Big (Tiny) Surprise

[Note: adding photos somehow messed up the margins. I decided I have enough to do without reinventing the whole post, so please excuse the format.]

Some days nothing feels as wonderful as a cold shower. Especially after doing garden work for three hours on what is the hottest, muggiest day of the year so far. The kind of day where wearing a bandana around your head, especially across your forehead, to keep salt out of your eyes and from clouding your glasses from you sweating only works for the first half hour. I had to wring the bandana out after I got home. I was too beat to rinse it of course, so it'll be nice and crusty when I go to fold it up for use next time. Say, tomorrow. Early in the morning. Because it will be even hotter and muggier unless the weatherman lies. Sure, they make mistakes, right? But I'll give them credit and say "lying" is a step too far. 

Unless, of course, it's DJT with a sharpie pushing a hurricane into Alabama. That was simply a lie. But he's no weatherman either.

This morning was "digging daylilies day", with help from my son Paul. They were ones, or mostly sections of clumps of ones, which I planted in the front garden starting in "91 when that house was built and which I added to over the years up to and including last year, even though I'd sold the house to Paul ten years ago. He let us summer there when we were snowbirding from Arizona, and I helped with the garden... most years.

 Now of course I have a different home and a different, empty, raised bed to fill however I want to. If you've been reading you know that. If you knew my parents you'd know my dad hated daylilies. When he grew up they all were orange. Two weeks of bloom and the rest of the year they'd look like unmowed grass. Now they come in a lot of forms, colors, and different shaped petals including fat frilly ones, even bicolors and tricolors. They bloom for a couple months, if you plant a variety of them. I'm told some are even fragrant, though covid "cured" me of the ability to know that.

The best part, for the lazy gardener like I am, is that they are nearly   impossible to kill, providing you start them right. I have transplanted them, dug them completely out to go to a new location, and several years later found them again in their original location. (Those of course got dug up again, put in a different new location, and so far are thriving as well.) If they grow thick enough they even drive out pesky weeds like invasive tall grasses. Currently they have done that for a steeply sloped piece of  the yard next to the driveway that can't be easily mowed.   

A few years ago I saw my very first purple daylilies, in the landscaping around a Dairy Queen. I HAD TO have my very own. HAD TO! After searching garden centers, then catalogues, I finally located several varieties of them. There were tall ones with large blooms, and short ones with tiny ones. Some even claimed to be rebloomers, but after having borders of Stella D'Oros, I decided they only would bloom once in this northern climate zone. So I didn't bother with ordering those since others were cheaper.

But now that I'd seen those, I started checking out other colors. And buying them of course. The weirdest one was claimed to be a blue one. There was a blue, highly colored photo next to the ad. I decided to gamble. I was pretty sure it wouldn't be that blue, but worth a try, right? They came in sets of 5, so why not? They came from China, so more of a gamble with the time for shipping, but I just had to try, right?

 

 

About a month later, the package arrived. They were tiny, not packaged with anything to keep them moist, had short brown crispy leaves, and brown roots. Healthy daylilies have white roots, bulbous where they store their water and nutrients to last through hard times.               

 

Dang! I was so disappointed! I complained about their being dead, complete with a photo, and got my money back. Only after that process, did I bother to research the company online, and sure enough, they had a whole lot of complaints, same as mine. However, the company complained about me, insisting they were still alive.

 

I was by then planting some other, purple daylilies in an open spot, ones I'd left in their garden center pots until they'd finished blooming just so I could enjoy them that year, so the timing worked to plant them all at one time. I figured they were only worth mulch value, adding to the soil. The company insisted they'd live. So why not put them in the ground where I could keep an optimistic eye on them, so long as I was already digging and there was room between plants? The "between the plants" location meant I had markers to check on any progress.

 Fall frosts came. No leaves had ever emerged. Oh well, just mulch then. At least mulch isn't nothing. Winter, then spring, then next summer. I just had to check the dead ones. Still nothing.  At least the purple "marker" ones were blooming vigorously, with signs of offshoots giving more blooms the next year. Which by now is this year. This morning those marker plants were the first ones to come out of the ground. I had to clear grass and Creeping Charley out from around them so we could get a "clean" dig. They still have to get soaked, dirt removed, stray roots pulled out from insistant weeds. A lot of work went into clearing everything out of the raised bed to ready it last weekend for planting.

Of course I remembered they were markers for the dead ones. Certain fantasies are hard to kill. I was very careful pulling out the weeds from the area. There was something there that was neither thistle, cherry tree starter, Creeping Charlie, grass, milkweed, or burdock, the fill-ins for the rest of that patch. The leaves were quite skinny but long and straight, more delicate than the daylilies I'd been digging. In fact they came out of the ground in a straight line, five separate tiny clumps of them.

I felt like Dr. Frainenstein! "Its  alive!" Or more accurately, "They're alive!"

There are no flowering stalks, not this year anyway. They'll go in a new, special, marked spot in the new house's garden, after, of course, getting all the dirt rinsed off the roots and anything alien getting tossed away. Exactly the treatment all the others will get. Maybe next summer I'll be able to see if in fact they are blue, as claimed. After all, they are alive, as claimed. As delicate as their leaves are, I may even find out that they're technically not even daylilies. 

It should be fun to find out.

Of course though, now my conscience is bothering me. Their grower didn't get paid. I can't dig up the old records to find out who they were, since they're too old and my takeaway then wasn't their company name, but just the "only buy live plants from the USA" warning I've mostly stuck to. Well, except for some heirloom iris seeds with fantastic colors.... But they were cheap. And apparently I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. Stay tuned for a couple more years for their update, eh?