Calm Garden Activity Day, 2026 Garden Prep

We are having a “calm” garden activity day again today. The daylily wind down has begun, and we are also having an on and off, sometimes very heavy rain day. No crosses were done today, but full disclosure, yesterday I kicked off the “wacky cross” period. I did an intentional “should not work” cross. It was probably good to take a break today haha.

I did that cross yesterday because I wanted to try a cross between two daylilies I really like. One is a diploid and one is a tetraploid that has a diploid in its parentage. What is the worst that can happen – it could fail? I took the chance. And I enjoyed the two daylilies all day. And more full disclosure, there will probably be a few more wacky tests in the weeks to come 😉 It is getting to be that time of year when I am willing to try those things. You never know. It could work. Last year, on a wind down season whim, I did the somewhat wacky color combo cross that got us the 28 Mahala Felton seeds. 24 are now seedlings. Yes, the parents were both tetraploids, so it was much more likely to succeed, but it was definitely on a whim. A very bold color cross that does not match the color palette I usually aim for. I am now very excited to see just how much it reflects the very bold Mahala Felton that I discovered in my historical research last winter.

We are also starting to approach the seed maturity window. After months of watching and tending the gardens pretty intensely, I like a little more freedom in fall when the bugs are down and the weather is getting nicer. I have learned from experience that I sometimes miss seed pod maturity when I get busy like that in the fall, so any seed pods I really really really want to catch need to be crosses done in the next couple weeks. The rest need to be ones I am ok potentially going to direct sow, or the squirrels or bunnies or birds 😉

On the bloom scene, we had one “first time seedling bloom” today. It was the last seedling scape of the season that was still pending bloom, and the reveal was a bit unexpected. It was a seedling I moved more into the sun last year. For expectation, I was going on my early years style of documentation. I was hoping for the Purple D’Oro that was in my documentation of the area I moved it from, but as the scape matured and the buds began to move to bloom, I began to suspect it was not going to be much like a Purple D’Oro. It was too tall and started to show red on the bud a few days ago. Still, I held onto hope that it was a very cool pollinator cross. Alas, today when it bloomed it looked exactly like the red daylilies we have en masse out front. It even has the signature curls at the end of the petals. That I absolutely love.

Seedling red daylily is definitely pretty, but not new. The red daylilies used to be in the area where the Purple D’Oro seedling was. I am guessing the Purple d’Oro seedling I documented did not survive and the red daylilies had a direct sow self-seed in that same area. Stuff happens. It will probably go up north as one of our “parents”.

And that leads to a further discussion on the plan that is forming for next year. It does go a few years back, for sure. Back to the years when I moved at least part of the garden to the little house up north (that we sold). In those years, we were moving toward a more “structured” look at the townhouse. At least in the front of the townhouse. We moved the red daylilies at the townhouse out of a more shady area in back to the front of the house and into much more sun. We had started with just a few big box bare roots and had grown them to the point where we had a lot of them. I wanted to further the development of our “red, white, and blue waves” theme out front. That was an awesome decision. And we are now “there”. In Spring the Bluebells clematis starts the wave. Then the red daylilies start blooming. For colorful interest, once they get going, we have at least a dozen and around peak two, even three dozen red daylily blooms each day. That wave gradually moves toward the less sunny area, and the red daylily blooms continue well into August. Just about that time the Marque Moon buds start to mature, and by the time the red daylilies start to wind down, the Marque Moon (creamy shimmery white) start to bloom. Even though they are old now and in the Linden roots, they still make a show. And the whole pattern ends at the Linden changing colors. There also used to be quite a few big hostas there, but I digress. The blue flowering hostas that are now in that area are earlier blooming, the Blue Mouse Ears divisions.

