Hope you are having a great day!
Happy birthday, DaylilyDiva219
Happy Happy, Hope you have a great day.
Thank you very much, Holly & Jen! It has been a lovely day, and your good wishes (AND daylilies!) are much appreciated! ;-)
Barb
Wishing you a wonderful year!
Happy Birthday!!!! ^_^
Almost miss you, sorry. Have a great day and a good year.
Wanted to add my wishes for a great nother year. Just looked through some of your daylilies in Plant Files...Breath taking. Hope yours survived and multiply well this season.
Judy
Thanks so much for the birthday greetings, Sally, Bec, Chris and Judy!
Sally, what a great shot - does that big yellow have a name?
Chris, love your scrap pages - can you refresh my memory on the name of the program you're using? Looks like fun!
Judy, thanks very much for the compliments on my PF daylilies. My daylilies' dilemma isn't the weather any more... it's the blasted DEER. They are becoming a very unfortunately regular presence in our area over the last couple of years, and have decimated the garden a number of times just before peak bloom. It's hearbreaking. ;-( It's so hard to have to spray on a regular basis - miss one application and every bud will be gone overnight. GRRRR.
Barb, That is unfortunate about the deer. I think of them as " browsers" which means they will eat pretty much whatevr they find along their paths, etc. Am coming to see that their browsing is very much like shopping and highly selective shopping at that! How is it that they can ignore a stand of sweet corn for 65-72 days and then harvest it all before you do at the peak of perfection? It certainly isn't the bloom color that catches the eye of the deer as you say they pick them pre-bloom which of course is when they are best to eat. I'm sure we will have some discussions here on dear and other critters as our gardens begin to green up. Maybe we could some one will invent a repellant spray that works on a timer and is set permanently in place like an automatic sprinkler system...while we strive towards alinement and restoration of the balance of nature in all things local and planetary....lol, but I digress. I guess what I am saying and you have said that it takes at least the determination of a deer to deter a deer! Good luck this year.
Barb, you got D-mail : )
Hi Barb-
THat big yellow DL - I may have a tentative name from rubyw and John who probably gave it to me. I don't know the official name and I wonder if it's a 'lemon lily' I've seen mentioned. It's tall and a clear pretty yellow and I like it. Depending on how it was over winter, I can share!
Re the deer- Boy I so sympathize! They really fried my cookies last summer. I took two clumps of StellaDoros to Moms, made them all nice with buds on them- only to have deer come through. I was soooo disappointed. They eat the few tomatoes off her one patio plant. They could have the whole rest of the yard!! If they knew what those few plants meant to me, and Mom....
urgh : ^(
But moving on--hart has had some battles and advised garlic planted among things, and use a fence to block their travel path, and that once they change their route they stick to it awhile even if the fence goes down.
That big clear yellow DL may be Hyperion
Judy, I love your idea of a repellent spray that is set on a timer! I say you go to work on that and patent it, and you can retire to a life of ease!
If we'd always had a deer problem, I certainly would never have gone whole-hog into the daylilies like I did. We live in a close-in, old subdivision, literally 8 miles from the Pentagon, well inside the Beltway, and they've just begun showing up on a much more regular basis. See the picture below for what blew my mind one afternoon in late November!!! I was coming down the stairs and looked out the window upstairs as I went to step down. Almost missed a step I was so stunned. Talk about a double take. And trust me, this photo does not convey how large this guy really was. :-(
Two bucks (young ones) had been coming through our yards on a more than daily basis back in 2009, day AND night, and my fellow gardening neighbors and I were on full alert, but of course, you can't be there 24/7. Unfortunately, one weekend, we came back from a quick trip to find my daylilies decimated. Of about 200 cultivars, only 20 or so had any buds left. To say I was sick would be an understatement. Since we've begun spraying, it hasn't been as horrible, but there's been evidence of damage, and there have been sightings. I do wonder if the 6-point buck in the photo is one of the young ones from the earlier visits. He was accompanied by two smaller deer, probably does. ARRRGH.
In any case, I've learned the hard way that evidently daylilies are like catnip (deernip?), or maybe caviar, to deer. They go right past the hostas and all other plants and head straight for the daylilies. So, as soon as things begin growing again this spring, I'll be spraying and I've bought one of the motion-detector water sprayers to set up as an added deterrent. We shall see.
I have a good friend in Davidsonville who has a huge garden full of daylilies, lilies and hostas and there are deer everywhere there, but her daylilies are essentially untouched. She sprays religiously, and it obviously works.
