The Rain Question

When I was a college lad pining away for a lost love who ultimately married me, I wrote a little poem with a cutesy touch....words dispersed across the space of the page.  The last lines went,

"and ask myself
the rain question.

Why
     Why
          Why
               Why....

Too much time on my hands or something.

This morning it is rainy.  It's not the volume we need, but it's a tad more than nothing.  Kathy and I bounded out of bed at 5:30, saw it wasn't raining yet, and dashed outside to gather pollen.  The rain finally came.  Between showers I took more daylily pictures.  I like to document the way the flowers react to temperatures and also how they bloom differently from day to day.

This is Phil Korth's GRACE LIKE RAIN looking better than I've seen it in the bast three years and probably looking best with raindrops all over it.

 

Nearby is the kind of chalky white daylily I prefer above other shades of white.  This is Patrick Stamile's WHITE MOUNTAIN.

 

By comparison, Phil Korth's AUGUST WEDDING looks like a creamy surface on a melon base color. 

This is is Larry Grace's BLUEGRASS MUSIC.  When I felt the rain begin to fall I grabbed the only blossom I'll see this year and brought it inside to collect the pollen.  Why only one flower?  There's some kind of malaise affecting how the daylilies grow, and many think the oddities are related to the mood swings of our weather gods this year.

The background on this flower is some sort of off-white.  The shades of blue and the pattern are what I love about this flower.

The strongest color in my entire collection belongs to David Kirchhoff's BETTY FORD, a strong contender for the top award this year and one of the best reds by the reigning master breeder of red daylilies.

In the vicinity is OBOE D'AMORE by Mort Morss (pictured below).  The large warm center of this daylily evokes memories of the warm center in the tone of the oboe d'amore, which makes this daylily a strong marker for the remembered sound, just as David Kirchhoff's MARIA CALLAS has a quality of color easily as rich and complex as the sound of Maria Callas at her best.

Here's a daylily that almost never opens well in my garden, but did a passable job this morning, and which has a color that is really a study in unreconciled genetic conflicts.  It's REGGIE MORGAN by Ted Petit and its complexities are the main reason for breeding with it.  If I weren't a hybridizer, I wouldn't grow this daylily because the weather here seems to inhibit full, flat opening most of the time.

A much better Ted Petit daylily in my garden, virtually perfect every day, is OCEANS ELEVEN.  I can't imagine ever tiring of this one.  I remember a poem of Rubert Brooke that begins, "O, Death will find me long before I tire/ Of watching you..."

Try to imagine OCEANS ELEVEN as a pastel yellow flower, just try.  The recent weather has prompted the advance of "melon" tones within the color of this one, giving the pastel yellow a toasty look.

Speaking of blue centers, you may notice concentric zones of bluish color on the face of OCEANS ELEVEN.  I see them today also in the eye of Mort Morss's BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE, which is coming into its own as the plant adds mass.

If the weather "toasted" the pastel color of OCEAN'S ELEVEN, it ramped up the furnace warmth in the orange of Bill Maryott's OKTOBERFEST, which is an eye-catcher in any quality of color it displays.

Another quality of daylily color is called "polychrome," which involves blends of yellow, cream, gold, and pink, though not always on the same flower.  Curt Hanson's THE GOLDILOCKS EFFECT is said by Curt to be the best polychrome.  I don't believe he's being a huckster to say so.  In my experience, Curt simply calls them as he sees them and is unashamed to announce which of his are the best.  I love this one!

If you hybridize, this is a fantastic parent.

There's a unique daylily here named THE BAND PLAYED ON by Patrick Stamile.  It's a rusty russet color with a black violet eye and edge.  I go for very dark and mysterious flowers like this.  My clump put up three scapes, all in bloom, so here are "The Three Tenors!"

Finally, back to blue purple and a fine example of the achievements of the late Ron Valente from Maine, CASCO BAY DELIGHT.  On many mornings, this doesn't open fully until late in the morning, but this morning it was flat open when I went out at 6.  I'm very glad I brought this into the collection.  I doubt that Ron Valente ever registered an average daylily.

Daylily Patience

When you hybridize daylilies, rain can change your plans.  When I walked outside this morning to see what was in bloom, I saw the gray clouds moving in and a rainbow caused by the low angle of the sun at 6 am.  The first drops fell a few minutes later, then a steady shower spoiling all the live pollen.  I didn't want to spend several hours using frozen pollen after the showers passed.  There were competing priorities, you see, and so I excused myself for later in the week.

