When the spouse discovered she'd married a herb/veggie garderner, she thought if she bought hybred day lily I'd take care of them. She followed my lead: in the winter order off for the seed catalogs. When the day lily catalog, she gasps mightly. They wanted $20 to $40 a bulb.
Petunia looked at the catalogs and moaned. At those prices she'd never get a yard full of day lilies.
Imagine her delight when a local day lily farmer decided someone else should buy the farm. The farmer put an ad in the local paper "Day lilies: $2 a clump." A day lily reproduces by dividing its roots into clumps. Petunia could get five to ten day lily bulbs for $2. Off we went in to the outskirts of nearby town in upstate rural South Carolina with a pick up truck and a pair of shovels for TWO trips. She picked out the expensive groups of day lilies and started digging.
Sixteen years later, we could start a day lily farm if we had only kept track of the NAMES of these different types.
Guesses are welcome.
I may post MORE of these dam flowers I didn't want in the first place. I wanted heirloom tomatoes, famous for not surviving or getting eaten by birds and bugs, dying the first time I forget to water them and maybe Thai basil and other stuff I can't buy at the supermarket. In the meantime, she refuses to care for HER plants and ignores mine. I ought to get rid of these things.
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I can understand. I have a garden full of orange day lilies, dating from the time when it was a large new garden, and I was in a hurry to fill it with things that were cheap and easy to multiply. In the last few years however I have started treating them as weeds. (Tip. Glysophate weedkiller kills slowly, a fading yellowing death, especially in autumn, so you can alway blame the death on a mystery illness.)
Recently an large area came free for planting by the village bowling green, which adjoins my plot. One of the bowlers said. "I will plant some flowers for you, save you a few pence." Which he did , and they were day lilies. "What colour are they ?" I said, hoping that he had given me some rare colour forms. "Oh they are orange."
So now I have to wait a couple of years before they can mysteriously die.
Fernapple
Level 9
June 28, 2020
1
>I said, hoping that he had given me some rare colour forms. "Oh they are orange."
Those are the common WILD ditch weed day lilies. (Common in South Carolina). The exotic stuff are hybrids which can turn expensive. Some are loud, gaudy and painfully ugly. My favorite example is the Bela Lugosi day lily (pictured).