Sorry, didn't mean to go off on a rant there... ;-p
Chris, thanks for the info, and I'll be expecting some mail from Amazon (A-mail??) any day now too. LOL! ;->
Sally,
As you can see from my rant above, I definitely feel your pain about the deer destroying your plantings at your Mom's! Nope, they don't care how special, expensive or rare a plant is if it's appetizing to them. I do wish they'd eat some of the weeds that abound here, but no dice. :-(
How tall is your yellow daylily? I've got a number of nice large yellows, "Yellow Pinwheel", "Sandra Elizabeth", "Susan Elizabeth" and "Star Dream", (and probably more) that are on the tall side, like about 28". I have "Hyperion" but it hasn't bloomed for me yet (I just got it a year or two ago from a friend - it's supposed to be 40", so it may be the one in your photo - that's definitely TALL!!)
Oh your pain far outwieghs mine. That would make me utterly ill.
i can't say how tall mine is- it would be a wild guess- of course I will try to measure it this year! but I don't think it was 40 inches. I think Suzie Wong is another yellow--maybe...John first gave this the name Montpeliah but then felt that was an unofficial name given by his relative who had planted a huge nursery of DL and got these from the estate Montpelier.
Yeah, I was definitely quite upset for quite a while after that. :-(
Sorry, but I'm guessing that a 40" daylily would not seem all that tall to YOU! (sorry, just kidding, but couldn't resist, my long tall friend!)
And in all seriousness, that number comes from the AHS directory stats on the cultivar. I've found that their size info is only a general guideline, since there are so many variables each growing season, how cold, how wet, how dry, etc. Then the soil conditions can also affect the outcome - bad soil, a stressed plant, not so tall. A plant could be 40" tall one season, and 30" the next.
"Montpeliah" - LOL!!! That's great!
HA HA- tall jokes are no problem!
40 inches sounds unbeleivable--then I remember the year my outhouse/ ditch DL was blooming at eye level!
Gosh, I had forgotten how silly some threads become when Sally is around. hahaha Love it girls!! First off........Happy Birthday Barb. Secondly, sorry to hear of all the ails of the path traveling deer. We have them here in the country too and yes indeed, they do like their Day Lily blooms. John has threatened to take up deer hunting again.
I can look out my back door any time and see a herd of usually five that must have something they love to eat directly outside of our fenced in yard. I believe it was last summer when there was one young buck, maybe not sure of the gender, but one of the deer was not deterred by our fence and I could also look out the same door and catch him in the yard munching on a bed of the Day Lilies there.
Sally, I will have John look at the picture you posted and see if he knows which it is. Oh yeah, of course being the good southerners with the accent and all we call it Montpeliah. hahaha I think the story goes that John's dad who was a master gardener, along with his mom also were involved in a club that was involved in beautifying the Montpelier Gardens one year and thus had access for some of the Day Lilies that were being replaced.
Also, along the same lines......for about three or four years John has been promising to bring home some specimans of Red Hot Pokers who are descended from those from Thomas Jefferson's beautiful home and gardens Monticello. He finally, last week I believe brought home two clumps of them. A friend got them from Monticello from some sort of plant give away some years back and they have grown and multiplied enough that she wanted us to have some of them. Hopefully he will go back for more before too long.
Anyway, love the deer talk and seeing so many of you who I think so much of. I hope the upcoming weekend, and seed swap for those attending will be good for everyone. Take care and thanks for some laughs Sally.
Ruby
Hi Ruby- thanks for coming by, and checking my 'story' -- I am not totally sure I kept all the plant tags together with the given DLs from you and John too...those swaps get pretty wild as you know!
But 90% thanks to you both I now have a bed of several DLs along my driveway. In the fall I rearranged some and split big clumps etc, and this year look forward to a nice display.
Hey Barb since you are the Diva, we are allowed to ramble on about DL, are we not?
Ruby! Hey - great to "see" you and thanks so much for the good wishes. Here's the weird thing about deer - we see more of them at our house in Falls Church than we do down in Nellysford! (At least most of the time) There was a very interesting article in the Washington Post magazine a few years ago about the differences between "urban" deer (in subdivisions, etc.) and "rural" deer. The former know rush hour patterns, and such, and the latter, know exactly where to go into National Forests, etc. during hunting season, and so on. I'm sure I've got to get busy spraying now that so many things are greening up as the days get longer and a little warmer. We don't worry about them at Nellysford - I haven't planted, nor will I consider planting, anything that is remotely interesting to them, so for now, it's mostly daffodils! LOL!
Sally, you can ramble on as long as you want about Daylilies - I know I certainly can!!! But maybe we should move it to a different thread so as not to annoy folks. ;-)