When you grow almost 400 daylilies, you’re bound to have a few plants that won’t bloom during the growing season. I always have trouble deciding if I should grant them clemency for one more year, or just yank them out and replace them with a more reliable cultivar.
Below are some of this year’s no-shows:
‘Night Beacon’ is an evergreen daylily so I’m going to be more lenient with it since it has to put up with our crazy Wisconsin winters. Besides, the flowers are gorgeous:
‘Krakatoa Lava’ doesn’t have that excuse. It’s a hardy, dormant daylily and a relative of one of my favorite orange daylilies—‘Mauna Loa’. This one better behave next summer:
I must give ‘Moonlit Masquerade’ another chance. I’ve heard stories of its moodiness from other local growers, but when it blooms it really blooms. Every year it does well in the American Hemerocallis Society’s Popularity Poll:
‘Susan Weber’ fills a void because it’s a very late-blooming cultivar. We had a very cold July. Maybe it got confused and figured it wouldn’t have enough time to bloom before the season ended:
‘Unique Purple didn’t bloom either, but it wasn’t its fault. It was murdered in its prime by my crazy neighbor and her bottle of Roundup. She picked the windiest day of the year to spray, and ‘Unique Purple’ just couldn’t duck out of the line of fire. I’m just lucky my arborvitae hedge survived.