As I gradually move the daylily propagation to our land up north, the wave pattern will become de facto at the townhouse and will start to wrap around the back. Probably a different color scheme. Probably keeping more pastels. Simplified as I stop planting seedlings here. And with that decision made, now I can also start to look at what needs to be divided this fall and use that as my starting template to also bring mature daylily divisions up north. I want them to self-seed up north. I have pretty much fallen in love with self-seed, and I am thinking it will be quite a bit of my go forward approach. We have soooooo many pollinators up north. If the deer can be kept away from the daylilies, I am so excited to see what self-seeds we get. The daylily divisions we bring up can be our mature daylily test subjects, to see how the deer react to a few unprotected daylilies. Unlike the seedlings, in the spring, when the mature daylilies start to grow, I will need to remove the cloches. We shall see how that goes. It will definitely be a determining factor in the fencing approach. Step by step. This is a long game.

For today, before it rained, I worked on maintenance. One of those things was beginning to remove the scapes from the Blue Mouse Ears hostas. They are done blooming and I do not want them to spend any energy producing seed. I will be dividing more of the Blue Mouse Ears this fall, so I want to preserve their energy to help them handle division as well as possible.

And I did grab some pics to share before the rain started.

The South Seas only have five buds left after today. In our garden, 2025 is, without a doubt, the year of South Seas and family, and I am so excited to continue that as one of my focus lines.

The Coral Majority looked way less “wild child, tie dye” today. She and South Seas are the pollen rock stars this year.

And Pink Tirza wrapped up bloom out back today. I got two “wish list” crosses from her this year.

Naomi Ruth also continues to delight.

I am fully enjoying the 2025 blooms and even having a little extra creativity. And little by little we are moving into the staging for next year’s gardens and the start of the seedling garden up north.

I heard it again this week, and it is absolutely true: A garden is never done. Thank goodness 🙂

Tender Love daylily, Red Volunteer blooms the first year

Today Tender Love bloomed for the first time this season. She is quite fragrant, and is a large bloom.

The bluejays have been visiting regularly. This morning I was slow to fill the birdbath so the visit was short.

And Red Volunteer bloomed for the first time in our townhome gardens.

I was anticipating this bloom after seeing how beautiful Red Volunteer bloomed her first year, this year, at the historic cemetery.

The beauty of self-seed daylilies

It is the time of year where I get to start relaxing my mind and start just following the palette of daylily crosses I have put together for the year, crosses put together depending on how and when each daylily bloomed. Yes, it is still a lot of work, but the template has been made, and now I get to spend more time really, deeply enjoying the second half of our daylily season.

Last Friday was our apex. The daylilies were blooming like crazy for days, and there were also spent blooms in various stages, still on the scapes, making pods. It is not my favorite “look”, but it is my craft. I let them do their best work, even if it means blooms that follow get a little compromised. It is actually my cue that the garden is about ready to move into the second half of the season. It is also a very good reminder to me that I am not the only one working on the garden. And nowhere is that more evident than in the self-seed blooms. They are all over the garden, too.

Side note – I need a spreadsheet to keep track of which daylilies are pollen producers only, pods only, and especially when I do a “one up” cross, either as a test or because I could not resist. And remember, not everything that worked last year is working this year, for both pollen and pod, and then there is rain and sprinkler patterns and location and age. It is … a lot. A lot that my very busy mind really enjoys. But there is even a point at which I say enough. This year it was the apex.

So back to self-seed. I cannot resist harvesting self-seed. This year we had quite a few South Seas self-seed seedlings go to bloom for the first time. I started this daylily propagation journey by harvesting self-seed, and South Seas is really good at self-seeding. (It could also be because I use South Seas pollen a lot, and that may cause self-seeding.)

All of the South Seas seedlings for all of the years up to 2023 seed harvest/2024 seedling, bloomed this year. And although I separated the years into separate plantings, I stored all of the South Seas self-seed harvest together, and the next year when they went to seedling, I planted them together, as a group, by year.

I am starting to see very different “looks” in the different yearly planting groups. The most dramatic has come through Equal Opportunity. Below are two scapes, and two different looks.

I love them both.

After seeing this year’s blooms, I get the feeling there is definitely a message go-forward. First, “Please don’t stop harvesting self seed!” (I won’t) and maybe even, “When harvesting self-seed – save, store, and plant each self-seed pod separately” (yet to be determined).

