End of the Summer Gardening

The conundrum with keeping a gardening blog is that during the months I want most to record and share my gardening thoughts, I'm actually spending all of my time gardening and hence find no time to write!

The garden on Labor Day weekend:

The brightly colored, immature petunias I used to fill in garden gaps early in the season now crawl like flowerless green snakes over everything.  My battle against pokeweed, bindweed and black swallow-wort have been fought and lost. Crabgrass and carpetweed blanket the garden paths I so carefully cleared and maintained early in the summer. Perennials at their prime in July look haggard and worn, brow-beaten by the sun and ready to call it quits for the season. Alas, the garden officially look like a very-tired, very brown jungle. 

Sigh.

A few perennials keep up the good fight. For example, the black-eyed susans, pictured here, just keep on kicking. They basically comprise the whole garden at this point. The purple bush in this picture is, I think, a butterfly bush of some sort. I thought for the longest time it was giant hyssop... but sadly, I'm really not sure what it is. Why do I not label things when I buy them?! I only label my daylilies, reasoning that I just need to remember the most general things about my other plants--like their common names. For example, this is black-eyed susan, yes, but it is a black-eyed susan that blooms only in the late summer, is 6 ft tall, has delicate branching and petit flowers and spreads like nobody's business. But the specific cultivar name? No idea. I'm not even sure it's a cultivar. But with the big purple plant I can't even remember the most basic thing... its common name.

Here is a close-up of the purple plant . Anyone able to identify it?  It know it looks a bit like loosestrife, but it's not that. Its base is woody.

Onward.

Although my gardens are a mess and currently dominated only by black-eyed susans, my daylily seedling bed, though still mostly green and flowerless, now sports a few blooms.  Some of these blooms are quite pedestrian, but some have also been surprisingly gorgeous. I tend to value those (still un-bloomed) seedlings with parental lineages that are new, edgy and cut-throat.  Oh la la! What kind of bloom will I see if I crossed this 2017 crazy spider with this 2016 luscious, petit beauty? Those pairings that include one or both parents from older lineages thrill me less. Yet... it's often those pairings that surprise me in terms of their elegance and beauty. I think that the newer daylilies I use in my hybridizing are often so gorgeous and unique already that it's hard to top them. Right now I'm talking strictly blooms. These plants are still too much in their infancy to know habit--and, of course, it's possible even the blooms will change between now and next season.

Because I'm new to hybridizing (I've really only been hybridizing in earnest for the last two years), everything about it still surprises and fascinates me. For example, I find it so interesting how you can have seeds from the same exact pod create such different looking flowers. It makes me think about children (human children, I mean) and how one parental combination can create such different looking progeny. It's also fascinating how when pairing dayliles (or humans, or dogs... or anything) beautiful + beautiful doesn't always equal beautiful, and common/boring + common/boring can create something exceptionally unique and gorgeous. Most fascinating of all--sometimes a seedling looks nothing like either parent and you think, Where did THAT come from? In instances like those I then feel the need to check out the parents' parents, and then the parents' parents' parents to see if I can find evidence that I didn't actually mislabel the cross, and that's why the seedling look nothing like either parent.

For example, this seedling just bloomed yesterday.

Very pretty! It's a cross between Kansas City Kicker (Stamile 2005) and Doma Knaresborough (Petit '94). Frankly, it doesn't look at all like either parent-- at all.

Here' a pictorial family tree: 

X 

Betty Warren Woods                     X  Shisado                                  =   Doma Knaresborough

 =

French Cavilier                        X   Sabine Bauer                      =       Kansas City Kicker

                                               

                Doma Knaresborough                 x                      Kansas City Kicker        =                           

                                                          New Seedling  bloomed 8/31

Bizzare, huh? The real question is whether my labeling is off. Kansas City Kicker is right next to Sparks Heir to a Kingdom in my garden.

