Daylily Haiku Thursday | Eliminate the Mediocre...

Ode to Spring (where ever you are...)

oaks ignite, shapeless

blowing crazy water falls

feeble cocoons hum.

H. 'Crystal Blue Persuasion' - the first time I ever saw the fabled flower. 

It was on my first visit to the old Daylily World in Florida.

I have been holding on to an excerpt from Michael Bouman, a daylily friend from Missouri, for just the right moment.  I read a lot of posts from a lot of people on daylilies.  I follow over 40 blogs on the topic, belong to two e-mail robins and get 20+ publications on daylilies each year.  In the midst of all that information and opinion, this particular quote from Michael I have been marinating on for quite a while.  Here is his piece of brilliance and how it relates to this sparkling photo of H. 'Crystal Blue Persuasion':

"Wishing doesn't make an ugly flower look like its catalogue photo. Bad color ruins the garden experience, so it's best to bite the bullet and deselect expensive plants that are not as beautiful as the best you grow. Eliminate ugly. Purge mediocre. Allow space between plants for their beauty to have an effect. Don't glut yourself or your visitor with aesthetic overload. Visit an art gallery and notice the space between paintings or other objects; then take that approach in your daylily garden. If there is no negative space in your garden, you're defeating beauty and nurturing something beastly."

This I believe to be the most spot-on advice for designing with daylilies.  Quite often, the daylily addiction causes gardeners to add more and more and more daylilies, creating a cacophony of bloom, color, shape and size.  I get it.  I'm afflicted, too.  And while this methodology is wild and wonderful and allows the gardener to feel free - it does always seem a bit "off."

I have this problem, and the gorgeous photo in today's post is reminiscent of my problem.  I have come to realize that maybe I am in love with photos I take of beautiful blooms in other people's gardens, and I should keep some of my daylily choices for my digital collection, and not my terrestrial collection.  H. 'Crystal Blue Persuasion' has been purchased four times, and each time it has perished in my Michigan winters.  I keep buying it because I think I'm trying to recapture the breathtaking moment I had when I first saw the flower.  There are so many daylilies languishing in my yard because they don't like this climate.  They don't look like photos in catalogs, and they don't look like examples I have seen of the same flower in others gardens or in my own photos.  I counted 16 daylilies last night in my collection that should stay in my digital collection and not in my garden.  (scroll back up and read Michael's words again to reinforce the message...)

Today, and only just now, I realize that I fell in love with the photo of a particular daylily - and I don't need to grow it to continue to love it.  Like H. 'Crystal Blue Persuasion,' a flower that at first sight literally took my breath away, it is best loved in this photo, and not as a struggling plant in my Michigan garden. 

I must let it go, so I will purge it and I will feel good about it.  Promise.

Daylily Haiku Thursday | Being alone.

there are little things

that make hearts flutter and sing-

you must listen, quietly.

Many moons ago (maybe a decade) I went anonymously to what they call "Daylily Mecca" in central Florida. I went to many gardens and even stopped by a daylily show at the local mall without really talking to anyone. I love daylily people, but that one-woman-tour was heavenly.

I remember being a fly on the wall in these gardens and at this show, and I wish I did that more today. It's hard to go to gardening events today and just enjoy the moment. I'll ease back into truly enjoying what is going on around me as it is happening - soon. Reliving events and relishing the memories after an event - often through photographs - isn't as fulfilling as living in the moment.

This bloom of H. 'Birds Eye' is one example of the pristine scapes on display at the show that day. Look at those buds and the strong, proportionate scape. It was spectacular.

Daylily Haiku Thursday | Describing the differences...

i do love stretching

 a lazy day into many.

blooms are not far now.

Here are six photos from the 2008 Region 2 Summer Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin.

Top L-R: H. 'Atlas Shrugged,' H. 'Tholian Web' and H. 'Becky Stone'

Bottom L-R: H. ' Star Spangled,' H. ' Wayside Painted Lady' and H. 'Double Breakthrough'

I chose these photos because each one of these daylilies has a distinct quality that is different from all the others.  Can you describe these distinctions?

Last week's Daylily Haiku Thursday became Haiku Monday instead.  Celebrating Easter, Spring Break and my son's sixth birthday filled my days with joy and fun, so there was none left for haiku. 

I hope you enjoy today's entry. 

You know you can go back and see all the haiku, right? 

Click here.

Rust is (was) here. | Daylily Blog about the yukky stuff...

Do you know what this is?  Yes, indeed - it is daylily rust - the fungus feared and loathed by daylily growers everywhere.  For the first time in almost a decade of its known existence in the US, it came to my garden in Michigan in the fall of 2010.

The AHS Daylily Dictionary defines it as a fungal pathogen that attacks daylilies.  The dictionary goes on to say that daylily rust is caused by the fungus Puccinia hemerocallidis and affects the leaves and scapes. It is not a new disease of daylilies, having been reported previously in China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Russia. Unfortunately, the disease has now arrived in North America, and was first identified in the southeastern United States in August 2000. Because of widespread shipping of infected plants, by late 2001 daylily rust had been identified in approximately 30 US States, Canada and Australia. In nature, however, the main method of rust spread is by wind borne spores.