More research to come …

Very Old and Very New

well … This year for the first time in at least a dozen years I only had two Purple d’Oro blooms. That was unplanned. I was staggering transplanting them. But the one I left was in the same area as all the big hostas that went missing, and it, too, is gone. The second bloom of the Purple d’Oro is happening today. I am thinking it might go to self seed. I already did a “one up” cross with the Purple D’Oro that bloomed earlier this week, and that same cross is not available today. Plus, today is supposed to be my enjoy and relax “no cross” day. We shall see. (The alternate looks a little shy to provide pollen today as well.)

Hey! what do you think of our newcomer? (Upper right corner) That is Carpenter’s Choice, a daylily I added last fall to the townhome garden. We shall not speak too much of another time I planted Carpenter’s choice. Suffice to say, it may or may not be blooming right now at the little house up north we sold a few years ago. A re-do buy and planting here was definitely in order.

Mid-season mess

This morning dawned just a tich on the cool side again – glorious! It almost felt pre-pre-fall. Very enjoyable! And we are reaching the middle of our daylily season.

About this time of the daylily season, in my gardens at least, a lot of blooms are going at once. And even overlapping.

Blooms are hard to access for crosses, they are sketchy to not disturb other blooms, and it gets kind of “not fun” to work through that. But it is beautiful!

So I am going to take a few days off crosses and just enjoy, and then we will be past the apex, and things should get easier to work around again.

40 degree drop

Rain Day

Today looks like a rain day.

Too bad because Naomi Ruth bloomed this morning for the first time this season.

Naomi Ruth going to be the next cross I try with red daylily. Pink Tirzah pollen in is not making successful crosses with red daylily this year so Naomi Ruth is going to be stepping in. Cuz red daylily is just to enticing to leave uncrossed.

But probably not today. Today is one of those days where we just enjoy a different type of look.

Terrific Tuesday

Today dawned with lots of “first blooms” for the season. Coral Majority was one. I was so tempted to cross all the South Seas self seed seedlings that bloomed for the first time this year, but I just couldn’t do it.

‘Equal Opportunity’ is soooo good right now, and I don’t want to tax her.

She is definety moving forward, but if I cross her with anything this year it will be to work on making her even lighter and add more glisten – probably a cross with Marque Moon, if the timing aligns. Otherwise Equal Opportunity will not be crossed this year.

We now have a name for this daylily. ‘It’s a Puzzle’. And I love ‘It’s a Puzzle’ exactly how she is. So no cross there.

Daylily ‘Shirley Dalaska’ also will not be crossed. She is beautiful! And ‘Simple Perfection’ was not blooming today. I may cross ‘Simple Perfection’ as she is looking more and more like South Seas, but TBD.

But there is one South Seas self seed seedling (yet unnamed) that would be perfect with a little extra spunk, and Coral Majority would be just perfect. So I did that first cross of a South Seas self seed seedling today. We shall see how it goes.

In case you are wondering, below is Coral Majority. She is a wild child. But she is an awesome pollen producer.

To help you get over that shock of a wild child daylily 😂 here are some soothing bird pics from this morning.

Shirley D

We are deep into daylily season now, and I am seeing patterns regarding daylily crosses that will work this year. For instance, the cross that made the Mahala Felton dedication daylily will not have a repeat seed creation season this particular year. One of the parent daylilies is not sending up scapes right now. That happens. It is a healthy daylily, not crowded. It could be that I just overworked it last year. For this year, the Mahala Felton daylily seedlings are doing well and will start to be be planted this fall in various locations in the Oakwood Cemetery garden where Mahala Felton is interred.

I am also having challenges this year with getting the Molly Cowles dedication daylily cross to replicate. 60 seeds last year, and not a single success with that same cross this year. But that, too, is OK. I have so many Molly Cowles seedlings that some will probably even go up north. I will continue to try to replicate those crosses this year. There is still lots of runway ahead. And some things happen for a reason.

