The main reason I'm turned off by daylilies is they are **so** overused - it's almost like "I don't know what to plant, guess I'll just plant a daylily". I'll plant them in the ditch, I'll plant them along the driveway, I'll plant them around the mailbox, I'll plant them by the porch, I'll plant them next to the patio etc. etc. etc.

July 25, 2009

July 20, 2008

But I don't care for them too much either. There are some colors/types that are interesting, but not enough to tempt me to buy more. There are one or two in the garden that I think are nice, but overall they just fail to impress me; they are mediocre.
CMK

I am not impressed by regular daylilies but I like the reblooming ones and I like them separated. I would never put more than 2 in a bed and I divide them often so I keep the plants small. I don't like a big clump of them. I clip off the flower stem just below the foliage as soon as they quit blooming to encourage repeat bloom.

I water and fertilize and never have them go brown.

Also, some have great foliage right into frost. Others peter out early and start looking ratty after blooming. Depends on the cultivar.

Where would we all be, if we all liked the same thing? [g]

I grow them in hard-to-grow areas, generally dry and sandy, and don't irrigate or fertilize them, so the foliage does get ratty on some after blooming. But that's okay, I don't expect plants to remain static and perfect looking.

That being said, they are definitely high maintenance plants. To grow them well, they need plenty of fertilizer and water and mulch and grooming and deadheading and frequent dividing and deadleafing....

Daylilies were the very first perennials I ever grew. They got me hooked on gardening. I think this may be a pretty common tale. As I am growing older, I am limiting their numbers in my beds due to their neediness, but to say I don't like them? Nope. I DO like them but only in the right places and in manageable numbers.

I was unaware that DLs are high-maintenance, as I have never done anything to mine except move them because that's what I do...I move furniture, I move plants...whatever. I've never found that they are needy at all. YMMV, probably.

I do have cultivars which are 'vigorous' growers...certainly those need dividing every few years or so- I have a black-eyed stella that is quite vigorous, as is "Streaker." Most of mine are average-slow growers, though, and I find that they fill in nicely and I have some to share at swaps.

Here in my corner of Z5, I have dormant and many semi-evergreens that do well. Dormants don't get terribly ratty looking until late August when they are done blooming (my DL beds are essentially DLs exclusively), and the SEs just stay green. I clip them all back though in the fall to tidy up. I do have hardy mums which are planted in the front of one of the smaller DL beds, which takes attention off the ugliness in the back later in the season. I think I'll try starting some nasturtiums late in the season to also add to those beds when the weather starts to turn again.

Daylilies do have ordinary foliage at best and require attention if placed in a conspicuous spot to look their best. I once read that a daylily fancier whose garden has been featured in numerous magazine articles spent about an hour a day deadheading flowers and doing other maintenance, just on the daylilies.

That's one reason I'll never end up being a daylily nut. The other is that while the flowers are nice enough, the plants as a whole just don't add enough to go whole hog and start collecting them en masse.

Too many other great perennials to explore.

I bought about 30 DLs last year. I have them mixed into the perennial bed and the front bed...four together in one spot is about as many as I put near each other. I noticed the same thing with the ratty foilage and got very worried about what I had done. LOL I spent a little time pulling out dead foilage every week in August, and they looked pretty crappy, but since then some of it has filled back out, and no more has died.

I do love the blooms, and the easy care, but can see your point about the foilage. We'll see how bad it bugs me next year. Some of them may be getting swapped!

I think they look best mixed with other perennials. The miniatures are really nice: smaller footprint.

Unfortunately, the deer finish them off quicker than I can have my eye teeth pulled!

One neighbor got so tired of them being eaten he put up a 3 wire electric fence around half of front yard where daylilies grow among Pachysandra.

My main problem with them is that I was once gone the whole month of June and lots of weed grasses went to seed, and since then I have not been able to keep up with the weeding. DL and irises have vertical growth so the weed grasses can creep in among the canes, so I am seeking to grow plants that grow in balls and cover the ground so the weeds will be shaded out. I also don't like the short bloom season of DL's where I live and like to grow a mix of plants to cover more of the growing season.

brit5467, you might have a problem with earwigs. I find them in the leaves on summer nights when taking the dog out for her walk.