What makes daylilies special?
Do you want to hear a deep, dark secret?
I didn’t use to be a fan of daylilies.
This confession is sheer heresy because I now oversee one of the largest public collections of daylilies in the United States. North Dakota State University is home to the American Daylily Society Historic Daylily Collection and has approximately 2,000 cultivars.
In my former ignorance, I used to think daylilies were rather pedestrian because you see them everywhere. Now, I have an incredible appreciation for them.
When you see hundreds of different daylily cultivars in bloom, something magical happens. The side-byside comparison allows you to see how unique and beautiful each cultivar is.
Daylilies are easy to breed and hybridize for variation in appearance. With their large stigmas and stamens, professionals and amateurs alike can engage in making plant crosses to create new cultivars. As of 2018, there were nearly 89,000 registered cultivars.
As you walk through the NDSU Historic Daylily Collection, the spectrum of colors is overwhelming. When people think of daylily colors, they think of yellow and orange. However, modern breeding has resulted in an explosion of novel colors. Breeders have introduced virtually every shade of red imaginable from bright scarlet to deep burgundy. Believe it or not, some cultivars display purple coloration (light lavender to grape). Pinks and pastels are fairly common. The only missing colors are pure white, black and true blue.
Looking at the collection, an astonishing number of the flowers have two, three or more colors. If you look closely, some flowers have diamond dust. This is a term for flowers that sparkle in the sun as they reflect light.
The flower forms are also unique.
Flowers with extra-long petals and sepals are called a spider form. If the flowers have extra whorls of petals, this is considered a double form. My favorite daylilies have ruffled edges or even projections along the edges.
Even the name is special and poetic. Daylilies are in the genus, Hemerocallis. Hemerocallis is Greek for beauty and day. What an appropriate name for a plant that produces individual flowers that bloom exquisitely for one day and die. Fortunately, daylilies produce new flowers each day for weeks on end.
If you want to add daylilies to your garden, they are some of the most adaptable ornamental plants. While they do best in full sun, they will also tolerate lesser amounts of daylight. Daylilies do surprisingly well in clay soils but will also thrive in sandy soils if kept well-watered.
To top it off, the daylily buds and flowers are edible. Stamens and pistils should be removed from flowers before cooking to prevent pollen allergies.
Over the last decade, I have become dazzled by the sheer beauty and variety of colors and forms. If you are a daylily skeptic like I was, I invite you to drive to Fargo for a road trip and see the NDSU Historic Daylily Collection firsthand. Late July is peak bloom but flowers will continue to bloom into September.