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AHS Region 2/Great Lakes Newsletter
The opportunity to address a captive
audience, as it were, is just
about irresistible. When I was invited
to write a bit for the Newsletter,
it seemed like a pretty simple
thing to do. As it happened, as soon
as I had said my diffident “probably
yes” I found myself at a loss for
words. Fortunately, the deadline
for this issue was so far away at that
moment that I was reasonably
hopeful that something would occur
to me by the time it was required.
We suffer from a certain compulsion,
most of us daylily lovers! We
are addicted to the newest introductions
from our favorite hybridizers.
We daub pollen as though we knew
what we were doing. We wait a
couple of years to see the results,
and then, reluctantly, trash almost
all of them. I think we need to take
a closer look at this condition of
ours, and perhaps try for a little
more detached perspective on ourselves.
I’ll contribute to that with
whatever little bits and pieces I can
come up with.
I suffer from another compulsion:
the compulsion to count, list, measure,
and tally everything in sight.
We will take some peeks inside the
world of data, using our dearly loved
daylilies as the vehicle for our voyage.
Hemerocoholicism
How did we all get wrapped up in
this compulsive addiction to Hemerocallis
I have several theories, none
of them flattering to us who are in
the condition. We are just fortunate
that there is an almost infinite number
of varieties out there waiting to
help us deal with our drives to collect
ever more types of the daylily.
We delude ourselves that daylilies
are tough and self-sufficient, so that
we are really not increasing the
amount of work we have to do car-
Page 18 Spring/Summer 2000
Iconoclast’s Corner
By Jim Shields, Indiana
ing for our plants even if we do order
30 or 50 new plants. If you
choose carefully, not a single plant
among those 50 new cultivars will
be tough, let alone self-sufficient in
our climate zones. The only self-sufficient
daylily I ever saw was
Hemerocallis fulva ‘Europa’, which
can survive abandoned by the roadsides
for a century or more.
We convince ourselves that those
new pinkish mauve flowers with the
swollen, wrinkled edges of yellow
are each unique and are all different
and significantly better than the
ones of similar appearance, but who
are named differently from those we
planted a year ago. Even worse,
some of us actually manage to believe
that the wretched things are
beautiful.
With the invaluable assistance
of fellow members
of the Daylily E-mail Robin and
of AHS generally, we are going
to build a set of observations on
foliage that will help to settle
the question – at least for the
cultivars covered thoroughly
enough in our surveys.
You should help us out
on this.
We love beauty, we search for beautiful
flowers, we crave the unique,
the novel, the new. We spend ridiculous
amounts of money for new
introductions with the weak rationalization
that we will make all that
money back when we sell the future
divisions of these expensive weeds.
We vilify our friends and colleagues
who dare to suggest that an occasional
variety of these plants is less
than totally hardy, less than totally
desirable.
The worst of us, typified by myself,
make lists of the names of these
things. The longer the list, the better
we feel about it. In fact, the better
we feel about the whole world.
It’s really rather sad.
Counting Everything in Sight
I am in favor of counting and measuring
everything not moving too
fast to get a good look at.
Let’s start with buds. Melanie Mason
has suggested that bud counts
on Florida plants decrease by 5 buds
for every climate zone farther north
in which we try to grow them. I
think I may have suggested to
Melanie that the bud count declines
as an exponential function rather
than a linear one, but Melanie’s hypothesis
has priority of date. I wish
we could say the converse was true
of northern daylilies as you move
them south. It’s too bad we can’t
make that measurement too.
However, we can certainly count the
buds on our scapes. We don’t even
have to count the buds on every
scape nor on every variety we grow.
Let’s just count the buds on the varieties
that interest us the most.
Join in and help us see if Melanie
is on the right track!
I am also dedicated to determining
foliage habits for as many daylily
cultivars as I can get our fellow enthusiasts
to study. The hybridizers
are generally pretty close on to
the true condition, in my opinion.
However, that is just my opinion; it
is not a scientifically verified fact.
With the invaluable assistance of
fellow members of the Daylily E-
mail Robin and of AHS generally,
we are going to build a set of observations
on foliage that will help
to settle the question–at least for the
cultivars covered thoroughly enough
in our surveys. You should help us
out on this.
(continued on page 17)