Sparks Heir to A Kingdom

Might it, in fact, be the pod parent? But I don't think so. I label each cross immediately after I have make it, and so it's unlikely that I would label the pod parent incorrectly. But still....

This is the problem I have with hybridizing right now. I trust myself and my labeling, but not 100%. I need to develop a labeling system that is fail-proof.  You'd think it wouldn't be laborious or complicated, but it is, at least for me. I must be so diligent to place a label on the bloom immediately after I make a cross, because I forget or mix things up if I make several crosses and then expect myself to remember them.

I also have trouble making sure I use a label medium that will not allow the written words to fade in the sun. I always label with a black Sharpie, but some tags hold Sharpie better than other over time. This is even more a problem with seedlings. I like the idea of having the label under the ground, attached to the fan of the plant, but when I first transplant the seedlings they are too small to have a label attached in this way.  I find that often I won't catch that a label has faded until it's too late, and I find myself holding the label to the light, desperately hoping to be able to decipher what it said!

I hope to write a bit more consistently now late summer has arrived. Even if no one reads my drivel it's great to have a record of my gardening thoughts. I leave you with a picture of Hazel, who has been playing in the pokeweed.

Dogs Eating Fertilizer and Other Gardening Conundrums

As I write, my Boston Terrier is farting incessantly at my feet. Or maybe it's my lab. She's resting at my feet as well. The culprit: fertilizer. My dogs decided 10-10-10 fertilizer is delectable. You might remember that in my last post I mentioned my daylily seedlings appeared to have stalled in their growth.  I decided fertilizer and more watering might be the answer.  So yesterday I spent the day spreading fertilizer carefully in the daylily seedling beds. My dogs watched me intently. I just thought they wanted to hang out near me because they love me so much. Apparently, however, they were watching and waiting for me to leave, so they could get into the garden and lick up all the fertilizer I had just put down. 

It smells so badly in this room that I have opened all the windows to let out the noxiousness, but my dogs are outpacing the air circulation in this room. I cannot describe how foul the smell is. It's literally burning my nostrils.  Ernie, the terrier, keeps letting out little, wet toots, and then turning to look at his butt, puzzled, as if questioning who is creating this constant and funny noise. The smell does not appear to bother him, or the other dogs. They are quite happy snoozing in this fertilizer-farting hell that is my dining room. 

Call the vet! Is that what you are thinking? I know, I'm a terrible dog owner, but they (and I) are just going to have to suffer until this has passed through them. I'm assured by poison control that they will not die from the ingestion. They will just fart, poop black poops, maybe barf, drool a bit and drink a lot of water. In any case, my dogs, especially the lab and the sharpei, appear to have iron constitutions. My sharpei ate half a bottle of iron tablets a few weeks ago and showed no signs of discomfort -- just kept on moving and barking as always. We actually thought it was the lab who had eaten the tablets, and so we tried to induce vomiting in her by giving her 3 tsps of hydrogen peroxide. She didn't even bat an eyelash. No vomiting at all. She also has eaten two full bags of Hershey kisses in the past with no ill effect. It's quite astonishing. I could go on and on with stories about what my dogs have eaten that should have killed them but miraculously, did not.

 But back to gardening! 

I finally have some blooming flowers! I'm in the north, so no blooming daylilies yet, but the lupine, iris and peony look quite nice.

I'm not sure I like these hot pink peony, but they are dramatic-- I will say that.

The garden below needs some rethinking. It will look quite lovely in three weeks, but I clearly didn't think about late May flowering when I designed it. As I moved things around last fall, I remember thinking that I could just put some annuals out front to provide color in May. I do have annuals out front, but I grew them from seed and they are not yet blooming. Sigh. Maybe I will give in and pick up a few six packs of petunias at Shaw's.

Speaking of Shaw's...
Do you suppose it's a risk to buy plants at supermarkets in terms of insecticide exposure? I mean, how do I know whether they have been treated with neonicotinoids or not? I'm truly obsessed with bringing pollinators to my garden, and naturally I fear killing them off once they come. 

