The City Gardener: Forever and a daylily

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Any plant that comes in a rainbow of colours, blooms for weeks on end, and actually seems to thrive on neglect, deserves a place of honour in a city garden

Daylilies have gotten something of a bum rap over the years. The familiar species type – the scrawny “ditch lily” with orange flowers that blooms faithfully each July in fields and abandoned front yards – is often dismissed as a near-weed, the Rodney Dangerfield of garden plants.

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But actually, the daylily family – hemerocallis spp., from the Greek “hemera,” day, and “kallos,” beauty, is one of the largest and most varied in the plant kingdom, thanks to extensive hybridizing.

Today you can choose from an almost limitless selection of heights, bloom times and colours from almost pure white to a purple so deep it’s almost black. And given the right conditions, all of them, like the humble ditch lily from which they sprang, will grow and spread for years with a minimum of care.

Though Canadians have been growing them at least since Victorian times, daylilies are originally from Asia, where they are still prized as an edible plant. (In fact, all forms of the plant, including the fleshy tuber-like roots, leaves and even blossoms, are delicious sautéed with a little butter or added to salads.)

Thick clumps of strap-like leaves send out slender stalks, called scapes, in mid-summer, each bearing as many as 12 to 15 buds. Each individual blossom only lasts for one day – hence the name – but since the scapes bear so many buds, you can enjoy fresh blooms over weeks, or even months.

Once you start growing them, you may find you can’t grow just one kind, and you might develop a few favourites. Mine include Joan Senior, with sturdy, creamy white flowers that bloom forever (the ones in my front garden started in mid-July and are still going strong as I write); old-fashioned hemerocallis flava, with glowing, bright-yellow blossoms; and Enchanted Forest, with frilly peach-coloured blooms and a heavenly fragrance.

While daylilies are among the easiest plants in your garden to grow, the fancier varieties in particular do prefer a sunny spot and rich, well-drained soil. Don’t let them dry out, especially while they are still getting established, which can take a year or longer. Keep an eye out for slugs and aphids, as with any plant.

I’ve found that if you carefully snap off the seedhead, that little green knob left behind after each individual bloom fades, it encourages the scape to produce more buds, prolonging flowering and letting the plant focus its energy on root and leaf production rather than seeds.

But you don’t have to, just as you don’t have to cut back the scape after flowering ends. Once they’ve dried out, you can usually pull out the scapes with a gentle tug.

Over a few years, healthy plants can get overcrowded, and either stop blooming or get leggy and messy looking. When this happens, dig up the clump, rinse off excess soil and trim the leaves down to about six inches.

Gently divide the roots into smaller clumps, cutting away any rotted or dried-out sections, and replant. You can do this any time up to four weeks before the first frost; but the best time is right after blooming finishes.

There is one task that both you (for aesthetic reasons) and your daylilies will appreciate. Clean up the dying foliage, either during fall clean-up or before growth starts again in spring.

Species daylilies, in particular, have a tendency to get untidy as the summer wears on, so I have no scruples about trimming mine back to about eight inches in September. They don’t seem to mind, and it gives the garden a neater look.

Please feel free to write in with questions, to comment or to share your own city gardening
adventures with Martha. Write to her at marthasgarden07@gmail.com.