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Rethinking the Common Daylily

Orange daylilies are so out of fashion that many gardeners dig them up and throw them on the compost pile. But it doesn't matter, they'll probably persist and end up blooming THERE next year. So let's rethink orange daylilies. They have many good features.

First, they'll bloom in sun or shade, wet or dry. Good soil or heavy clay. They like sunshine best, but aren't fussy. So they are great for beginners.

Second, they're cheap. In fact, no one should ever buy them. Your friends and family have orange daylilies, and each clump gets bigger each year, so there are plenty to divide. You need only ask- and do the digging.

It really doesn't matter when you divide daylilies. If you do it now, the foliage may get a bit messy, so do it in the fall after the foliage has been cut back if you're a tidy sort. Or do it in the spring.

Third, they're pretty and are a great filler in flower arrangements. Day lilies are eschewed by many because each blossom only lasts a day. But if the vase gets some morning sunshine every day, the larger buds will open in succession. Recently I've been filling up a cutting bucket with daylilies and leaving it on the front steps for a last burst of color before entering the house.

Fourth, daylilies are easy to hybridize. More on that later.

Fifth, daylilies are useful for stabilizing steep banks or filling in places you don't want to mow. Planted 8-12 inches apart they will fill in and bully out -or shoulder away- almost any other plant.

And last, they're delicious. Garden writer Lewis Hill, co-author of "The Flower Gardener's Bible" recently told me that sometimes he serves ice cream in the blossoms, and that the buds are good in salads or a stir fry. He also said the roots are available in the Asian food market in Montreal, though he'd never eaten them. "It would seem a little like cannibalism to a daylily-lover like me", he said

Being a dangerously curious sort, I dug up some orange daylilies, hosed off the roots, and scrubbed them with a brush. I boiled them for about three minutes. They were delicious! Really, this isn't something to eat just to avoid starvation. They remind me a bit of water chestnuts. The fat bulbous part of the root is tender, though the rest is tough. I ate them plain with salt and butter.

Daylilies can easily be hybridized. In fact, there are some 100,000 named varieties by now. Here's how to do it:

Carefully examine a daylily. You will see 7 small parts in the center of each flower. Six are identical, the male anthers, each of which is loaded with pollen. In the center is the pistil, or female part, which is longer and light colored. With a pair of scissors cut off an anther from one color of daylily, and touch the pistil of another. Done. No chit chat, no flirting.

According to Lewis Hill, who has bred and registered daylilies, the plain orange daylily isn't, in fact, the best daylily for hybridizing because it doesn't have a highly diverse gene pool.

So if you have some daylily hybrids of colors that you like, or that have ruffled edges or extra petals and sepals, they probably would have a better chance of producing something unusual. Still, I've read that only one out of a thousand daylily crosses produces an interesting cultivar, and most crosses of common daylilies have already been tried. But, like parents, you'll probably love what you get.

To avoid inadvertent crosses and to document the linage of your crosses, you have two choices. You can get out to the garden before the bees, or you can put a paper bag over the scape (the stem) the night before. Tie it loosely.

After crossing daylilies, you must wait 2- 3 weeks for the seed pods to develop. They look like a little green peppers at first, then turn brown and dry. When you shake the stem and seeds rattle, seeds are ready to harvest- 4-6 weeks after crossing. Each pod produces about a dozen black seeds that are large enough to handle easily. Lewis Hill recommends planting them right away, as they would do if left to their own devices.

Daylily breeders talk about "lining out" daylilies, which means planting a line of seeds well spaced out in good garden soil. If you get the bug, that probably means digging up and removing your lawn before long - but that also means no more mowing!

It will take from 1 to 3 years before you see what you get from your breeding program. And it might take 5 years to decide which are keepers. Be sure to label well in case you breed a winner.

Along with cockroaches, orange daylilies probably would survive a nuclear holocaust or an encounter with a meteor like the one that did in the dinosaurs. You gotta love 'em.

Henry Homeyer is the author of "Notes from the Garden: Reflections and
Observations of an Organic Gardener." Write him at P.O. Box 364,
Cornish Flat, N.H. 03746; send e-mail to gardening.guy@valley.net; his Web site is gardening-guy.com.