Author: eadmin

Daylillies and a Friend – Updated Gallery

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I promised that the next post would be pretty pictures, these come from a friend in Ohio. These were small pictures that she shared with me and the large gallery size makes some of them a bit fuzzy but still beautiful; we’ve been talking about working with bigger one for this blog for a week or two but I wanted to get this posted while it’s still daylilly season.  I will swap out any larger ones when she sends them.

She says she’s not an expert in daylillies but she does have over thirty varieties in her garden.  From a Daylilly Expo that she attended, she tells me:

There are 71,474 registered daylilies with about a thousand new ones being registered every year.

These are the basic daylily forms:

  1. Round
  2. Double
  3. Polymerous (many more petals than typical)  I think he said there have been up to 12 petals.
  4. Unusual form.  If each petal is four or more times longer than wide, it is called a “spider.”
  5. Patterns
  6. Miniature
  7.  Sculpted
  •   pleated
  •   relief
  •   cristate – growth from or over one or more petals

 

Giverny

[oqeygallery id=22]Since I mentioned it in a recent post, I thought it might be time to share my pictures and thoughts about the garden. It was one of the first gardens that I visited outside of Paris and I’ve returned over and over again.  Although my earlier trips weren’t captured on camera, I have been there every month of the year while it’s open, except for July.  I intend to fix that someday. 

The garden is always beatiful.  One October vist after a heavy frost, the naturtiums were grey mush but the colors reflected in the pond were incredible.  The garden is well funded.  The staff start hundreds of thousands of annuals every year so that there is never an empty space. They strive to be true to Monet’s artistic vision for the garden, although plant materials may be somewhat different than he might have used. I recommend that you find time to visit Museum Marmottan and the Musee d’Orsay  to see his work on the same trip when you visit this garden. The spirit of the place is somehow shared in all of Monet’s work.

Many people choose to take a train or a tour bus from Paris to see this garden and that works, but then you are on the same schedule as hundreds of other tourists.  The train stops in Vernon, over three miles away from the garden.  There is a bus that finishes the trip but the one time that I took the train, there were too many people for the bus and many people were left to find taxis and other conveyance on their own.  Rick Steve suggests that the last hours in the day have the least tourist traffic and I’ve found that to be generally good advice.  After the bus leaves to take the tourists back to the Paris-bound train.  Although packed with beauty and history, it’s a small garden; an hour or two will do it justice. Leave extra time if you want to tour inside the house (it costs more) as there are often lines.

The small town around Giverny is worth some time, too.  The Museum of American Art has pretty plantings, keeping with the theme.  And the hotel and restaraunt Baudy has a rose garden worth visiting, especially in early summer.  (Do watch out for the nettles.)  The visit was free if I ate there, if they still have it, try the omlette with rabbit and potatoes.  It’s a classic so I expect they still do.

My little soldier

Scarecrow

It works, it really works!  This little guy single handedly defended my garden from the neighborhood deer.  Last year the woods side of my garden took a lot of damage.  This year, when they ate all of my Yogoslavian Red lettuce, just as it was about to form it’s tender, beautiful, small heads, I asked my gardening friends for advice.  We went over many of the things that don’t work too well and I was actually thinking about spending hundreds of dollars for fencing, when one of my garden friends mentioned she’d had success with a motion activated water system, marketed as the Scarecrow.  When it senses something moving in its “line of sight” it sends out a strong jet of water.  The sensitivity and the range of water movement can be controlled.  Mine is made by Contec but I noticed Haveaheart also had their version.  They aren’t too expensive but you probably want to add a dedicated hose and a splitter if you can’t dedicate a water outlet to it. 

Some friends found evidence that deer would lose their fear over time.  So as soon as the summer garden was winding down, I turned it off.  However, it seems the deer haven’t checked back recently as nothing has been eaten.  It may be in neighborhoods like mine where there are few deer, it’s a permanent deterrent.

Now if I could find something just as effective for chipmunks.  In my tightly packed garden, they quickly learned how to stay out of the Scarecrow’s sight.  I ordered Coyote Urine crystals from the same source and only succeeded in ruining my garden shoes.  Stinky!

Moving the daylillies

before
Before

I bought maybe one plant of a deep red daylilly at a public garden that I visited in New York State many years ago.  It was in the bed along the front walk before I planted the roses and I may have split it once long ago.  Due to the horizontal supports for the climbers, it ended up under the roses.  After this year’s flowers were spent, I decided to move it.  It had become quite a clump and I was able to divide it into seven fans without even trying.  I decided to pull the non-performing amaranths and from the before and after pictures, you may agree that pulling them wasn’t a sacrifice.  I was able to preserve the single perfoming specimens of amaranth “Cinco de Mayo” and “Early Splendor” (from left to right).  My plan for this long border is for the display to move forward through the seasons, from the once blooming roses to daylillies and then to the dahlia bed in front.  Maybe the amaranths to fill; we’ll see.

after
After