Passalong Plants - The Daylilies

Last fall the Austin Garden Bloggers met, and PAM from Digging brought me a division of this daylily, “Best of Friends”. You’ve probably seen Pam’s May 23rd post, filled with buds and blossoms of this beautiful daylily. I’m thrilled to see it flower in my garden. ‘Best of Friends’ is the newest of my passalong daylilies, treasured both for the beauty of the flowers, and the friends who passed them along.

Above is the passalong apricot daylily seen in the May 15th post and still unfolding flowers every morning. It was one of a group of unnamed ‘Stella d’Oro’ descendents, seedlings that were sold like living raffle tickets for a few dollars back in the early 1990’s at house #3. My friends and I bought a few, and waited for them to bloom. Some turned out pretty, some looked almost like the ubiquitous ‘Stella’ herself, and some were pitiful. My friend VIOLA was pleased to get a nice apricot form, and when it increased after a few years, she gave me a start. I grew it in Illinois, dubbing it ‘Vi’s Apricot’, and carried it to Austin. It’s quite a small flower, as you can see below when a bloom from ‘Vi’s Apricot’ is tucked in next to the large flower of ‘Best of Friends’.

Vi is retired from gardening now, but at one time she was very active in her Illinois Garden Club, donating time and labor toward community issues while enjoying the social aspects of the club. Visitors loved her enormous perennial borders, jammed with plants collected over the decades. Vi would guide the visitors around the garden, trowel in hand, ready to send a friend home with a living token of their tour.

More than a decade ago I bought this small maroon daylily as a gift for Vi. She was delighted to find out that Hemerocallis ‘Pinocchio’ could produce a second flush of bloom. Once the plant grew large enough, Vi insisted on passing a fan of it back to me and ‘Pinocchio’ also came with when we left for Texas.
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Thirty years ago, as a just-moved young gardener at house #2, I met BERTHA. My new neighbor was a retired businesswoman in her early seventies who volunteered her clear, cultivated speaking voice to record technical books for the blind. Bertha grew flowers that had come from her own mother’s garden, and she shared one of her mother’s daylilies with me.

I’ve grown it in four of my gardens, and remember my friend fondly but I can’t call it ‘Bertha’s Yellow’ – this one already had a name, Hemerocallis citrina. Here’s the second bloom of 2007 on this tall, light yellow daylily, which opens in early evening and has a faint but pleasing scent. It stays open overnight, closing as the sun comes up.

Of the nearly 50 daylilies that I grew in Illinois, only 6 made the cut and traveled to Texas. Two came from nurseries- four were Passalongs.

I brought Vi's ‘Pinocchio’, ‘Vi’s Apricot’, Bertha's Hemerocallis citrina, the purchased ‘Prairie Blue Eyes’ [blooming in the photo above], a purchased ‘Catherine Woodbury’ and a passalong ‘Eenie Allegro’ from Vi. These daylilies had a rough life, spending 5 years confined in deck containers. I nearly lost them all at one time or another, and both ‘Catherine’ and ‘Eenie’ succumbed to the intense heat. The four survivors are doing better since 2005, when they finally traded life in pots for roots in Austin clay.

They've grown and if this summer lets them continue to thrive, these daylilies are ready to become Passalong plants once again. I think that both Vi and Bertha would be pleased and perhaps amused, to know that their daylilies were growing and being handed around deep in the heart of Texas.

In a few weeks I'd like to tell you about some plants that were passed along by other Austin gardeners. Until I get back from Illinois - Happy Gardening to all of you!

[This post was begun May 31, but completed, photos added and posted June 8th.]