Daylilies; the overlooked beauties

Daylilies, or more correctly, hemerocallis, are a rather overlooked group of plants. They are called dayliles because they produce at least one flower per flower stem every day for weeks,

but when mature each plant can produce up to 20 flower stems, resulting in a mass of colour for 10 weeks or more.

Many years ago (perhaps 25) my father and I attended a seminar for horticulturalist including the well-known nurseryman Adrian Bloom. He was launching the now famous H. ‘Stella De Oro’ onto the gardening market and trying to encourage garden centres to sell more of these wonderful plants. Sadly, daylilies seem to be no more popular today then they were then. If anything there are less grown in our gardens.

Why should this be? Daylilies are easy to grow, tolerant of a vast range of garden locations (sun to shade/dry to wet) and colourful (white, yellow, orange, red, purple, pink with all sorts of patterns). It may because they bloom at a time when most gardeners have finished preparing the garden for summer, when they are ready to turn on the barbeque or go on holiday – from June to August. When they've finished flowering, they leave behind a handsome clump of long, slender leaves which, having demurely died back in autumn, is easy to remove ready for the new growth to emerge the following spring.