d in most of the eastern half of the country and a few pockets in the West.<\/p>\n So what is to be done?\u00a0 Fill your garden with better mannered daylilies, which are available by the millions in every retail outlet.\u00a0 If, unlike me, you are immune to superstition, pull up self-sown ditch lilies when they pop up in your own garden.\u00a0 Plant lots of true lilies, like \u2018Casablanca\u2019 and \u2018Stargazer\u2019, as well.\u00a0 These bloom slightly later than the tawny orange daylilies, but are beautiful, floriferous and non-invasive.<\/p>\n Since there is little to be done about the rest of the tawny orange lilies, short of diverting the entire National Guard to assist in their removal, I suggest enjoying them as you drive by the vast ditch lily swathes out in the country.\u00a0 After all, Hemerocallis fulva is neither illegal, immoral nor fattening.\u00a0 There is something to be said for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A long time ago, someone actually planted a tawny orange daylily\u2014Hemerocallis fulva\u2014on purpose.\u00a0 I am sure the individual in question planted only one and was amazed five years later when it had morphed into an enormous clump and threatened to devour the entire garden.\u00a0 That is what tawny orange daylilies do.\u00a0 At this time of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[46,597,599,601,154,602,600,598],"class_list":["post-855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-summer","tag-daylilies","tag-ditch-lily","tag-hemerocallis-fulva","tag-henry-mitchell","tag-invasive-plants","tag-mrs-greenthumbs","tag-orange-daylily","tag-tawny-orange-daylily"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":856,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions\/856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}