HOW TO GROW DAYLILIES

Anne Swithinbank explains how to extend flowering times

BACK in the 1980s, when I worked as Glasshouse supervisor at RHS Wisley, clumps of daylilies grew in long borders running alongside the old (and now demolished) glasshouse range. One morning, our American orchid scholar picked a handful of flower buds and handed them round as a snack. At the time, eating flowers was far from mainstream, and for us Brits this was quite a novelty.

Hemerocallis translates as ‘beautiful for a day’, and yet a succession of buds ensures an acceptably long flowering season and blooms continue to open in a vase. Commonly grown H. fulva is a tough, hardy plant bearing single or double orange trumpet-shaped flowers during summer, along with strappy leaves that die back for winter and grow again in spring.

Thick clumps of fleshy roots help plants tolerate droughts well, and in a neglected and overgrown border, a daylily hold its own with a Michaelmas daisy, globe thistle and goldenrod.

There are 15 species of hemerocallis, mainly from China, Korea and Japan, where they grow in a wide range of habitats from marshy river valleys to meadows, forest edges and mountain slopes. These have given rise to over 50,000 named cultivars, offering a variety of flower shapes and colours, from white and palest green through peach, yellow, pink and red, to purple and near-black on plants from 1-5ft (30cm-1½m). Look out for fragrance and extended flowering seasons. Most have been bred in America, where daylilies have always been widely grown and appreciated. Here in the UK, some gardeners find the larger, more garish blooms hard to accommodate but with this many to choose from, there should be a daylily for everyone. If you dislike doubles or fat, rounded flowers, you should look for blooms with a dainty spider or star-shape, and the miniature varieties look great in pots. I welcome plants with the showiest blooms and evergreen foliage to our exotic border, and choose classic tall cultivars to blend with grasses and other perennials. Set dark-tinted flowers against a backdrop of gold or lime green, so they stand out. Would I rather eat my daylily buds or see them open? Well, I wasn’t that impressed with the taste first time around, but I might give them another go…

The salmon pink flowers of Hemerocallis ‘Pink Damask’ with their bright yellow throats

I’m lifting a clump of daylilies from a neglected border in early spring. Divided and replanted into wellnourished soil, they’ll flower better

A sweep of H. ‘Golden Chimes’ at RHS Wisley