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Day Lily: An Ornamental Edible

© Leda Meredith

It is 3pm on a Saturday in June. We are having a party, just a few friends and neighbors who've come over for the novelty of having an outdoor barbecue in New York City. I am wearing a long, sunset orange peasant skirt my dad gave me years ago, and I am sitting next to a patch of daylilies. The daylilies have their orange skirts on, too, six petals each. We look very respectable, ornamental even.

But don't stay too long at the party or you'll witness quite a transformation. Off comes the long skirt and on with the jeans. The flowers are closing (each bloom only stays open for a day, hence the name). The petals will get strung up and dried for soups and seasoning. Some of the unopened buds will go into my pickle crock. But not too many - I still want to enjoy those extravagant flowers for many summer afternoons to come.

Like me, daylilies can hang out with the front-of-the-bus crowd. The same folks who wrinkle their noses at the "weeds" I let grow in my garden because they are good eating smile approvingly at the daylilies in bloom. These are prized and collected for their flowers, and numerous varieties are bred, sold and traded. For more info on daylilies as gorgeous ornamentals visit Ellen Roddy's site, or go to The New York Botanical Gardens which has an entire daylily walk with dozens of varieties. Every summer busloads of visitors stroll along admiring the vivid colors and never dreaming that this plant also provides four kinds of food (from its tubers, shoots, buds, and petals).

Daylilies and I also have a back-of-the-bus side to our personalities. We both survive transplanting and aren't too picky about where we're replanted. Almost anyplace can be home, provided it's got some soil (any kind) and some sunlight (more is nice, but we'll get by where there is less). We're perennials, and hard to get rid of once you've got us. If you dig up a daylily to harvest it's tubers, you can replant the roots and the plant will grow back. Daylilies also do well in containers.

During the winter, while I am living off the food I put by for the cold time, the daylily lives off of the starch in its tubers. But we don't wait around for the warm months to get on with life. Many times my fingertips have been chilled while collecting daylily shoots for stir-fry on an early-March morning, and the tubers are still firm enough then to be worth harvesting. (For more info on daylilies as a delicious wild edible, see the recipes below and visit Melana Hiatt's pages).

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