Daylilies For Your Cottage Garden

Daylilies are rightfully popular.These fabulous and flamboyant flowers have delighted gardeners for centuries, ranging from the species such as the lemon lily to the now escaped and naturalized tawny daylily sometimes called a tiger lily (Please see my own Tackling the Tiger for more about that one!) and its fascinating double orange flowered form, Kwanzo. Daylilies are so widely grown and loved that there are many daylily societies around the world, including the American Hemerocallis Society.

Nowadays we revel in a vast array of named daylilies, with more coming out all the time. Hybridizers strive to create new forms and colors to introduce every year. They take careful steps to track their crosses, hoping to hit the jackpot with a real winner. Some are so devoted to the project that they fill up their freezers with hand collected pollen just to they can interbreed early and late bloomers!

Sometimes the results are breathtaking and extraordinary, other times simply pretty. I have never seen a daylily I didn't like (except for "Stella d'Oro" but we'll get into that later; for the impatient, here's my My (In)Famous Stalla Rant), but apparently accomplished daylily hybridizer Pauline Henry, producer of the widely acclaimed Siloam series, would throw her "rejects" over the fence as cow fodder. Now that's determination!