Tears of Undulating Joy | Daylily Blog on Garden Tours

Sometimes you are moved to tears.  They are not tears of sadness, but of undeniable blissful happiness.  I wiped those very tears from my eyes today as I stood in the garden of Tim Bell and his amazing family.  The American Hemerocallis Society Annual National Convention kicked into high gear today with the first of two days of bus tours.  We saw three gardens...and will see three more tomorrow.  This tour is five years in the making, and every minute invested can be seen in the smiles, hugs, and even tears of the convention-goers eyes.  If you have never been to a garden tour, do your insides a favor and plan to attend.  You can check out this website for more information on other daylily related meetings in your area.

As promised, here are my Top Ten Favorite Photo Moments of today.

 

H. 'Pirate King' and H. 'Madiba Magic'

H. 'Alpine Ruffles'

I put the above photo here to illustrate the immaculate state of Bell's Daylily Gardens.  I took 210 photos here and could do a years worth of blogs on just this place.  The edges were pristine, the markers were all set near the same height, the borders were organized, coordinated and amazing.  Notice the plant markers and edges in the above shot.  This is how the entire several acres looked.

H. 'Love is Deep' featured in a perennial display and H. 'Fabrege Easter'

H. 'Painted Pinwheel' and H. 'Savannah Skipper Doodle'

H. 'The Blue Parrot' was the most outstanding daylily of the day.  W.O.W.

This dragonfly balanced delicately on the tip of a daylily bud and posed for several shots.  He was quite proud of himself, as should our Georgia hosts this weekend.  I am overwhelmed by the generosity, completeness and hospitality of the Valdosta Hemerocallis Society and the entire state of Georgia daylily growers and supporters.

More coming tomorrow! 

Daylily Haiku Thursday | Doin' the Daylily

stretching wide open -

colors of every shade,

for every eye.

H. 'Stolen Treasure'  and  H. 'Abilene Crab Claws'

Today is the first official day of the American Hemerocallis Society National Convention in Valdosta, Georgia!  This is THE daylily event of the year, where 600+ daylily lovers from all over the world come to share a weekend immersed in their favorite flower.  I'll be posting my Top Ten Photo Moments of each day, as we tour some of the most gorgeous public gardens in the state.

I hope you enjoy them!

Gardening All-Nighter | Daylily Blog on "Catching Up"

Every spring I end up reliving my college days and pulling an all-nighter or two - not studying or doing keg stands, but gardening.  My spring purchases and plans usually start to backlog on me about this time and I feel compelled to pull off a herculean effort to get everything "caught up"  (funny thing is that a garden is never really "caught up," but it does afford us obsessive compulsive types a small feeling of success.)

I am energized to see some progress.  I have been to maybe one too many plant sales or farmer's markets this season and I maybe I have too many things to be replanted, repotted, removed, relocated or recycled.  So, tonight I will light a fire in the backyard, turn on the deck lights and work outside most of the night. 

Yes, I know its strange.  But it feels so good so I'm okay with strange.

I'm outside alone.  It is silent and the air is cool.  I'll take an iPod and speakers outside and quietly tune in to Dave Matthews- or maybe Sugarland or Fleetwood Mac- and plant containers, window boxes and a few in-ground annuals.  I have a bucket of daylilies soaking in water that need potted and a wormwood that needs transplanted.  And if it's 2am before I get finished, then so be it.  During it all, I'll mentally chew on challenges we are facing and sort a few bad-apple ideas out.

The sun is already setting and Carter is already snoring. 

Guess I should get to work.

tonight's sunset...

Daylily Haiku Thursday | 86 pounds of daylilies!

generosity

knows no bounds (in daylilies)

i'll pay it forward.

The Southern Michigan Daylily Society is hosting the 2011 Region 2 Summer Meeting and Garden Tours.  I am chairing the planning committee and let me tell you...it is a lesson in delegation and teamwork.  Each week someone does something that makes me smile and remember that I'm not the only one obsessing about things continuously.

