Daylily Overload

Daylily Not Forgotten is really that color.

I would like to think when I see a daylily these days that it takes a lot to impress me. I can see beyond the single flower. I know to look at bud count and branching, to worry over whether it is a dormant or evergreen type or somewhere in between.

Making it through the Heat and Guilt with Change

I don't like the heat. I love shade, air conditioning, and misters. While I dislike the cold equally, I don't feel the overwhelming guilt associated with the heat, because in winter the garden is in stasis, nothing changes. During hot days, plants can literally die without water. I think this may be why I have gravitated toward planting everything in the ground while others are planting more pots. You have to water though and that entails going outside in the heat. In an effort to be a more effective waterer, I hooked up a 4-faucet attachment to the outside faucet and have a separate hose for the plants on my deck, a soaker hose for the hydrangea along the house and a separate hose for the rest of my watering. In the future,  may attach a buried fourth hose to my hosta garden to run some sort of watering system there so I can just turn a valve and water.

I think these weather extremes may force me to be a more efficient gardener if nothing else.

Clematis 'Diamantina'

Daylily 'Arthur Kroll' and allium 'Summer Beauty'

Spider daylily 'Northwind Dancer'

Phlox and balloon flower

It is too hot to move plants around, although I did move some orange daylily flava.

Daylily flava

And, I have been doing some major editing. In the battle between sun and shade; plants preferring sun while the gardener prefers shade, I have done some major editing. I mean major in that I purchased a chain saw.

My parents were both concerned with this purchase as was my son. Graceful, I am not, as some of you know. This is probably why my father never taught me the ins and outs of using a chain saw as a girl. As it was as a supervising gardener to my son who was doing the actual work, I managed to trip backwards over some branches and bruise my butt, hit my head, and put the majority of a 1/4" by 1 1/2" stick into my calf. Not as gory as that sounds, I didn't feel that stick, nor notice it until about a half hour later when I was eating lunch and the back of my leg itched. It didn't hurt when my son pulled it out, nor does it bother me to walk. It is a bit sore to touch. I would guess the muscle at the back of my calf deflected the stick placing it between the skin and the muscle. My head hurt worse and my butt will be sore for a couple days I suspect.

But if a chain saw could be considered cute, this one is. I purchased a cordless Greenworks 10" chain saw. It seems more like a amped up hedge trimmer. (It ran for about an hour and a half on the battery which was fully charged again in an hour.) And with all its safety features, I felt confident letting my 22-year-old son wield it. Over the course of a few minutes we cut down the cherry tree, a sheared balsam which was 12' tall, took out most of the lower limbs of my katsuras and even trimmed out the leader on one (I have been keeping these shear in lollipop forms about 8' tall for years.). The smell of almonds was redolent on the heated air. The largest diameter trunk was maybe 8" but it sawed through an 1 1/2" branch on the katsura in seconds. I hate to consider how long it would have taken us with my handsaw. We even used it to cut through the shrubby base of the dead side of my ninebark which had many branches of 5/8" to 3/4", making it the prefect tool for trimming and limbing up small trees and shrubs.

The brick makes a spot where the balsam once grew.

Two barberries were removed here. As the trees filled in, the amount of sun they received did not show their color to its best. Why have something so prickly when there is little upside?

This cherry is 10 years old and has borne little fruit. It was shading out a variegated dogwood and my grapes. We left the trunk long to use as a fulcrum to remove most of the root ball.

The growth habit of this 'Limelight' hydrangea has suffered from too much shade. It will need a major shaping now that it has more light.

Once it starts to cool down and with my son off to his first adult job and his own apartment, I will have time to make some major overhauls to my garden and yard. He got his degree in chemistry this spring and has accepted a job as a raw materials tester for Sigma Aldrich, a subsidiary of Merck.

Changes all around...

Fringe Event

Daylily 'Arthur Kroll'...and not...

When deadheading yesterday, I noticed this bud that didn't look quite right. It sort of looked like two, but not...quite. It has anthers and and a pistil (I think). And there seemed to be pollen on the anthers, so fertile... but oddly shaped.  I would say fastigated. And there are three more buds that look plumper than they should. 

Hmmm...

Almost like an episode of Fringe or The X-files, where something happened at a quantum level and two universes vibrated a slightly different harmonics and the poor soul morphed into being with a rock or the floor, or another daylily.

Bloom Day, July

Daylily 'Happy Days Are Here Again' blooming in my garden. Introduced this year, this plant was given to me last summer by its hybridizer Darrel Apps. It has been blooming since July 5 and has a soft green throat.

A Visit with Dr. Darrel Apps, and Of Course, Daylilies

High summer is here, and in Wild Rose, as strange as is may seem that the name of the village is not Daylily, that means looking at, thinking about, talking about, and evaluating daylilies.  Last night, I fell asleep thinking about daylilies.  I would bet that is the situation for my neighbor, Dr. Darrel Apps, too.

Dr. Apps, has retired to my village, but the use of the word "retired" is probably not correct.  He has simply changed his venue.  His daylily breeding program is moving along faster now than it probably ever has.  