Patience is hard.  I didn't use to have it.  If a new daylily didn't do well in its first season in my garden, I would lose interest and put it in the plant sale.  This is a form of insanity, but I excused myself, as no one else would think to do so!

I hope I have learned my lesson.  Here is Nicole DeVito's CALL ME BLUE, which she kindly sent me last year from her Central Florida nursery.  I love the white flowers with blue eyes, so this was a welcome addition.  Nicole posted this photo on her web site.

This is what my plant looked like when it bloomed in my garden last summer a few weeks after arrival here.

It's nice, but it lacks the pizzaz of Nicole's photo.  A decade ago I might have been disappointed, but now I know to just leave the plant in place and let it build a root system.  It's in a full-sun location where I water a lot, so it has all the right conditions to thrive.

This morning I saw the payoff for patience.  After a year, the plant now produces a flower easily as bold as Nicole's photo.

Worth the wait, I assure you!

Daylily Color, Form, and Substance

This morning I waited until 8 am to take pictures of the daylilies.  I noticed that when I take pictures at 6, the sun is just over the trees and the light is orange red.  At 8 the sun is not orange red any more and the light is oblique.  Remember that; it will be on the test.

Color, form, and substance work together to please or disappoint.  I like vibrant colors as well as pastels.  I like a variety of forms and even some colors that are blended and mysterious.  But I dislike a daylily that opens with one petal sticking out like a bratty child sticking a tongue out.  I dislike color that seems dull.  I dislike substance that is flimsy and can't take sun exposure.  On top of that, some daylilies begin to decompose in mid-afternoon, while others hang in there until after dinner.  I try a lot of different cultivars to see how they perform here, and if they struggle, if they can't take the weather or the sun, or if they start to break down in mid-afternoon, I try to send them somewhere better.  Or, if the case warrants it, I will destroy the plant rather than "contribute" it to my club's plant sale, thus spoiling the fun for an unsuspecting bargain-hunter.

No, the place for a lousy daylily is on the compost pile.  Alternatively, you could try giving it to one of your enemies as a gesture of friendship.  Socrates, were he still around, would poo-poo the notion that harming an enemy is a form of "good."  Somewhere or other Plato records Socrates as leading a group of friends through a discussion of justice, and he puts them into the unwelcome position of admitting that doing evil to an enemy is an evil thing, and evil in the atmosphere poisons the doer as well as the done to.  Something like that, I think.

Let's start with hot color.  This is John Allgood's ELIJAH, and it's entirely about the joy of hot, hot orange with red in it.

The hybridizer and landscape designer Darrel Apps told a story once about giving a lecture in which he showed an advantageous landscape use of a mass of this daylily.  Someone came forward after his talk and bought every plant he had available.

Here's an example of clear bright red on a big flower with an open form.  This is Van Sellers' ALL AMERICAN CHIEF, a daylily that's wildly popular everywhere.

I bought this daylily for Kathy last summer after she swooned over a clump of it in a tour garden.  I've always loved this one since I first saw it fourteen years ago.

Here's a cooler color, a dark bing cherry violet bred by my friend Phil Reilly in central Florida.  This is called MARVELOUS MADNESS.  It was wide open at 6 am this morning and the color was still good when I looked again at 3:30.

This is a new plant this year.  The scape is a lot shorter than registered, but I'm seeing stunted growth throughout the garden, randomly, this season.  One of my own seedlings which measured 28" high last year is blooming on 10" scapes this year.  Oi!

Things can go blacker than this.  Here is Jamie Gossard's DARK MONKEY, also new this year, for Kathy's spider and UF hybridizing.

I'm keeping an eye on a huge rose pink one by Phil Reilly named GWENDOLYN ROSE.

Like MARVELOUS MADNESS, this one opens early and perfectly.  It is over 6 inches across the face of the flower.  With such wide petals, the overall impression of this dusty rose confection is of something called "full-figured" in daylily circles, and elsewhere.

We're cooling down now, looking at medium lavender purple and blue.  This is a sister seedling to the one I posted yesterday by my friend, Subhana Ansari.

I'm very taken with the look of this blossom.  I don't know if it will make seeds yet, but this morning I put pollen from Steve Moldovan's PIECE OF SKY on this in hopes of something miraculous.