Two weeks ago, the Region 2 newsletter editor Narda Jones sent me an offer I couldn't refuse.  Her club, SWIDS, had a plant sale which left them with some extra plants.  She sent an email asking if we could use them for the 2011 meeting.  YES!  I think she could hear me screaming YES from three states away.

Four days later, three large boxes containing 86 pounds of daylilies arrived on my doorstep. Yes, folks, that's eighty-six.  8. 6.  86.

Kathy Rinke quickly arranged to have the three boxes picked up at my house and carted to her place near the center of the state for safe planting until next year.  She is chairing the 2011 plant sale and this makes her job so much easier.  How often do 500 fans of daylilies just fall on your doorstep when you need them?  And even more, how often do you find a volunteer like Kathy who steps up and says she will plant them until next summer?  In the daylily community, it happens all the time.  Which is why most of us give so much, because we know it will come back to us just when we need it.

Amazing contribution to the region by the Indiana group.  The bargain table plant sale at the regional meeting in 2011 will now be UNREAL thanks to their generosity and forward thinking.

WAY.  TO.  GO.

                                              

My Place In Space | Daylily Blog on Sharing

In some circles, some view having the same specimen plants in their garden that can be seen in another as a crime punishable by exile. I say "some circles" but maybe I just mean my own. There are 65,000+ registered daylily cultivars, so there are many to choose from when adding daylilies to your landscape. I heard a story this week about a lady who doesn’t use plant markers and won't share variety names just so people won't know what she grows in her garden and so visitors can't replicate or purchase what she grows. Really? Why have visitors at all? Why share it at all? Where is the joy in this type of "secret garden?" (those are NOT rhetorical questions, by the way, please post your answers in the comments link below this post!)

My friend Nicole and I share an eerily similar taste in daylilies. We like the unique, the eccentric, the road-less-travelled daylily introductions. Just when I think I've discovered something that is amazingly obscure…she's already heard of it. And when she sends me information on something new she found, quite often I've seen it somewhere along the way and have a picture to share. We share a lot, trade a lot, buy a lot, talk a lot and "do daylilies" a lot. She has her niche tastes and I have mine (she also collects some cool sedums and clematis and I treasure my lilium and miniature hosta) but overall, we like the diversity that the daylily brings to our gardens.

Have I shared some of my lesser-known beauties with her? Of course. (and she has done the same for me)

Do I tell her what I've found or seen on a tour? Totally.

Would I ever be so elitist to think that my garden is the end-all-be-all of daylilydom? Never.

Gardening is a hobby that quickly engrains itself in your soul and hydrates your very being. It’s a type of therapy you'd never get from Dr. Phil on a good day. Gardening is a common thread that binds some of the least likely cohorts together and makes them all the better for it. Don’t be scared to share – much like the perennials we all love, the karma created from sharing information or actual plant material is magnified and quickly replaces any sense of self-importance you may have.

No one appreciates your hard work more than a fellow gardener.

You just have to be secure enough to really let them in to your place in space.

Daylilies pictured above (from top to bottom): H.'Golden Hibiscus' , H.'Night Embers', and H.'Joan Derifield'

Daylily Haiku Thursday

reach out and stretch out

beyond what you thought was true -

bend reality.

My beloved 'Bird Girl' holding a bloom from H. 'Her Majestys Wizard'

Peachy Keen Daylily Thoughts

I am a sucker for a peachy-pink polychrome daylily.  Although the colors peach, pinky, melon, coral, salmon and the like are quite common in daylilies, the variety is amazing.  Many collectors view anything peachy as 'the new yellow' in the category of "Daylilies to Avoid,"  I enjoy the subtle sherbert-ness of a good peach polychrome.  During a recent presentation, even the famous David Kirchhoff said he avoids using the word 'melon' to describe any daylily.

What is a polychrome?  The AHS Dictionary says: a blending and intermingling of colors without distinct bands. 

This is H. 'Crown of Creation.'  It is one of the first real toothy daylilies I paid big money for, and its coloration is sublime.  Shades of butter, oranges, milk and creamsicle swirled together in toothy goodness.  I already regret selling the whole clump last year to finance my daylily travels.