So Which Daylilies Did I Select?

My photo of a photo taken by Dr. Darrel Apps of 'North Wind Dancer' (Schaben, 2001).  All the pictures of daylilies in this post are pictures of a picture taken by Dr. Apps, unless otherwise noted.

There were quite a few "Goings-on" in my neck of the Central Wisconsin "New North" this weekend.  For area gardeners, we have had a couple pretty cold "cover up your coleus and clip your basil" sort of cold nights; not the "Run, run-- collect all the cukes and tomatoes" sort.  We also had the opportunity to select from some truly superior sorts of modern daylilies from the hybridizer, Dr. Darrel Apps, who as a member of the local Kiwanis, donated daylilies to their fund raiser held in conjunction with the Classic Car Show Pancake Breakfast.

With 70 different selections, the choice was difficult.  That pale yellow spider on the far right was not among my selections, but would have been a nice addition to my long border. (My photo.)

Dr. Darrel Apps, daylily hybridizer and Kiwanis member.  (My photo.)

So what did I select?

Oh, It's a Pretty Little Thing

A rejection from Dr. Apps.  (Cute though!)

 After the Armageddon that is pruning the wine grapes and the dappled willow (which I had left a tad too large last year because of the drought and heat, and this year too late because of the garden walk, using my new-to-me (garage sale find/gift from my beautiful SIL) and more powerful hedger (It actually cuts through the stems of the dappled willow versus just tearing them up and getting stalled/stuck.); I am back to admiring daylilies blooming in my garden.

(How many run-on sentence fragments can I jumble together?  I tell you Internet search engines have rotted my brain!)

"Austin's Beauty" and other unnamed daylilies

Daylily 'Strawberry Candy' and gooseneck loosestrife

Daylily 'Saturn...(something)' (LOL)  I don't care for those laterals

Close-up

One mustn't forget foliage, and there is some interesting stuff in my tiny bed that I have planted tiny things I didn't want to "lose" in the long border or the shrub alley hedge.  I could never decide what to plant there, thinking it should be "special".  It turned into a "holding" bed.  "It" has come up with its own plan it seems...

Unusual Plants from the Garden of Dr. Darrel Apps

Sometimes when I see something so fantastical, so extraordinary that it is completely beyond my comprehension, I imagine what people might have thought when first seeing a rhinoceros or a coelacanth. This feeling doesn't happen often for me in gardens, but every so often, yeah, it does.

I had just spent and hour looking over the daylilies in the breeding program of Dr. Darrel Apps when he calls on the phone and tells me I simply must come over and take a look at his clivia. It has five blooming stalks. This one is an orange one. Darrel has a yellow clivia and an orange clivia of enormous proportions.

I accused Marilyn and Darrel of spoofing me with fake flowers and had to rub several of the stems and blooms between my fingers just to be sure.

Equally amazing was this trumpet vine. I believe this is the first bloom I have seen, although Darrel said it had bloomed last year. I stopped talking in mid-sentence to check out this one. Dr. Apps told me it is truly hardy to zone 6 and growing here doesn't do it justice, but he couldn't help himself and had to bring it from NJ when he moved home to WI.

He told me there is a selected cultivar name 'Morning Sun'. I can only imagine what this vine would look like covered in these blooms that look nothing like the campsis radicans grown almost invasively here. Other than the leaf structure and color, they seem to have nothing in common.

Darrel can never say too many good things about the calamagrostis Karl Foerster. He tells me their are, in his opinion, just about five really good grasses for the upper tier of the United States. This is one. He also really likes the panicum 'Dewey Blues'. 'Elijah Blue' the blue fescue is another he feels is good. He hasn't mentioned the others, but my choices would be the carex 'Ice Dance' and the miscanthus purpurea - purple flame grass. I also like the panicum 'Heavy Metal' because of its uniform seed heads. He grows northern sea oats in his yard for winter flower arrangemens, so a good bet he prefers that one over my preference for the miscanthus.

A couple daylilies from Dr. Apps' breeding program. I asked him their name. He would be miffed that I've forgotten, but they are too pretty to exclude.

Dr. Apps, daylily hybridizer and promoter, has often told me that gardeners that only grow daylilies are "boring", that they limit themselves and are missing out on the really vast experience of gardening.

Dr. Apps is not one of those people.

An Intimate Look at Hemerocallis

Hemerocallis fulva

Unnamed hemereocalliso, seed from Jung's

Unnamed hemerocallis cultivar from same genetics a 'Ice Carnival' and 'Polar Ice'

Hemereocallis 'Spacecoast Starburst'

Hemereocallis pollinated by my Handsome Son

Hemerocallis 'Country Rose'

Hemerocallis 'Mildred Mitchell'


Hemerocallis 'Mary Todd'


Hemerocallis 'Bela Lugosi'



Hemerocallis 'John Kroll'

Scenes from the Garden

The long border is just a long expanse of green. The rest of the garden does have its moments.