A consequence of being insecticide free is that I cannot control evil creatures like Gypsy Moth caterpillars. They have destroyed my cherry tree and they are fast destroying my roses. Does anyone have any experience with this? I would like nothing more than to kill them all in some incredibly cruel and painful way, burn them alive, blast them with poison, squeeze the green slimey caterpillar guts out of each one of them, but I don't know how to do so without affecting the plants--and hence my pollinators.  In the picture below you can witness my defoliated cherry tree. So sad. 

On another note, you will notice that there are stripes of gray on our house. We are going to paint it this summer, and we are deciding on a gray. Feel free to weigh in. I'm undecided.

Here is yet another question I have for this audience:

When you plant a new daylily and it immediately puts out scapes, do you allow the flowers to bloom, or cut the scape? I fear the plant being too taxed if it flowers. Is this unreasonable?

In other news, I continue to work on my butterfly garden. Unfortunately it doesn't look any better than the last time I wrote and posted a picture.

You can see we still have to clean up the mess of dead trees that my husband cut down so I could plant this garden. I read Gyspy Moths love to make their nests in dead wood. They are probably making nests in the mess as I write. argh.

I think I mentioned that in order to make this garden I have done a lot of digging / excavating. The pine needle layer is six inches deep, and so I have to dig and add soil repeatedly so I can actually plant.  I've determined that in the past this area was definitely treated as a trash heap. I have found so many bizarre things. Here's a list:

Not so bizarre:

• plastic plant labels
• the head of a large spade
• rusty nails and screws
• piles of rocks
• an old wooden trellis, rotting beneath the earth
• old soda and beer cans
• old patio stones
• bricks

VERY BIZARRE:

• a Barbie doll's arm
• a decorative hair barrette
• the remains of a swingset
• pieces of artist clay
• shards of actual pottery
• a piece of a dog leash
• a marble

and...
drumroll....
you really will not believe this...

• a jock strap. 

I KID YOU NOT!

I actually didn't even understand what it was until I showed it to my husband, who laughed, and then told me.


As I finish writing this I am watching a squirrel perform an incredible act of body contoration and strength in order to get seed from our bird feeder. I would shoo him away, except I'm so impressed by his prowess that I will allow him his fill. Truth be told, I like squirrels. They are funny, probably soft, although I have never actually pet one, and they are both incredibly smart and strong (witness the bird feeder display) and also incredibly stupid (roadkill... when will they learn?) Kind of like dogs. Hence, I like them.

All right, time to stop procrastinating and to start gardening!

Spring Time Fervor

First, here is a picture of my beautiful daughter (and me) before her junior prom. Just had to share... You know how proud we moms get over our gorgeous daughters!

On to gardening.
I can't do it all.
And it's just wrankling me. I realize wrankle isn't actually a word, but it still captures my feelings of late.

We moved to this home three years ago and took over its essentially overgrown and uncultivated two acres.  Of that acreage, I'd say half of is house/driveway and cul-de-sac, and a quarter lawn. The last quarter (maybe even more than a quarter) I've cultivated into garden. A portion of that is devoted to vegetables, raspberries, strawberries and apple trees. Those areas don't require much work. They need to be watered and weeded and occasionally fertilized (esp the vegetables), but mostly they just grow and produce and are satisfying. Maybe not the raspberries, actually.  I love having fresh raspberries, but the plants are piggy and aggressive. So are the strawberries, but they are easier to manage. The raspberries want to spread, and they are winning. In fact, they are spreading into my neighbor's lawn, which eventually is really, really not going to be good for neighborly relations. But I digress.

Photographed below are two of my new gardens. You can see the mailbox garden below isn't quite finished. Or, more accurately, it isn't close to being finished. It's the edging in that back that kills me. It's so damn messy and yet the thought of ripping out the pachysandra and the weeds over there makes me want to cry. I need a bulldozer or a tractor, or at the very least a tiller. But I don't have these things. (Bring out the violins. She has two acres but no tiller! JK.)