Finally, one of the few tiny daylilies I grow.  This is Grace Stamile's LITTLE BLUE ANGEL.  I bought it two years ago because this was the best blue eye Grace had yet achieved, and I wanted to have it in my garden as a presence.  I am so glad I did that.  Thank you, Grace!!

Today's Best Daylilies

This is a post about blue and orange.  I've declared them today's colors.  Pictured above is Mort Morss's KARELIA, photographed this morning around 8 am.  I love the proportions of this flower face, the size of the blue eye with respect to the size of the petals, the width of the sepals, and the beautiful way the flower opens itself for viewing.

Here's another blue-eyed one I like a lot, Patrick Stamile's BLUEBIRD BUTTERFLY.  I prefer the more creamy background color of KARELIA.  Some days, the creamy custard color of BLUEBIRD BUTTERFLY shows more of a near-white look, and I like it better.  This photo shows the various shades of blue and violet in the eye.  I had never noticed this pattern in previous years of growing it.  Nice!

Here's a new favorite.  It's a seedling sent here for testing by my Bay-Area friend, Subhana Ansari.  The delicacy of these clean colors thrills me.  No, it didn't rain today.  In my haste to water this bed, I forgot to take the pictures until the sprinkler had made a few passes.

 

Now here's one that is "blue" only by inference.  It's Frank Smith's BUBBLING UP, the result of crossing the black-eyed off-white CRAZY IVAN with the blue-eyed creamy flower, BLUEGRASS MUSIC.

I am only crossing this with blue-eyed mates.  I want to see if I can get something this bold in blue and white tones, as there are a gazillion off-white daylilies with black purple eyes and edges already on the market.

Now to the color orange.  I find orange a source of visual refreshment in the garden.  There are some fabulous modern daylilies with orange backgrounds and red or reddish eyes.  Here is Dan Trimmer's punning TEQUILA MOCKINGBIRD.  "Hey, Boo!"  I love the ruffles and that jazzy eye,

Dan has introduced loads of great orange daylilies.  I'd love to try them all!  Here is his PORT ORANGE, named for a Florida coastal town northeast of Enterprise, where Dan lives.

There is so much going on with this flower in addition to its size and its ruffles.  The bright green throat is politely outlined in red orange.  I love that it has always opened this flat before I'm outside to check the garden.

Equally impressive to my eye is Frank Smith's MATTHEW KASKEL.  This is a big flower that's always perfectly flat when I walk out before breakfast.

 

Finally, back to blue.  This is Ted Preuss's BLUEGRASS MEMORIES, a fabulous dark purple flower with a dusty blue eye and edge.  I had no idea it had this exceptional beauty from the pictures I'd seen.  My Nikon D5000 digital SLR has a sensor that has proven exceptionally good with blue and purple tones.  The color below is exactly what I saw in the garden this morning.

Kathy and I grow about 800 varieties, which is too many by several hundred.  She asked me tonight at dinner if I ever discard a daylily.  I said my aim is to keep eliminating all but the best, like BLUEGRASS MEMORIES.  She was prompted to ask by the large number of creamy yellow daylilies that don't interest her or offend her sense of protocol.

Here's one we both love to hate.  I have a big clump of it and I will decline to name it here.  Those of you who grow it will recognize it at once!  This is a showstopping daylily on the days when it doesn't zipper itself closed.  It has a heavy ruffled edge, you see, but lacks the genetic programming to make the flower pop open despite the busy convolutions of the edges.  As a consequence, of the three days it has been in bloom so far, I'd rate it poor, poor, and impossible.  This will not stay here much longer.  I keep it for breeding because it turns out that the offspring don't inherit this problem.

Duckworthy Days

Yesterday morning the ducks of Hidden Lake assembled on our piece of shoreline and reminded me of why I so love where we live, and why I named our place "The Duckworthy Estate" on the day we moved into the house in 2010.  When I was a wee lad my family lived on the shore of what was called a "lake."  It was actually a dammed up stream that flowed through New Egypt, New Jersey.  My younger sister and I were not allowed to walk across the dam on the way to visit my grandparents.  We had to go an extra block into town and play it safe.

The "lake" was wide enough for small power boats to cruise short distances back and forth from the dam up to a narrow place where boating wasn't fun or possible.  My dad owned a canoe, so canoe rides through patches of lily pads on the lake are part of my memory of boyhood.  We passed an old "ice house" and my mom explained the old-time practice of harvesting blocks of ice in winter and packing the blocks with sawdust inside an ice house so there would be ice in warm months.