Rust decimates daylily foliage.  As I think back over the last decade, I remember one year seeing photos from Florida where the daylily growers had cut back ALL the foliage on the daylilies and left the tall scapes stand.  It was quite a sight.  In the North, layman's research proves that rust does not overwinter.  That is good news for me, because my friends in the South are spending small fortunes spraying rust treatments/chemicals in their gardens almost year round.

This outbreak of rust exploded in my garden in late September.  I bought several late season plants from the South and due to the proximity of the rust outbreak, it was obvious the spores started from those Southern purchases.  I saw the concentration of plants exhibiting these active spores around the new plants.  Luckily, we had early frosts and the spread was stopped.  Only about 8 plants were covered with these tufty spores by the time our first hard frost hit.

It creeped me out having it in my yard.  I have heard hundreds of stories of this fungus, but can say I never saw it with my own eyes in person until it showed up in my own garden.  I was wide-eyed and aghast at its appearance.  How dare it show up here?!  But, knowing our long, faithfully freezing Michigan winters would do its job killing it off, I was not afraid to take these pictures and show you what it looks like.

Don't get it on your hands or clothes and traipse through the rest of your garden.  Don't send infected plants to others.  Don't blame the grower for your infestation.  Get educated and don't believe everything you hear.  Do your own research. 

Daylilies might be called the "perfect perennial," but we do have our battles to fight.  I just hope we stop starting the battles with one another and throw our energies at something worth eradicating, like daylily rust.

Since the rest of this post was slathered with pictures of yukky stuff, I thought I would add a few nice ones to close it out.  I hope you enjoy - and hang in there, although it snowed here yesterday, I know SPRING IS COMING!!

Three beauties from the 2010 Southern Michigan Daylily Society Exhibition Show

From left: H. 'Dragon Fang', H. 'Planet Claire' and H. 'Tommie Lee Joiner'

Daylily Haiku Thursday | Compulsion

 looking toward new things

I try to not buy them all

I can't help myself!

(H. 'Arnie Oseland' from John Kulpa of Michigan)

Daylily Haiku Thursday | Recurved...

twisting and turning.

rolling back onto ourselves-

waiting for springtime!

This is a great photo of a recurved daylily.  See how the petals and sepals really reflex back toward the base of the bloom?  That is a characteristic that not all daylilies exhibit this clearly.  Some are flat, some are cupped, and even others are just slightly recurved.  I love this trait; it gives the "face" of the daylily a very rounded appearance.  

I love taking photos of the backsides of daylilies.  More on that later...

Motion and emotion... | Shutterbug Daylily Blog

Photographs capture one precious frame of life.  The viewer does not know what happened before or after the moment captured in the image, so the photographer's job is to impart motion and emotion into the photo.  Your daylily photos can come to life with a few new thoughts!   Shown in this post is H. 'Skinwalker,' a Stout Silver Medal winning daylily hybridized by Ned Roberts.  Registered as an 8.5" diploid spider, it is very photogenic!  I don't grow it myself, but I always seem to notice it "performing" on garden tours all over the country.  Motion in daylily photos is a challenge and in my world, it is created by considering two other characteristics - balance and composition.  I am not focusing on the motion of the flower in the photo, but motion in the PHOTO ITSELF.

I should say that I am a casual photographer, with a mid-level point and shoot camera.  I'm not a hardware expert, nor do I have any formal photography training,  so I can only tell you I love the camera I have right now after much trial and error with other point and shoot models.  I find it is has been very accurate for color interpretation.  It's the Sony Cybershot DSC-H20.  Regardless of what camera you have, size and cost mean nothing if you do not know how to set up your eye to take a good photo.  Great photographers can pick up a $10 disposable camera and produce a few good shots because they know how to "set up" a good photo!
When snapping a photo, I ask myself two questions: One, What is the flower looking at? I think of the daylily bloom's face just as I do a humans face in my photos.  The flowers filaments are its eyes...where is it looking?  Is there another bloom or something else in the photo facing a complementary or opposing direction?  Remember, I'm trying to tell a story with this photo...what is in this moment that is worth looking at?Second, Where do I want the photos main focus point to be?  Sometimes it is not the center of the photo, and I make sure my focus indicators on my camera are keyed in to this spot before I snap the photo.  (the focus indicators are those gird-lines that I see when I press my picture taking button down half-way.)

The best photography hint anyone ever gave me is this:  if you want a photo that stands out from the crowd, do something unusual while taking it.  If you stand upright, point your lens outward and simply snap a straight photo, you cannot expect too many unique results.  This method also causes you to see things in a new perspective.  If you are getting strange looks from lying on the ground or stretching weirdly to get just the right shot, you are probably on the right track to getting a unique photo.
Anyone can take a daylily mugshot, and not everyone does that well. 

Stretch your imagination. 

See them differently.