Below is another new garden. Last year there was pachysandra surrounding this small dogwood. I ripped that out last fall and planted tulips and daffs. Of course, the problem with tulips and daffs is that they look like horrible after the blooms fade, and if you cut back the foliage they don't bloom well the following year. Actually, the tulips never bloom well the next year anyway, so I may start treating them as annuals. Opinions out there? Tulips as annuals? Anyway. I have to deal with the daff and tulip foliage problem now.  I have about four daylilies in there currently. I could use the daylilies to cover the daff foliage, but you know that never actually works without looking super messy and crowded.

The picture below reveals probably my biggest undertaking this spring.  I had my husband chop out a bunch of dead pine trees this spring so I could create a butterfly garden here. Of course, this has proved 80 billion times harder than I thought it would be. Because this was a woodland area, the pine and leaf layer is at least a 1/2 a foot deep. Also, there is pokeweed EVERYWHERE. I have broken my back trying to dig it out. I left some all the way in the back because I know the birds like the berries in the fall, but that weed is seriously annoying. Ditto with the Black Swallwort. Man that stuff is persistent! Sometimes I fantasize about having a futuristic laser gun that I could point at the weed and zap it out of existence. Wouldn't that be amazing? And it would be so satisfying...Zap Zap Zap. Take that Pokeweed! Die Die Die!

 

Shockingly, most of this above area gets eight hours of sun a day, so I have been able to put in some good butterfly/bee plants--specifically a lot of Joe Pye Weed, various milkweeds, salvias, autumn sedum and agastache. Unfortunately, weeding this area is proving totally overwhelming. Now that the trees are gone and it has full sun the weeds are psyched! It's killing me. Can you tell I'm a bit overwhelmed and disheartened this morning? I'm hoping I will be rewarded by some good growth this summer, so it doesn't look like such a sloppy wasteland.

Here are pictures of areas that desperately need work. I walk by these areas a million times a day and think, What a mess! Argh! I have to deal with that! Below is actually a tiny bit okay right now. I like how the white azalea, pruned early this spring so it might look a little better, looks with the blue hosta. However, this area is overgrown and completely weedy and needs to be re-thought.

Don't even get me started about this area. That vinca... help me!

or this. I'm sure it was a lovely garden at some point (witness the hosta) but it is such a mess right now.

Here are areas that will look nice in a few weeks when things start to bloom.  (The weedy green mat below is foxglove. I have to get down on my hands and knees and thin it.) I find late May a frustrating time for perennial gardening in Massachusetts. The earliest blooms have passed, and the June blooms are yet to come. Nothing blooms right now. Any NE gardeners have suggestions? 

 

Pictured below are my daylily seedlings. I examine them everyday. They seem stalled in their growth. I'm sure this is because I'm watching them too carefully.  I started some of these babies under lights in the basement in October of last year, so I secretly hope some might bloom this summer. I know that is unlikely. But you never know... 

 

I find what is hardest about gardening on such a large scale is that even though you might have one area look amazing. another area is always in need of work. It never looks perfect all at once. Not even close! And yet it seems some achieve this. Is it because I am a one-woman operation who has taken on too much and doesn't have key equipment like a tiller or a tractor or a weeding robot? Man I wish weeding robots existed...

The other frustrating thing about my gardening right now is that I am really the only one who sees it. My kids are teenagers. Need I say more? My husband notices sort of and he also helps me a great deal, but he doesn't really SEE it. For example, he loves ground phlox. We have ground phlox everywhere, and yet when we are out and he sees a patch he comments on how pretty that blue flower is, and couldn't we grow that? And I'm like....but we do grow that!!!! It's everywhere!

