Whenever I go on a garden tour or visit a botanical garden, I like to bring along my digital camera and snap photos of any interesting plants that I see. Instead of writing down all the plant names, I’ve discovered it’s easier to snap a photo of the plant tag and then one of the plant. Then I can label all of the photos accurately when I download them to my computer and add them to my ever-growing plant encyclopedia.
Because I tend to only photograph plants that I want to consider for my own garden or read more about, my garden encyclopedia is more like a gigantic wish list. Even if I converted every last blade of grass in my yard into a flowerbed, there would still never be enough room for all the flowers I want to grow.
Sometimes a real winner becomes obvious when I discover that I have more than one photo of a particular plant. That’s the case with Daylily ‘Wispy Rays’ (pictured above). I have more than a dozen photos of ‘Wispy Rays’ taken in various gardens over the last couple of years. Apparently, I’m a big fan. I’ve decided it’s about high time I promoted the plant from the wish list to an actual spot in my garden.
I’m even charmed by the description of this daylily: “Pompeian red with a ginger watermark and yellow-green throat.” ‘Wispy Rays’ is a taller variety growing 36″ with eye-catching 7.5″ blooms. It really shouldn’t surprise me that I’m infatuated with it because one of its parents is ‘Ruby Spider’, one of my all-time favorite daylilies.