We fished with bamboo poles over the wire fence that surrounded our small yard.  This was catch-and-release style, catfish and some "sunnies."  Sometimes after supper Mom gave us pieces of bread to toss to the lake ducks.

I feel enchanted by the view of waterfowl cruising our small lake.

We usually have the sound of alto wind chimes in our life.  Here's the set I bought myself as a retirement present two years ago.  It hangs over our patio.

While I took this picture a pair of swallows flitted overhead.  I turned around to see what they were up to and noticed the nest they've built on a deck beam.

Out in the yard the clumps of blue Siberian irises we brought from Vermont have come into bloom.

The daylily season began for real on May first, when little yellow BITSY came into bloom.  That plant was a Father's Day gift almost twenty years ago.  Three other daylilies were in bloom in the back yard yesterday, all new arrivals a month ago.  Here is Jane Trimmer's DRAGONFLY DAWN.  It has been blooming on "Florida scapes" for several weeks.  Lately the appearance of the flowers has picked up as the roots have begun to establish themselves.

The eyezone is composed of several bands of color.  The Trimmers highly recommend this cultivar for breeding patterns.

Here is Jamie Gossard's PHANTOM WARRIOR, part of a small collection of Tet. spiders and unusual forms I assembled so that Kathy Bouman can explore the fun of hybridizing.

And here is Jane Trimmer's LAVENDER ECHOES, a large flower with a gray blue eye surrounding an applique pattern in the throat.  Very complex and quite pretty!

Yesterday Kathy learned how to collect pollen and freeze it in gel caps for future use.  If not exposed to prolonged heat or moisture, a gel cap of frozen pollen can be refrozen for subsequent use.  I have some frozen pollen that I've used for more than five years.  On the other hand, I've spoiled a gel cap of pollen in less than a minute by dropping it onto wet grass!

Professor Storm

Yesterday we escaped the heaviest of the weather that swept through this region from noon until after midnight.  We had some hail, but nothing as bad as the baseball-sized chunks that fell a few miles east of here.  The hail did not break the skylights over our living room, and our house took in no storm water.

We had fierce winds and heard the tornado sirens around dinner time, but suffered no horrible twists of fate such as those people partying under a large tent in downtown St. Louis.  One person died, several were critically injured when the tent collapsed.

We suffered some mere setbacks in our landscaping.  I lost a few hours' sleep because the ferocity of the final rain around 2 a.m. gave me a scare.  It was so hard, I imagined it was hail.  Daniel Koenig, my nurseryman, told me today that we had four inches of rain yesterday.

This post is a survey of what the storm has taught us about heavy flows of water on our sloping ground.  When we went outside to see if our potted flowers had been trashed, we found very little sign of a hail storm.  Kathy's newly-planted window boxes were full of intact petunias.

When I walked down the driveway and looked left, I saw that the wind had taken down the best of our three Redbud trees, planted last May.  It had the fullest foliage and presented a "sail" to the gust of wind that snapped the trunk in spite of two supporting wires.  I sawed it off just below the break and dragged the beautiful top over to the driveway.

The storm drainage swale that we cleared of excess rubble and debris last month was somewhat rearranged by the force of water flowing off the neighborhood and down this channel to the lake.  Many of the large stones that used to serve as a reinforcing wall on the left bank were pushed down to form a dam, and the channel was deepened there.

The water dug out the right side, too.  This is an awkward spot where the former poured concrete broke up and collapsed.  The debris that was pushed away formed a mound in the center and helped create that new flow on the left.

That much new water raised the level of the lake and covered the stones in floor of the lower section

Looking directly to the right from there, you can catch a nostalgic glimpse of a piece of old Highway 94.  Last week I dug that piece out of the garden along with a companion piece just as heavy.

Just when I thought the Rubble Museum was closed, up pops another donation to the collection!

The most pressing landscape challenge now is deflecting and channeling storm runoff on yonder hill, where I grow my seedlings.

The darker green area in the picture below is sod I laid last summer after I dug a drainage swale to channel water coming over the road from the upper neighborhood.  I can see from this vantage point that there is a slight hump at the top of the hill in the middle of the picture frame.  Water flowing down from the left side of the picture is being deflected by edging I installed at the end of the summer.  But water coming down from the middle of the picture is flowing straight down the lighter green grass and over the seedling beds in the foreground.  The short-term fix will be to deflect the flow with some edging material.  Long-term, I think I'm going to need to contour the light green area just enough to create a flow to the right.

