My City Highrise Garden by Brownmiller Susan

Author:Brownmiller, Susan [Brownmiller, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Daylily Dreams

I’d seen tall, orange daylilies growing wild along country roads, but not until I studied the Hemerocallis pages in garden catalogs did I learn that so much hybridizing was going on in their world. New short cultivars that are perfect for small gardens! Astonishing differences in shapes, colors, and hues! Ruffled! Double! Reblooming! Diploids and tetraploids (double the number of chromosomes) that can’t pollinate each other!

Daylilies are not American natives, though they took root in our soil as if they’d been here forever. Hemerocallis fulva, our familiar roadside wildling, was collected in China for food and medicine for thousands of years. Traders on the Silk Route carried seeds to the Middle East, and from there the proto-daylily migrated to Europe, from where early colonists took the seeds by ship to America, planting them for a bit of color in their front yards and cemeteries, from which the plants escaped.

French horticulturalists were the first to fool around with the chromosomal makeup of the proto-daylily. Oddly enough, the Chinese never went in for hybridizing—I bet they’re sorry now. Dried daylily buds are a must-have ingredient in Chinese cuisine, most famously in hot and sour soup. America’s fever for hybridizing daylilies took off about eight decades ago, when amateur gardeners with obsessive habits and a scientific streak began crossing and recrossing the plants in their backyards. Local daylily clubs popped up here and there—in Texas, Arizona, Arkansas, Atlanta, and Chicago—to show and trade the new creations. Local and regional associations are still fairly autonomous, though they affiliate with the American Hemerocallis Society, the umbrella group formed in 1946.

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