Those daylily seedlings are wonderful, and I hope they will bloom absolutely beautifully, but I knew there was more to come. It was forming in my mind. Something a bit different.

We were “getting there” when one of the daylilies I purchased and planted at Oakwood last fall began to bloom a few weeks ago. That daylily’s name is Red Volunteer.

“Volunteer” has layers of meaning. What a cool daylily to be at Oakwood. And it is stunning. I am hoping for way more blooms next year. I only caught two this year.

But something was still in my mind. It just was still in a “waiting” state. Something with ties to meaning. It finally arrived.

Dedication daylily “Shirley D” is a dedication to my good friend, long time historian and author, and fellow volunteer at Oakwood Cemetery. Shirley puts up with my relentless garden talk, endlessly long texts, and ridiculously ambitious ideas. And Shirley and her husband Mike dedicate uncounted hours of personal labor as well as their substantial leadership to Oakwood Cemetery. They are, in my humble opinion, the primary reason Oakwood Cemetery is in the renovated state it is in today.

Dedication daylily “Shirley D” is from 2022 harvested seed. 2022 was a tough year for me. It was the year my husband and I decided that the little home up in the mining town in northern Minnesota (that we had renovated and planned as our retirement home) was not truly a match. Our plans were upended. We were back to the townhome plan, and I was gutted. I wanted a yard to renovate into a garden. I wanted to be in that area. But it was just too small. My friend Shirley was a dear sweet comfort as I greatly grieved selling that house.

The following year, as I was looking for something I could pour myself into through gardening, Shirley, once again, reminded me of opportunities at our local historical society. While dedication daylily “Shirley Dalaska” was slowly putting roots down where I had planted her the previous fall, I joined the historical society, intending to mainly garden. I took a meandering route, but eventually I found my way (back) over to Oakwood, where I, once again, saw the old, abandoned garden I had seen before. Volunteers are not in plentiful supply, and no one had felt both a calling and the time to address it. And honestly, I too had no interest in that garden. The goats that had been at Oakwood to eat the buckthorn a few years before might have enjoyed it had they had access to it, but it did not really speak to me at all. I was looking at the huge expanse of a raised bed fence garden that so needed love. The old, abandoned garden had stuff that would look great in the fence garden, but the fence garden needed way more than weeding and transplants. What happened next is a testament to Shirley’s absolute genious. While I was working through what I was feeling called to do, Shirley didn’t give me her plan. She let me come up with a “Susan plan”. An impossibly ambitious plan to move the heaving rock and exposed plastic out and go to a mulched garden. I went to the store, bought three bags of mulch, put some in, took a picture and asked what she thought, and pretty soon Shirley and Mike were there doing garden days, sometimes even when I wasn’t there – moving rock, pouring out bags of mulch, putting up with my insistence that hostas would never survive there and that people who were increasingly plopping hosta donations in the newly renovated garden were going to be sorely disappointed when their hostas died. It was, after all, I said, a full sun garden, for goodness sakes 🙂 (Those hostas are thriving – lol) Shirley has stood beside me, even talked me out of really bad ideas, and still encouraged me in my efforts. She soooo gets me. She gets my intensity. She gets that I primarily want to make gardens. She gets that I am so pleased seeing the community appreciate the completed renovation. (Is a garden ever truly completed though? I don’t think so.) Shirley gets that I was pretty driven about getting the garden renovated but now am thrilled that I only need 1 hour per week to weed it because neighbors are weeding as they walk by. So cool!!! And she puts up with me saying, for the 900th time, that I am not going there every day to water plopped plants, which still happens lol. It’s OK, she says. Shirley really is a saint. I think she may be watering plops. I’m pretty sure she is 😉

This year, as the daylilies in my townhouse gardens started to come up and then show scapes and buds, dedication daylily “Shirley D” took her sweet time. Other South Seas self-seed creations were coming up, making it onto my blogs. Still created by our mutual neighborhood pollinators but looking “not Shirley”. And then the first bloom. Does “Shirley D” not have the “it” factor? Understated, yet undeniable presence. Like Shirley D the person, my dear friend.

