image source: Linda N., via Flickr

I always think of the daylily as a harbinger of summer. No matter what the calendar says, when you start seeing those brightly colored blooms in yards around the neighborhood, you know the warm weather is here to stay.

I’ve lived in the Northeast, Midwest, and Southeast, and in all these regions it was common to see “wild” orange daylilies growing untended along roadsides, posing as wildflowers. This is a flower with a tough constitution – few others can tolerate such a wide range of growing conditions: full sun or part shade, sandy or clay soils, slightly dry sites or the sides of a stream bed.

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But daylilies blend in to formal flower borders just as well as they fit into cottage gardens and more naturalistic settings. They’ve been nicknamed “the perfect perennial” because they are such versatile and reliable garden plants. Their strong flower stems never need staking, and the plants aren’t susceptible to any pests or diseases that I know of.

Gardeners of a previous century might have considered the daylily’s greatest flaw to be its limited color range – warm hues ranging from bright lemon yellow to orange-red. But during the past 75 years, new hybrids have been introduced in many new colors and flower forms, as well as a range of heights.

This remarkable diversity comes from the fact that daylilies are very easy to hybridize, even for amateurs and home gardeners. (If you want to try it yourself, you can find a tutorial online at Dave’s Garden.) Because of modern hybridizing efforts, there are now exotic new shapes, including ruffled petals, double forms, and flowers with long, spidery petals. There’s also been an explosion of new colors, from scrumptious pale shades of pale apricot and lavender, to deep hues like maroon and violet, and even bi-colors.

True blue is now the only shade missing from the daylily color spectrum because, like roses, daylilies don’t have the gene that codes for blue pigment. There are also no snowy white daylilies, though you can get close with creamy shades of ivory.

Many years ago, when I was writing an article about daylilies for a glossy magazine, I learned that there’s a secret to tapping into all this daylily diversity. Basically, you have to take the road less traveled. Most commercial garden centers tend to stick with very common varieties of daylilies. If you shop exclusively at those places, you’ll miss out on all the really exciting stuff.

Instead, seek out a specialty nursery or a daylily hybridizer. In the Atlanta Yellow Pages, there’s actually a listing titled “Daylily Farms,” but maybe that’s not the case where you live. Fortunately, the American Hemerocallis Society has an online listing of daylily nurseries, organized by region. Try to go shopping when the flowers are in bloom, so you can see exactly what you’re getting. I’ve done this several times, and it’s always a fun excursion!

Planting Tip:

Daylily Color Schemes

The daylily growers I’ve talked to all have different ideas on how to combine daylily colors in the garden. Here are a few of them, to tickle your imagination:

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• Plant like a purist – in huge, sweeping drifts of all one color.

• Plant for contrast – start out with one color, like yellow. Then, for every 5 or 6 yellows, plant one red. You can also do this with pale lavender and deep purple, soft apricot and bright orange, etc.

• Plant for a theme – one grower I talked to said she planted soft pinks and lavenders around a Victorian gazebo, and bright yellow daylilies in a border built around chartreuse hostas and other gold-variegated foliage.

• Plant randomly – I always remember what Steven Stinchcomb, the owner of Turnipseed Nursery Farms, once told me: It’s impossible to clash daylily colors because they all seem to work together.