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.