Our zone 5 garden is overflowing, and keeps growing by leaps and bounds. We have an abundance of perennial favorites, but we have our flower futures invested in the modern daylily.
We have at last count about 1,006 registered cultivars and several thousand daylily seedlings.
Every year we hybridize but last spring (2010) was pretty bad: continuous heavy rain for weeks, and then drought. From the end of June until the moisture of snow and ice we had approximately 1.5 inches of rain. That's barely enough to wet your whistle, or in this case the garden's yawning cracks.
But our favorite flower can take it and take it! I read another gardener's report that they fell in love with daylilies when the Mississippi flooded and they lost everything in their garden but the daylilies.
The moment for me was during a visit to my friend Alice's house in the spring and saw outside her door all the perennials I had given her the previous summer. She hadn't been feeling well and never got them planted, so all were dead but...wait for it...the DAYLILIES!
Indeed, I've had too many survive the compost pile, being out of the ground and bareroot over the winter, only to start growing again in spring.
Now Alice is a daylily addict too.
Are you hooked yet? Just wait till you see the photos.