Among Shirley’s many contributions, Shirley does stained glass work.

Back at you, my friend, with another floral beauty.

It’s A Puzzle

The other morning as our dog woke me to go outside at 4 am, and I realized the birds were not starting to sing yet, I was reminded we are into mid July. We are on the waning side of the summer solstice. Even though the days are hotter, the amount of sunshine each day is decreasing now. Kind of bummer-ish. And truth be told, were it not for daylily time, I would be tempted to be indoors way more in July. I do not naturally love the heat and humidity we get in July. But I love the gardens, and the daylilies make July sing, so outside I am.

There is so much “garden” going on that I didn’t get my blog from Friday finished, and didn’t do anything blog related on Saturday.
Here is a download:

A few of the Molly Cowles crosses that were so easy and successful last year have failed so far this year. I decided to flip the cross, and see what happens. So far so good. But honestly, if that cross isn’t a go this year, I’m good. I have 38 seedlings going from that cross. I can rest on that one.

Hello Yellow is done blooming for a while. And she has two self seed pods going. I am so excited about that! I am still working on figuring out her parentage. I so regret my sloppy note taking early on. I still think my note that she is a cross with Pink Tirzah as one parent could be accurate, but I need to prove that out. Pink Tirzah is still a puzzle to me. Last year she behaved like a diploid, but this year her diploid crosses are failing, so far.

We have another puzzle, too, but this one is easy, I think.
To set the stage, I have been reading up on daylily propagation, and one consistent recommendation is “FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS”, meaning choose a couple daylilies to cross, and then focus within that parentage to work on the desired characteristics. Sage advice. The reason I needed a third seedling box this year is because of all the “one ups” I did last year. A lot of them produced questionable seed and are not going to seedling yet. Arrggghhhh. So for me, I definitely think South Seas is one of my focus lines. The Mahala Felton daylily seedling cross is in the South Seas line. A lot of my self seed seedlings, and now blooming daylilies, are from South Seas. I even have Coral Majority self seed seedlings cominh up. South Seas is one of Coral Majority’s parents. (Not my cross, I bought Coral Majority.) But with 5 new South Seas self seed seedlings blooming for the first time this year, and successful crosses in that line, am hearing the message that South Seas is my “FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS”. I even have a Lullaby Baby I bought last year, a diploid, that is budding out this year, that is, guess what? In South Seas parentage. A diploid, in a tetraploid’s parentage. Apparently, it can happen.

On to the puzzle – I have had 5 South Seas self seed seedlings go to flower in the past couple weeks, and they all look different. They are from different years. But what I thought was solely the 6 year South Seas seedling has 3 very distinctly different blooms, a different look and even height per scape, and I know that the 6 year seedling was one seed. It should be the same genetics. So …. I am guessing the other two, different fans, are from bunny and squirrel assists. Direct sow, so to speak. Different genetics. South Seas almost always has some seed spillage each year where I find there has been critter activity. I think the seed spilled around the 6 year seedling and made the different versions. Something to be aware of, as I had a similar scenario with Just Plum happy last year, but OK with me. I absolutely love all the self seeds that have bloomed from South Seas. So much that I have decided not to cross any pollen TO South Seas, at least this year, to make any seed that comes from South Seas be noted as self seed. Keep my like easy. But I will use South Seas pollen. I already have a successful cross this season to peach daylily with South Seas pollen (one pod, and it looks like others on the way). That will be fun if the seed is viable. And hopefully others like Lullaby Baby will work as well.

I am thinking Pink Tirza is going to be my other focus line, but first I have to figure out how she is going to behave in the garden. ie. Did she really cross with a tetraploid in my garden, and if so, are there others that would work? Hint: I already tried South Seas. No dice. But she did make the start of a pod from Hello Yellow pollen (until I accidentally pulled it), and I typed Hello Yellow out last year as a tetraploid. Yah. It’s a puzzle.

Subscribe to continue reading