Good morning! For many of us gardeners, this has been a challenging summer, fighting both weather and physical ailments. For me personally, between flooding rains and extreme heat, the weeds have won the battle this year in my garden. Since it is my refuge and my therapy, it is hard for me to admit that in some ways my garden has become a burden too. I have always taken pride in keeping the weeds away, and actually enjoy weeding. In what other endeavor can you see such immediate improvement? ( I hired someone to help weed, but she quit after two sessions because of all the chiggers. I am covered with bites of various kinds, and the chiggers are the worst.) But now that the daylilies are blooming, I am trying very hard to shift my gaze from the garden floor to the blooms everywhere.
If you have read any of my previous diaries, you know that irises are my first love. But, let’s face it, they bloom mostly in the spring, and here in the northern part of the country, we do not have a long enough gardening season (yet) to let the rest of the summer slip by without more flowers! Some people (I really do hate that phrase) disparage daylilies because for much of the year they take up quite a bit of space without contributing too much in the way of interest. If I had a very small garden, I would probably only have a few daylilies. But I have quite a bit of room, and quite a few daylilies!
When I checked into it, I found that new daylily introductions from top hybridizers actually cost more than iris introductions in many cases, and I do not have any of the super expensive, new specimens that collectors would covet. Most of my daylilies were purchased from local nurseries, only a few mail ordered, but I do have quite a few different varieties of the more common ones, and today I will share photos of most of them — taken this week. (I am a little afraid that I might overload you with daylily photos here. If you hate them, please forgive me, and just scroll on by to the poll and the comments.)
What do you think of daylilies? And what’s happening in your garden?