The Blooming of the Daylilies (Hemerocallis)

The daylilies (Hemerocallis) have begun their summer show appropriately on the unofficial start of summer, Memorial Day. Maybe the lilies felt the need to pay tribute to all of our country’s veterans as we all should. These showy flowers are well known for their bountiful blooming abilities. Each flower only lasts a short period of time, about a day (imagine that!), then either sets seed or fades away with fresh blooms appearing over and over again. To encourage the proliferation of blooms you can dead head the spent blooms which sends the energy that would be used to produce seed back into the plant.

Here are some of the ‘Stella de Oro’ Daylilies with buds that are about to break.

We have this daylily next to a butterfly bush in our front garden. Unfortunately this plant will need relocated as soon the light of the sun will be forever blocked by the growing foliage of that butterfly bush. For now though it is a happy little flower!

I planted several of these next to our salvia in the front porch garden. Together the purple and gold should make for a nice combination this summer. I would like to add more of the daylilies to the front porch garden in time among other plants.

I began with one clump of Stella last fall and divided it into thirteen divisions. Every clump has begun to produce flowers this spring. A couple of the received a second division a month ago and are doing very good in the garden. Daylilies just keep on growing. You can begin with one and they will become as many as you need over time. If there ever was a fool proof plant to plant in your garden it would have to be a daylily.

I would eventually like to try hybridizing daylilies. Hybridizing is pretty simple with daylilies. You just take the stamen of one to the pistil of the other and if everything works right you will have a hybrid seed. That may be oversimplified a bit and you still have a ways to go to get your hybrid but that’s where you start. There’s no guarantee that it will be the plant you had in mind but to me it sounds like a fun experiment. I’ll need to get a couple other kinds of daylilies for the hybridization experiment.

You may have guessed it, this one is not like the others. I don’t have a name for it other than Hemerocallis ‘That Orange One’. It was one of several divisions I made from my mother-in-law’s garden. I like the deep orange color in the middle that contrasts with the yellowish colors on the outside of the petals.

So far the ‘Crimson Pirate’ daylily has not budded but I’m hopeful that it will this summer. I found some interesting information about the ‘Stella de Oro’ Daylily and it’s name. Apparently the name means “Star of Gold” but is a hybridization of Italian and Spanish which makes the name a little inaccurate.