Okay, a few more items to mention before I get back outside and wrestle with cultivation:

1. I was digging a hole yesterday and I found the BIGGEST grub I have ever seen. I researched online and discovered it must have been a Staghorn Beetle grub. It was gigantic--we're talking like three inches long and  an inch think. Ewwwwww. On that note, I like to kill lawn grubs when I happen upon them digging, and the other day I smushed one between my fingers and grub guts sprayed onto my face. Isn't that THE MOST DISGUSTING THING you can imagine? It was truly horrifying.

2. There was a huge green frog in my little pond, and now he's gone. Where did he go? I have other smaller frogs, but I'm missing that king daddy frog. (I think he is a green frog but maybe he's a bullfrog? His croak sounded like a green frog, though...)

3. There is a robin nesting in my weeping cherry in front of the house. :)

4. I keep observing birds carrying twigs and I want to follow them so I can figure out where they are nesting so I can spy on them. Earlier this spring we had mourning doves nest close to the house in a pine. Aren't those little snugglers cute?

As I finish this post I am looking out the window. A Red-Tailed hawk is at my birdbath drinking water! Holy moly he's an impressive bird. I wonder if he's checking out the hunting scene? I've never seen a hawk drink from a bird bath... but that does appear to be what he is doing. There is a robin atop a tree close by going absolutely bananas chirping. I wonder if he is warning birds to stay away?  He's still there and it's been five minutes.  

Okay, he just flew away. Watching a hawk close up is very interesting and cool. 

And now I need to get outside. Thanks for reading!

It's beautiful here in the north.
It's like Narnia when Lucy first enters through the wardrobe.
Still, I'm annoyed that the White Witch stills holds my gardens in her icy grip. She's had her seasonal reign. Enough already.

Sunrise over the back gardens.

Today it was blustery and 30 degrees, so no melting yet. My smallest dog, Henry, a doxie/chihuahua mix, got stuck in a drift this morning and I had to pull him out. 

I have a little pond in my yard. It's frozen right now, but in the summer it has a waterfall and it used to have koi in it. Unfortunately, the UV filter we had running in the pond broke last winter, unbeknowst to us, and subsequently green algae took over the pond in early spring and killed off the koi. It was sad and also made me feel extremely guilty. For a long time we did not fix the UV filter. Why bother? We had no fish to keep alive anymore. Weep.

And then the frogs moved in. Oh man did we have frogs! They loved that algae. We mostly had American Bullfrogs, Green Frogs, and Leopard Frogs. My husband and children seemed relatively nonplussed about these wonderful amphibians (my kids are teenagers...), but I became smitten! At one point my husband (Andy) cleaned the pond and replaced the UV filter. The pond returned to its pristine loveliness, but I did not spy quite so many frogs after that point, which worried me. Where had they gone? Were they suffering since we had disrupted their home? Gradually, the frogs returned. I think they might have just been horrified that Andy had emptied and refilled the pond, and they took off for several weeks before daring to return.

Green Frog

Northern Leopard Frog. These little dudes are super cool looking. They are iridescent in the sun.

American Bull Frog

Andy turned the UV filter off for the winter, and before the last snow storm I noted the green algae had begun to grow. It got me thinking about my frogs. I so want them to return this summer. So, this morning I researched how to best create an attractive environment for frogs so that they will come.

It turns out the reason my pond became a frog mecca last summer was because we had inadvertently already created the perfect frog environs. They love algae (no surprise there), they like small ponds in areas that have plenty of bugs to eat (check), and they like ponds that have gradual, shallow entries into them. The one area in which I had been remiss is that I didn't have any little frog getaways--pots turned sideways and half buried and other little crevices that serve as cool, damp hiding places. I'm on it. I'm going to make some fab frog hide-a-ways and place them around the pond--just as soon as the foot of snow surrounding it melts....

Onto daylilies.

Yesterday I moved a hundred or so daylilies from the basement to the first floor of the house and placed them on a card table close to a sunny window. The goal was to free up some downstairs space to place a few heated mats and get some annuals and vegetables going before it's too late. I'm worried these daylilies will not do well by the window, but I also can't figure out another solution.