The seedling bed planted this past week lost some of its surface, and maybe some seeds.  The next bed up was empty where the water flowed over it.

The left side of these seedling beds is also a problem.

The edging material on the side of the keeper bed protects the unplanted area from runoff, but the runoff is not stopped effectively by the raised edge of the seedling bed in the foreground.  There is additional water flow off a neighbor's yard to the left.  Again, some edging material to deflect the water is the short-term fix.

Much of the washing-out in these beds was a consequence of a torrential straight-down rainfall.  The same thing would happen if I were watering with a wand and didn't know when to pause or stop for good.  In a few seconds the ground becomes saturated and then everything else runs downhill.

Yesterday the new magnolia trees came into bloom.  The flowers were undamaged by the hail.

A Second Season of Planting Our Landscape

Last night just before Kathy served grilled salmon, I stepped out on the deck with my camera to record a few things that please me.  We've had a fantastic April in terms of beautiful working conditions and beautiful results from our repeated "nursery crawls" all over the metro area.  Our favorite nursery still is the closest to us, Daniel's Farm and Nursery.  They are not the biggest nursery around, but everything about their site, their people, and their plants resonates with our life histories of living in rural areas and getting to know "real" people who operate distinctive family businesses.

On one of our trips there a couple of weeks ago, we walked through one greenhouse devoted entirely to Hostas, and we walked out with eight pots of "First Frost" for the east-facing border of our patio.  Here is the view straight down when you walk out of the dining room and cross the eight-foot-wide sitting area there.

There are the pavers that Steve and Tim laid last fall, and there is the new sod from Daniel's that came in the nick of time before the November rains provided all the watering needed.  There is Hosta "First Frost" with cranesbill "Max Frei" growing next to it.  Kathy has planted Max Frei at intervals between the clumps of First Frost.  The powder blue leaves with cream accents make a perfectly composed emotional impression, and the small purple flowers of Max Frei lift that impression out of the merely sedate and into the sublime.

Here's a look at more of the border and more of the plants.

Looking beyond the patio, I see the product of Kathy's afternoon work on the bed she envisioned outside the basement and below the master bedroom.  She laid out the curved stones at the end of the summer.  This month a local youth brought more stones down and laid them in a row.  Kathy didn't like the lack of symmetry, so she took a tape measure and moved the near end of the row out onto the grass a foot or so, making the bed of uniform depth.  We're going to remove the old Hostas there and replace them with some majestic beauties, anchored by a dwarf Colorado blue spruce bush at the far end.  We bought the bush this afternoon.

Our neighbor's son, Adam Dobbs, planted those two Japanese maples and helped with planting a dozen other trees last week.  He's a great worker.

Looking in the other direction, there's our only shaded garden spot so far.  This hillside was eroding from storm water that washed over the driveway in small surges and flowed through the blocks of that wall.  In my previous blog post I showed the work on a new French drain in the flood side of that wall.  Kathy has been working on that shade bed for a year, and it is really starting to show what it will look like when the plants grow in.

At the base of that hill is the veggie garden plot.  Since it receives any runoff, it seldom dries out, and so it seldom is tillable.  Kathy had one of our helpers move some bricks and blocks down there so that she can build five raised beds in that area.

Then looking to the right you see the daylily beds we planted in early June last year.

I am moving a lot of plants right now, and every time I dig a place in those beds, I encounter more of the buried rubble that was hauled in years ago to raise the level of the back yard.  In a way, this back yard is "historic," if highway construction refuse is truly history.  Why wouldn't it be?  Whatever happens is part of the story and there's nothing that's outside the story of God's creation.

I am removing the clay I dig out of the hole and dumping it along the shoreline to build up the border there.  I'm replacing the bad soil with a topsoil/compost mix from Daniel's Nursery.

Down on the shore Kathy has placed two white poles to mark the locations for two more smoke trees. We'll have a trio down there, two yellow and one deep purple.

Back up on the deck, we have creatures great and small who like inspecting the world from behind those comforting vertical bars.  There's Topper, the immense and extremely conversational cat, with Lola the Poodle.

And there's Ginger, the resourceful hunter of birds and the lover of evening Netflix movies on the couch.

This is the cat who chose Kathy years ago in West Plains and who carries her mystique about her at all times.  I am happy to be a part of those times!