Daylilies

Until recently, I haven't been all that enthusiastic about daylilies. Not that I held any enmity toward them, like the Renegade Gardener, but to me, they were just ok. Lately, however, I'm starting to really like them. Really like them. There are so many different colors; it's like being five years old and opening one of those huge boxes of Crayola crayons for the first time and finding out that there are way more colors than the six or seven shown on that poster beside the chalkboard, and that they all have names. Aquamarine, magenta, periwinkle...and I'm sure they've come up with more since 1974...

Daylilies were like the basic colors for me. They were nice--red, orange, yellow--ho-hum, but last year my neighbor gave me some of her divisions. All different colors. And then I looked at them close up through the camera lens, which is a good way to gain a new appreciation of anything. So when these red-and-gold daylilies bloomed this week, I was a lot more interested in them than I was last year. These are the ones that were here when we bought the house, one lone clump scrunched up against the fence beside one lone rose bush, holding off an advancing army of grass. I had no other plants at the time, and even less money, so I dug up that clump and scattered daylilies everywhere I had an open patch of ground. That was the summer of '05. Last summer, they didn't bloom so well, which may account for my initial lack of enthusiasm, but this summer, they are fabulous! And they bloom later than all my others, so the splashes of red give the borders a whole new look for June, after a profusion of pastels in May. Is this how an addiction begins?

For some great daylily photos (with names) check out Gotta Garden out of Virginia.