Lily Daze

By the Mother Earth News editors

The day lily (so named because its buds bloom for one day only) that punctuates flowerbeds from Virginia to New Brunswick is not a true lily. You can tell it from the other orange lilies because its blossoms are unspotted and point up, like cups, rather than down, like bells. Unlike true lilies, the day lily has a leafless stem, with its long leaves shooting up from the base of the plant. It is sometimes mistaken for the tiger lily, another Asiatic import, but with spotted, downward-hanging blossoms.

Like roses, cultivated day lilies have been bred into an astonishing assortment of colors. Naturalist Edwin Way Teale wrote that his wife's garden contained about a hundred varieties of day lily in shades of pink, purple, chartreuse, cherry red, orange, buttercup yellow, lavender and tan. With colors like that come poetic names such as Vagabond King, Winning Ways, Prairie Moonlight, Grandfather Time, Ice Carnival, Silver King, Bold Rankin and Soft Whisper.

-Fred Schaaf