Deb's garden

Having a big old farmhouse with an oversized lawn and garden beds spread all over, I’ve tended to plant taller daylilies with larger blossoms. Proportionally, it makes sense, and since my gardens tend to be an overgrown riot of mixed flowers and herbs, like English cottage gardens, the blossoms don’t get visually lost so easily.

But my friend Deb has a different situation and a different sensibility; a lovely smaller house in the city, with perfectly manicured, curving garden beds. Deb particularly loves the smaller pastel daylilies, tends them lovingly, knows them all by name, keeps the clumps from getting too large, and gives them breathing room. With her artist’s eye, she carefully juxtaposes them with a variety of striking hostas, ferns, other perennials, and unusual trees and shrubs. And as her daylilies increase, she shares her bounty so generously with her friends … the smaller daylilies in my collection are nearly all varieties that she has given to me at one time or another.


Deb also has a lovely habit of floating one or more daylily blossoms in a shallow dish of water, bringing them to the table where perhaps for the first time each one can be closely examined and admired at length. It’s one thing to gaze appreciatively at a lovely garden scene; it’s another to look, really look, at one blossom close up, daylily or any other. Flowers are utterly amazing, as could be said of pretty much any of Mother Nature’s creations, don’t you think? It’s rare that we take the time to focus in that way, though, and I’m grateful to Deb for drawing attention to this level of appreciation of nature. And I’m always grateful to have gardening friends who are all about daylilies too.