As garden personalities go, I like to think of daylilies as that girl in high school who all the guys wanted to be with and all of the girls wanted to be. Remember your class’s “Best All-Around”? Yeah, that was her. She was pretty in a sunny, cheerful way, but also had that great personality that made it impossible to dislike her (much as you might have liked to). She was smart, dependable, and had that effortless ability to look great at all times while also getting along with just about everyone, making friends that ran the gamut of that tricky high school social landscape.
Each time I plant a new daylily in my garden, I think of that girl. I know this one isn’t going to let me down. It’s a well-known fact that daylilies are one of the easiest, most dependable perennials one can grow. (Have you ever tried to kill them? They’re nearly impossible to mess up.) Whether you live in Anchorage or Miami, there is a daylily that will grow there. Clay soil? Sand? Loam? Daylilies can adapt to just about any soil condition in which you might decide to plant them. Increasing numbers of blooms year after year? You can count on daylilies to provide just that, while weathering wind, heat, cold, and even drought with ease and very few pest problems to speak of. You can, quite literally, plant them and forget them.
But it was only in recent years that I discovered modern daylily varieties to actually be quite a wide and varied bunch, embodying much, much more than the tall, orange “wild” types that grew in my grandmother’s garden. I was nothing short of thrilled to discover that daylilies not only come in sizes ranging from tiny dwarfs to towering scapes, but also in an array of colors whose descriptions may well be nearly as prolific (Bitones! Bicolors! Polychrome! Picotee! Dotted! Dusted! Diamond Dusted! Tipped!) as the varieties themselves. Which means that, not only is there a low-maintenance daylily to meet just about everyone’s taste and color preference, but one can also quite likely find a variety to fit nearly any area of the landscape.
My happiest discovery, though, was when I learned that daylilies are no longer limited to just a few weeks’ bloom time at the peak of summer. Sure, all daylily blooms last just one day, but breeders and hybridizers have worked their magic in the course of the past few decades to create extended bloomers, repeat bloomers, and everbloomers that bring us daylilies that will continue to produce blooms for months.
The modern daylily? Best All-Around, indeed. Happy planting.
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