In just a few weeks, even if there is snow still on the ground, I plan to start hardening  my infant daylilies off.
Our last freeze is usually in late April. When do those of you hybridizing in the north start to harden off your babies?

History of.

This is Patrick Stamile's "Chang Dynasty." There's no reason for this picture. I just love the flower.  Also, "Chang Dynasty" is a born and bred, evergreen, Floridian plant, but it does well here in my Massachusetts garden. You just never know which of those Southern beauties will do well here. This is one!

Last summer was the first summer I really and truly hybridized. The previous summer (2016) I dabbed a little pollen, but only a few times, and I harvested only about 25 seeds, total. Some of those seeds I planted in the fall. Nothing came up last spring. The rest I germinated indoors. Of those, only a handful made it--all from a cross between "Custard Candy" and "Strawberry Candy." I ended up with three plants that I put in the garden last summer. One of those plants bloomed in mid-September. It was such an exciting day... (I know, I know. It's a little sad and pathetic that I was so excited about seeing a cross between those two Stamile classics.) But it was my first flower! And, miraculously, it looked like... drumroll.....

a mix between "Custard Candy" and "Strawberry Candy." :)  Here's a picture:

I decided to call it "Mary's Very First Baby." And I'm registering it. Just kidding! Of course I'm not. Still, it will forever remain in my garden even though it's so very pedestrian. It's still my first daylily seedling to bloom and I love her. 

Anyway.  I made quite a few crosses last summer and I suspect I will have many more babies flowering in 2018. 

Here's how I went about hybridizing this summer. Each morning I'd go for a slow walk through the gardens and I'd cross flowers that happened to be blooming. It was all very planned and scientific. cough.

Sometimes I did have a question in mind before making a cross. For example:

• What will happen if I cross this near white lily with this near black one?
• What will happen if I cross tall to short?
• What will happen if cross this pretty flower with this fabulous branching?
• What will happen if I cross this hybridized, grown and raised in the south plant by this plant hybridized, grown and raised in the north?

Sometimes, though, I had no reason. This Tet had a flower blooming, and so did this one. So I crossed them. I've read a lot about hybridizing at this point, and the one thing every hybridizer says is that you must have a specific goal if you want to make great plants. However, deciding on a goal at this point in my nascent hybridizing career seems a bit like a newbie runner planning to a run a specific goal time without ever having raced a step.  So, I made my goal this: cross everything under the sun and see what happens. 

Although this approach might seem naive and uninformed to serious hybridizers, it did help me understand the fertility (or lack of) of each of my plants. I learned some plants take seed with just a dot of pollen given at any old time of day, whereas some plants won't set seed no matter what kind of provisions are made for them. Some plants set seed, but the seeds never completely mature, or even if they do mature, they do not germinate.  Some plants create viable, strong seeds in every pod. Some plants form pods that never grow, or only grow in a few chambers, or only produce one or two seeds. Some plants pack 30 seeds into one pod!  I learned that crossing a Dip to a Tet can result in a pod, but that pod will be empty. I learned that even if I am absolutely positively sure I will remember the cross I just made, five minutes later I will have forgotten it. I have to log the cross before I make it, and tag the flower as soon as the cross is made.  My little brain seems unable to handle the daily must remember game. I learned that pods ripen faster when it's hot, and more slowly as the weather cools, so making a cross in mid-August may not allow for a pod's complete maturation.  I learned other things, too. Too many to list.

By the end of the 2017 season  I had collected more than 1000 seeds.  Some of these seeds still remain bagged in my refrigerator. Some rotted after a month in the fridge, most likely because I harvested them too early or put them away before they were fully dry or because of some other novice error. The rest of the seeds, about 750, I tried to germinate. I figured my success rate would be low enough that I would only actually grow a quarter of that. Remember, the previous year very few of my 25 seeds germinated. But I was wrong! About 650 germinated, and I now have about 620 or so plants. Some of the seedlings died. Some were albino. But most survived.  

