    |
Each chapter in Grounded in the Garden contains both a story and factual information you may not have heard before about the plant or task for which it is named. Here is part of a chapter called “Daylily.” For the complete chapter, check out the book to learn more about daylilies, their history and their culture.
Daylily
I’ve given in to the inevitable: I’ve finally pulled up the rest of my leggy petunias and buried them deep in the compost heap. Central Florida summer has enveloped us once again, and the glory of the spring garden is past. Pansies, ageratum, and sweet alyssum suffer in the rainless heat and humidity. They will be the next to go. Even the snapdragons—summer staples in northern climates—are looking too weary and worn to bother with. Best put them all out of their misery.
My roses are starting to decline, putting out fewer and smaller blossoms as the heat forces them to conserve their energy, and their blossoms tend to “blow” the same day they open. Even the geraniums look exhausted.
What I need is something that likes high temperatures and bright sunlight, something that will show a new flower every day and will multiply underground, giving me even more color and cheer next year.
Hibiscuses thrive this time of year. They relish the heat and don’t seem to mind the drought too much. But they’re so flamboyant, rising high above the ground and showing off their exotic ballroom-skirt blossoms for everyone to admire.
And I enjoy the crape myrtles, their lacy dancing-in-the-breeze clusters of crinkly flowers that come in such a variety of colors. But where I live, both these plants tend to turn into huge shrubs—even trees—so I plant them sparingly.
What I want is color at my knees, not frills and flounces at my shoulders.
This summer I’ll try daylilies.
Daylilies, and I go back a long way. The sight of orange and yellow ones securing a steep embankment, beautifying what might otherwise be a dismal landscape, always takes me back to my childhood and the miracle of finding flowers growing wild in unlikely places.
When I was young, I lived in Indiana in a neighborhood surrounded by woods and overgrown pastures. The creek at the end of our gravel road was good for tadpole stalking in summer and ice skating in winter, and the open spaces on either side were havens for phlox, daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, and daylilies—those plain, old-fashioned tangerine-colored ones, the native Hemerocallis fulva, sometimes called “tawny.”
Walking my bike through fields and forest, I’d find a rectangle of daylilies in a clearing. Had a cabin been there years ago? Did someone plant these “lilies of the field” around her homestead in hopes of brightening an otherwise difficult, perhaps colorless life? Did the house burn to the ground and grasses and vines cover all evidence of its having been there, save for the flowers that still bloom year after year along what was the perimeter of the house? Did the flowers growing along the tree line at the edge of the forest migrate there on their own, or did she plant them there on purpose, adding a spot of sunlight to the dark edge of the woods?
The hybrid daylilies we are able to grow today evolved from Chinese and Japanese species brought to North America by settlers emigrating from Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These gold and yellow daylilies are the ones I fell in love with as a girl.
In China they were originally cultivated for their flavor. “The buds were eaten as a spring tonic and any extra buds were dried to be enjoyed during the winter months. Not only were daylilies tasty, they were also good for you, holding such diverse powers as the ability to relieve pain, cure kidney ailments, and lessen grief. It was called hsuan t’sao, [SWAN TSOW] ‘the plant of forgetfulness,’ and was said to cure sorrow by causing a loss of memory.”1
Hummm…“To relieve pain…and lessen grief.” Maybe that’s why I’m responding so to daylilies this summer. My mother’s unexpected death at the end of March has dulled the color of my days. I am grieving her loss and I’m lonely for the sunlight she shone on me so constantly and effortlessly. Perhaps I should make a tonic of daylily blossoms “to relieve pain…and lessen grief.”
Some days I miss her almost more than I can bear, yet I wouldn’t wish her back from where she is now. Whenever I feel sad about her being gone, I picture her with her two sisters and their girlfriends, all of them dressed to the nines, having cocktails, laughing together, and listening to the champagne sounds of Lawrence Welk at some heavenly USO dance.
Mom is surrounded by the film stars she idolized all her life. Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Bettie Grable, Lana Turner…all of them. She never tired of the far-fetched world depicted in the movies of the 1940s, where the women were all beautiful and gorgeously dressed and where the handsome men knew how to treat them like ladies. She adored this fantasy world, where life was lovely and she could always expect a happy ending. “All I want is for everyone to be happy,” was one of her famous sayings. “You don’t want much, Phyllis, do you?” my husband would say.
Maybe, when we get to heaven, we get to have the world we always wished for. If that’s true, Phyllis Rose is singing with Bing Crosby, “Heaven, I’m in heaven and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.” She is whirling around on the dance floor with Fred Astaire, moving as gracefully as Ginger Rogers. She’s wearing a golden gown with a full skirt that’s shaped—I can’t help but notice—like the fully opened blossom of the hopeful, healing daylily.
