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The Daylilies
 at Laughingstock

by Pat Otterness

Some people actually plan what they will do with their time. Their undertakings are carefully researched and orchestrated, step by perfect step, to accomplish glorious outcomes. Go figure!

That never happens at my place, the infamous Gardens at Laughingstock. I am what might be called, for lack of a better description, an iris hybridizer. I never set out to be one, knew nothing about irises when I began, and have stumbled and bumbled through mistake after mistake as I persisted in this ill-conceived endeavor.

In the same way, only happenstance brought daylilies into my purview. Their existence crept so stealthily into my consciousness that I never felt an Aha! moment when the connection began. In fact, until my iris mentor, Bill Maryott, decided to hybridize daylilies, I was hardly aware that daylilies came in colors other than the wild orange kind that grow along my country road.

I had photographed these picturesque masses of wild orange daylilies with great enthusiasm, though my joy was more in the compositions than in the blooms themselves. I failed to fully appreciate the yearly display of riotous color along my road until it was stolen from me by the Virginia Department of Transportation, which began to mow them down every year just as the blooms were beginning to open.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for clearing brush along the roadside. Here in the South, unwanted vegetation has a way of erupting unbidden from the earth and forming towers of ugly weed seed in no time at all. Still, if a VDOT driver is mowing down weeds along the edge of the road and comes upon a magnificent display of blooms, don't you think he could go around them rather than ruthlessly slicing off their heads? Or is that just me?

It was this wanton destruction of beauty that first drew my full attention to daylilies. I went so far as to move a few small clumps of them to my yard where they would be safe from the mower's blade. Still, that was as far as it went. Busy with my irises, I left all other plantings to fend for themselves, and by paying too much attention to one type of plant, I allowed another to sneak up and catch me by surprise.

When Bill Maryott announced his defection from iris hybridizing and his intention to hybridize daylilies instead, I was horrified. What was he thinking? How did he expect to change horses in midstream, as it were, and start all over again with something new ... at his age?

But start he did, and to my utter and total surprise, he has been successful. Early on, he gifted both me and my daughter with some of his first creations, actively trying to recruit our interest in his Hemerocallis venture. With a growing awareness of daylilies, I began to notice their presence in my community. The Nelson County Library has a thin strip of garden space at each side of its steps, planted with daylilies I had never really noticed before. In early summer these diploid daylilies presented a blaze of color, followed by a nice assortment of bee-pollinated pods that I greedily gathered and tucked in my pockets for a rainy day. Of course I didn't know they were diploids at the time, nor did I know that tetraploid daylilies existed. I was just fooling around, as is my wont.

That same summer I went so far as to purchase a few diploid daylilies in shades of lavender from a local vendor and planted them in pots. This was followed by ordering several daylilies from Bill: a brilliant red one (name long forgotten), and a yellow spider cultivar (also long nameless).

This awakening interest in daylilies was only a dim background to my growing iris venture, though, which took the majority of my time, attention, and money. By 2004 I was writing articles about the funny side of iris gardening for Tall Talk, the journal of the Tall Bearded Iris Society, another unplanned venture that has brought me a lot of pleasure.

Meanwhile, Maryott was urging me to try my hand at hybridizing daylilies, and I was listening but resisting. I was intrigued by the seed pods I had swiped from the library's daylilies, though, so with Bill's instructions, I began to germinate daylily seeds for the first time. It was pain-free since I was spared the intensive record-keeping I maintain on my iris crosses, but it quickly became obvious that I had no place to plant the hundreds of new daylily seedlings I garnered from those seeds. My iris garden had become so extensive that all the good, sunny spots were taken as well as most of the not-so-good, partially shaded places.

A steep embankment opposite my house and fronting the road has always been prone to erosion. Each summer it becomes overgrown with a thatch of tall, invasive weeds and briars; and since it is a private road, it is not subject to VDOT's mowing regime. Walking around my yard that spring, I had an epiphany. What if I were to plant my daylily seedlings all up and down this bank? And what if I interspersed the daylilies with plugs of a nice ground cover? In my mind's eye, I pictured a neat wall of ground cover serving as backdrop to bright clumps of daylilies in a rainbow of different colors. Wow! That would be terrific!

I already had hundreds of plugs of daylilies, so all that was needed was some attractive ground cover. At a price that made me wince, I was able to purchase flat after flat of periwinkle plugs to plant between and around the daylily seedlings. Luckily, this was before my knees gave out on me, when I was still able to climb up the bank and insert my plugs into its loose and too-easily-eroded soil.

I watered the bank every day as spring turned to summer. Soon, of course, I was also watering the inevitable weeds and briars that were the long-time tenants of this patch of country roadside. Someday, I told myself, the daylilies and ground cover will crowd out these weeds. Someday it will be beautiful.

Okay, years have passed and I'm still waiting. Go figure! Early last spring I thought my time had come. The periwinkle had spread ... slower than I'd hoped, but still ... it had spread. Those clumps of daylilies that had survived the overshadowing of weeds and the erosion of soil were getting bigger. I was aglow with anticipation right up until the same old leafy villains thrust up through the soil and asserted their dominance for another year.

Hope springs eternal, and as another spring approaches, I wait and watch. Over the years I've seen a few of my daylily seedlings daring to open blooms beneath that curtain of weedy undergrowth. If I live long enough, surely the day will come when the weeds are crowded out at last and I can finally see the embodiment of my long ago vision, the epiphany that sparked a plan.

 

International daylily enthusiasts are welcome to request seeds from the AHS International Seed Bank. The aim of this outreach program is to spread the interest in growing and enjoying daylilies around the world.  

 

For more information, please contact Maureen Strong at

Seed Bank.