Why I Collect Daylilies

Daylilies weren't meant to be a collection of mine. It just happened.

First, let me go back.

At key points in my life I have bought (and kept) style magazines that have influenced me years later in ways I never would have guessed. I mean, how could they influence me? I put these magazines away, and never look at them except when we move, or just move things around.

Not long ago I found a magazine -- I believe it was a copy of House Beautiful from 1993 -- which had an article about an interior designer who decorated her small Parisian apartment with Murano glass. Close to the back of the same magazine was an article in the gardening section about hybridizing daylilies.

The first house we bought had a garden, but no daylilies. (It did, however, have poppies, something else I fell in love with from seeing them in a design magazine.) These pictures were taken in June 1997, when we had been in the house for almost five years.





Photos belong to kbgardenblog.blogspot.com and may not be used without permission.

It was not until we moved into this house and the garden had been landscaped that I thought of daylilies. And even then I did not think of them as anything but just another plant. There was a sell-off of some pretty yellow ones, called 'Moonglow', so I bought a bunch and planted them in the front garden.

I chanced to be in touch with a woman from my past, an old teacher of mine but also at one time she and her husband were very good friends of my parents. They were moving into a new house and she said one of the big jobs she had was photographing, digging up and repotting, and then labelling all her daylilies so she could move them with her to the new house. It was she who first mentioned to me something about a daylily farm, as there was one near her where she had acquired most of her collection.

Still, it was more like an odd fact that I filed away at the back of my mind than anything I aspired to. Until a while later when I really started looking at daylilies in the nursery.

After that, being already a collector of other things (Art Glass, for one) I naturally slipped into character when visiting nurseries and garden centres. I had to buy a few daylilies every spring, along with the beautiful foliage plants hosta and heuchera. All these plants are in the hands of creative hybridizers, so there are constantly new varieties to be aware of.

In reality there are a limited number of shapes and colours of daylily flowers, and many of them bearing different names actually look alike. But as with any form of design, hybridizing is subject to trends. (The current pursuit in hosta hybridizing is for a red-leafed variety. One that I own, called 'Red October', is one step along the way. It has red stems and petioles supporting green leaves.)

In daylilies, one trend has been lavender eyes. I have benefitted from this trend and have a few of those results in my garden. Some hybridizers pursue unusual shapes. Others want ruffled picotees with huge multicolour eyes -- which to me is the daylily equivalent of big hair, or a velvet painting of Elvis, but it's all a matter of taste: those are some of the most expensive daylilies being sold. Usually they are not cold-hardy and will only survive in the South. (There might be some kind of message there, but I think Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd already had that duel, and each has survived with their fan base intact. Note that this is actually a clever pun, since many daylilies reproduce by increasing the number of fans, and having an intact fan base would be necessary to daylilies, also.) Northern hybridizers are of course pursuing daylilies with attractive features that will also survive harsh winters.

Even though daylilies are my main horticultural collection, I do collect other types of plants, too:

• hosta


• heuchera (common name 'coral bells')


• hardy geranium (the true geranium; what is most often called geranium is really pelargonium, or 'zonal geranium')


• poppies


• sempervivum (common name 'hens and chicks')


• echeveria

I only collect echeveria in summer because they are not hardy through the winter. Last year I tried overwintering some plants indoors, but that was not really successful, and besides, now that we have a cat no houseplants would have a chance of surviving.