Below is H.' Harvest Moth.'  It is a spectacularly large Klehm daylily.  You can see (and buy) more of his daylilies here.  I added it to the garden last summer after winning two fans at the live auction of the Region 2 Summer Meeting.  This year, it has already multiplied to four fans and looks really healthy.  It is tall, has a large bloom, is a wonderful combination of pastel yellow and peachy-pinks.  These colors really shine in both the sunlight and the moonlight.

 

Color is such a fickle thing. Da Vinci is quoted as saying "the color of the object illuminated partakes of the color of that which illuminates it."  Polychromes play to this quote fully.  They do not have a tone or hue of their own, yet when placed next to something orange, they become more orange, or when paired with a complementary color, exhibit a different face. 

Maybe thats why I like polychromes...they are mysterious and only occasionally revealing.

Daylily Haiku Thursday - the spring rains...

chaos disappears

noises fade (effortlessly) 

balance is restored

H. 'Titanic Tower' as seen at Valley of the Daylilies - the gardens of Dan and Jackie Bachman, summer '09

Today is quickly becoming yesterday...

Anticipation is an enemy to productivity.  Quite often my mind is diverted from "what should be happening now" to "what will be soon" and I miss out on some intricacies of the moment.  This phenomenon is never more true than it is in gardening with daylilies.

This time of year, my mind has visions of fields afire with blooming daylilies.  I'm thinking of upcoming exhibition shows, garden tours, my own garden open house, and the hundreds of different daylilies that will show their beautiful faces in my garden for the first time this July. 

I am thinking of what flowers I will show, what arrangements I will enter in competitions and what guests will snack on when they visit.  I am not concentrating on properly fertilizing the grass, edging the easements, power washing the gutters, or repainting our front porch.  These tasks are not fun.  They are not full of blooms.  They are necessary distractions to my dreams of later days - the very things of which honey-do lists are made.

Daylilies are truly only open for one day, which helps greatly with my gardening-attention-deficit-disorder.  If today's blooms arent great, no problem, tomorrow will be different! 

The blooms you see open on your daylily plants today will not be there tomorrow.  Yes, it's true.  The good news is most daylily plants produce multiple scapes which produce multiple buds, which means more flowers (see picture to the left of multiple buds on multiple scapes.)   Although each bloom only lasts one day, you will quite often see at least a month's worth of bloom from each daylily clump you have planted.  This brief lifespan contributes to my anticipation affliction.  I gear myself up for the flurry of flowers in July and August, looking past much of what is happening now in the garden.  It doesn't help I live in Michigan where summers seem an eternity shorter than any other state in the union. 

In dreaming of the diamond dusting on H. 'Corinthian Pink' or the deep purple stain on the eye and edge of H. 'Sabine Baur' or the metallic gold edge on H. 'Prickled Petals,' I forget about the garden path that should be swept out or the fence that needs a good scrubbing. 

(seriously, who could resist the diamond dusting seen above on H. 'Corinthian Pink?')

H. 'Sabine Baur'

My right brain collided with my left brain today in a small anxiety attack as I looked over the garden.  I have been daydreaming ahead too much and I think I lost sight of what should have already been done.  Darn it.  Breathe.  Breathe, Nikki.

It is okay.

Tomorrow is a new day.  Someone more wise than I coached me to begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with my old nonsense.

I give us all permission to anticipate tomorrow with all the mouthwatering goodness that it promises.  It does not mean you aren't appreciating today, it just means you are comfortable in your current moment and preparing for the next.  Make your plans for tomorrow, start a list, make a pile to be cleared another day.  For me, it means I have "skin in the game" of tomorrow, which gives me a little more hope that it's coming - and that it's going to be great. 

After all, I planned for today yesterday and I'm already working on tomorrow right now. 

It is the perfect testament to the fleeting lifecycle of the daylily.

 

H.'Prickled Petals' - Don't you love the gold edge?  It almost seems embroidered on there!