Simplicity and Sharing

Throughout the 2026 gardening season I had one main daylily goal – to collaborate with the pollinators.  I focused on paring down on the volume of daylily crosses I did, and I trusted the pollinators to make awesome crosses.  They did not disappoint.  They have three successful self-seed pod parent varieties so far – Purple D’Oro, Just Plum Happy, and Autumn Red. Those three have been hard to bring to bloom from self-seed, so I am delighted to once again have the opportunity.

My intentional crosses have produced two new pod varieties this year.  Both were retries that were failures in previous years. And then for tests, I had some pretty definitive results – all of them failed. I have one final test that is pending and that is a second go at Cedar Waxwing x Cedar Waxwing. Cedar Waxwing self-seed was my last untested option to see if perhaps it is Hello Yellow’s parentage.  That effort, just like Hello Yellow’s behavior, produced a pod I pretty much suspected would fail, and it did. However, since that is consistently Hello Yellow’s behavior as well, to make a pod but have it fail, I tried one last test of Cedar Waxwing x Cedar Waxwing.  If it, too, fails, I am out of ideas for Hello Yellow’s parentage and I will be done with that effort because … I have decided to go to all self-seed in 2027, and more specifically, pollinator created self-seed.  I have loved the results, and I love the idea.  Let the pollinators choose. 

Part of the decision is also because I will have my hands full over the next few years, sharing.  There are 29 crosses awaiting bloom in future years in the townhome gardens, and I want to share as each of those bloom their firsts.  I also really want to start getting the historic cemetery garden more focused on historic daylilies. I have seen firsthand what a drought did to that garden this year, and the daylilies that are already there did the best, hands down.  Now I am excited to see what historic daylilies do.

So, there it is.  Although I know it will take boatloads of discipline to not do any daylily crosses in 2027, I feel super peaceful about that choice.  And I am very excited to start the daylily focus at the historic site cemetery, starting with transplants of Autumn Red daylilies from my own garden this fall.