I planted my first seeds indoors in late October. My reasoning was... 

Okay. There was no reasoning. I just wanted to plant them. I knew it meant that I'd be using Grow Lights for like 7 months, but I've already spent so much on my gardening "hobby". What's a few more dollars in electricity and heat? Right? Clearly I need a large, heated greenhouse. I put it on my birthday list, but so far the reaction from my non-gardening mate has been a guffaw and a snort.

This is my basement set up. I started out putting three or four seedlings into gallon pots, with plans to give each seedling its own gallon pot once it began to look squished. I quickly realized this would not be efficient enough in terms of space. I have a big basement, but I have limited grow lights and I'm not sure purchasing any more at this point would engender tremendous marital affection.  Next year for sure. I ended up buying tree pots and transplanted each lily, one to a pot. This has worked quite well.  It definitely saves space, and I think the plants are quite happy. They are simply growing vertically rather than horizontally.

My biggest plants are now about 4.5 months old.  This plant is a cross between Salter's "Arabian Veil" and Peck's 1969 classic, "May Colvin." Random, I know.

My youngest plants are not quite 2 months old.  This is a cross between Salter's "Nordic Night" and Patrick Stamile's "Dixie Sunrise" (DS is another evergreen, Floridian daylily that does very well here in zone 5/6, suburban Boston, MA.)

By the time they are put into the garden, my biggest plants will be almost 6 months old. My hope is that some of these older plants actually bloom this summer. Fingers crossed.

Space Problems

In the dead of winter I find it hard to believe that my gardens were ever as lush, colorful and beautiful as they look in my pictures. Truth be told, I remember taking some of these pictures, and at the time I felt annoyed that things looked too messy and unkempt, or this certain plant looked ratty, or that certain plant was being overtaken by another. You know how it is. But looking at the pictures now I'm stunned by the garden's color and beauty.

I like to showcase my daylilies.  In my opinion a field of daylilies is beautiful, but often the uniqueness of each plant, each flower, gets lost when daylilies are placed in line-out after line-out. For example, here is a picture of an old cultivar introduced by Carpenter in 1985 called Harbor Gate.

It's a lovely pink and has such a nice pale, green throat. Its edges are the tiniest bit ruffled.  It's northern hardy and has attractive foliage for the whole season. Its one flaw is that it doesn't bloom longer than two weeks in my garden. I digress. In the picture you will see that Harbor Gate is surrounded by pale lavender impatiens, a somewhat sad looking pale pink petunia, and in the foreground a bit of brunnera. The pale lavender of the impatiens and the bright green of the brunnera show off the delicate pale pink of the flower, and I think it's for this reason I get many comments on it. Oh! That's a pretty one! What's that? And, of course, it's nothing very special! I think I obtained this pretty one" from Wild & Co a few years back for $2.50!

Here are a few other examples:

This is "Dixie Sunrise" (Stamile, 2008) with purple petunia and lupine.

"Strutter's Ball" (Moldovan, 1984) with a sprig of cornflower.

My point is only that as we collect more and more daylilies, we fail to showcase each one in a way that highlights its unique beauty. Harbor Gate, when in a row of dayliles or in a line-out, simply doesn't attract attention. It's just another pink daylily. Of course, I'm not selling my plants right now, and although I'm a daylily enthusiast and hybridizer, I'm not a professional, just a hobbyist, so I have the luxury of framing my daylilies with other plants--with caring more about situating a daylily than with maximum production or with a complex organizational scheme that helps my business and hybridizing program. I design my gardens with beauty and color in mind, and not practicality in terms of space and organization.

All that said, as my daylily collection and hybridizing program grow, I am finding it harder and harder to find perfect homes for each plant. I have whole sections of the garden that are just daylilies and nothing else. Further, my basement set-up teems with daylily seedlings and there is no room to grow from seed the annuals that I have in the past; the annuals that actual frame my daylilies!