Our roadside daylilies have bloomed - 4 days ahead of "schedule" - but right on time for this year's garden. All over the gardens we are starting to see their bright splashes of orange - quite lovely.
Of course, every year I have a "contest" with our neighbors to see whose daylilies will bloom first. Even though I have extra earlies in the garden that start blooming in mid-May, they don't count when it comes to this contest. It would just be pitting our wallets against each other - who could buy the earliest blooming plant - and would have nothing to do with the skill of the gardener.
So we only count the lowly common roadside daylily for the contest. Same flower, same soil (practically), same sun (pretty much), same rain. The question is plant placement. We have both set stands of these daylilies throughout our properties. We even have some from their gardens and they have some from ours because these daylilies spread like crazy, so whoever is willing to get to digging gets the overflow daylilies.
This year, I had a new stand of daylilies on a southern hillside, well protected, lots of sun, good soil, good amounts of water. Everything was looking great.
But he beat me. He beat me by 12 stinkin' hours. I thought I had it in the bag when I got up in the morning and saw that his weren't in bloom - knowing that mine were ever so close to bursting open. But when I looked again at the end of the day, I saw it - a lone daylily blossoming on his south-facing hillside. (Yes, that's why I planted mine on a south-facing hillside. I'm not too proud to take gardening help!)
I thought, well, maybe, possibly, it was a cultivar, not a roadside. But I knew better. It was the first roadside of the season - 4.5 days early.
The next morning when I went out to my gardens and saw all of the roadsides in bloom, the only thing I could think to console myself was that where they had but 1 blossom, I had several in almost every stand (except the south-facing hillside stand).
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