Daylilies

There are certain plants that I have always loved but I never gave daylilies a second glance.  Somehow a year or two ago I ended up purchasing 2 daylily plants.  This was probably at my husband's urging that they "looked pretty" & "you never buy anything I like."  Anyway, I stuck them in the ground & they flourished.  A month or two ago the plant nurseries started teasing the public with their offerings.  It was always a yearly warm weather thing for John & I to go to plant nurseries to see what they might have of interest.  We were at Lowes last month & saw 3 daylilies different than the ones we already had.  It was at this point that I thought it might be nice to plant one section of the foundation garden off the back porch with daylilies so we bought them.  However, there was still room in this particular section of the garden.  We started searching for more daylilies.  There's a nursery in Frankfort (Frankfort, Kentucky ... not to be confused with Frankfurt, Germany although I'm sure Frankfurt, Germany must have its share plant nurseries where I would've rather shopped but that's another story). Anyway, this nursery (Wilson's) is a bit on the expensive side but they had a multitude of daylilies on sale at 40% off.  We loaded up our cart & brought home 8 or thereabouts. Then John & I both had the same idea ... let's fill the entire (for the most part) foundation garden off the back porch with daylilies!

I was at the hospital on Wednesday getting yet another blood test.  The gal who always collects the blood (Penny) is an avid gardener.  I asked her if she had any daylilies.  She said she had a few, nothing unusual, & then asked me if I had ever been to a woman's house on US-27 who sells daylilies from her yard.  I said no.  She said she had never been there either but she passes by there all the time & she heard that this woman has a lot of unusual ones. She said you couldn't miss it ... there was a sign out front indicating daylilies were for sale & you could see a long row of daylilies in the yard.  I told John about this & he said "you want to go see them?"  Of course I said yes.

We found this woman's house very easily.  It wasn't more than maybe 10 miles from the hospital.  We drove up the driveway & saw the long row of daylilies that Penny talked about.  They were gorgeous!  We got out of the car & walked over to where they were & that's when we noticed that the side of the yard was full of daylily beds ... & when we walked over there we saw that the back yard was full of daylily beds!  At first I thought they were just extra daylilies ... the plants that would be sold which were featured in the bed in front of the house, but no.  They were all different!

No one was home but we spent quite a bit of time looking at all the daylilies.  I always carry a little notebook with me so I started making a list of ones we had to have right away, ones we would want to purchase later, & others that we might want to purchase which weren't blooming but had catchy names.  It was then that we noticed a little tent & John found a note saying "be back at 1 o'clock."  It was 12:30 so we continued looking & noticed that each bed had a number so we started retracing our steps so we'd know where to find the plants we had marked on our list.

At 1 o'clock a car pulled into the driveway & it was this woman, Willie, & her helper.  Willie came over & introduced herself.  She's a talker & we learned a lot about her personally & of course a lot about daylilies & how she got interested in them & started her business.  She gave us a booklet with each daylily plant she offers listed alphabetically along with it's information. There are 1492 of them listed!  It's truly amazing!  The prices per daylily range from $5 to over $100!  Apparently there are "rare" daylilies   : )

Yesterday I spent the entire day organizing "the daylily garden."  I will take photos of it & some of the daylilies when I can but for now I will leave you with a tour of Graham's Daylilies.  My pictures in no way convey the true mass of beauty that is found there but I did my best   : )

I just had to take a few pictures of the view from her backyard.  Isn't it beautiful?

I also had to take photos of the first daylily that caught our eye.  It is such a deep red orange color!  Truly breathtaking!  The name is Heavenly Dragon Fire & it's one of the rare ones.  We passed on bringing this one home   : )   And to all of you who have expressed interest in seeing a picture of me, there's part of my legs & feet in the first photo   : )