There's Lilies and then there's Daylilies...

It's that time of year when daylilies are popping out everywhere, and sure as eggs are eggs, someone will innocently refer to them as 'lilies'. So I thought that it was time to have a quiet chat about some of the differences between the two families of flowering plants. 

Daylilies: Botanical name is Hemerocallis, which translates from the Greek to "beauty for a day". Which, coincidentally, is the length of time each individual flower on a plant lasts. There are a few different species of Hemerocallis, but thousands, and I do mean thousands, of named cultivars.

Lilies: Botanical name is Lilium. These are the true lilies. There are a number of different species of lilies, including Orientals, Asiatics, Martagon, and many others. But they're all true lilies. 

(Golden Stargazer, an Oriental lily, highly fragrant and gorgeous.)

Daylilies grow from thick, fleshy tubers or rhizomes. Here's a photo of some daylily roots. Each one holds one crown, or "fan" of daylily leaves.

True lilies grow from scaly bulbs. The above photo shows a typical lily bulb, with its fleshy scales. Roots grow out of the bottom of the bulb, while the new plant emerges from the growing tip. (from The Suburban Gardener's blog, a useful resource with lots of photos of different types of lilies).

Daylilies have grassy foliage. The flowers are held on sturdy stems called scapes, which emerge from the crown (growing point) of the plant. Each scape can hold many individual flowers, and some scapes are branched and have even more flowers. The first year or so of a daylily's life it may only have one or two scapes, but as the plants multiply they produce many more scapes and many more flowers. (This is a fancy variety called Spacecoast Gone Bulldogging', at Canning Daylily Gardens here in Canning, NS.

True lilies have a central stem with leaves arranged in a whorl all around the stem. The flowers are born at or near the top of that stem. (I've had this Asiatic lily for years and have no idea what its name is. Big, vigourous and deep pink, no scent of course).

At a place like Canning Daylily Gardens, you'll see hundreds of different varieties of daylilies, in a huge array of colours. It's a great place to go to get excited about growing these wonderful plants, which are quite easy to grow.

This is 'Luzia', a white Oriental lily, showing its cluster of buds arranged at the top of the plant. Some true lilies are dwarf and suited to growing in containers, while others are best grown in a garden setting. 

('Starman's Quest', one of my favourite daylilies. It is quite near another favourite, Timelord. Alas, there is no Tardis daylily, yet.)

The flowers of daylilies are edible and often used as garnishes or in salads. However, if you're a pet owner, please be aware that the aerial parts (the stamens and carpal, or the sexy bits) are moderately toxic to animals. That said, the entry on Hemerocallis in Mind-Altering and Poisonous Plants of the World is very brief.

This species of lily has been in my garden since before we bought the place, so I'm not certain of the species and don't know the variety at all. It's lovely, and a later-bloomer.)

The flowers of true lilies, however, are toxic in all their parts, especially to cats. I have a friend who very nearly lost one of her cats when it got pollen on its coat and, being a cat, groomed it off. While I grow all kinds of lilies and over a hundred different daylilies in my garden, I leave all of them outdoors to be enjoyed, and leave the cats indoors where they are safe. It just makes sense to me.

There, hopefully this brief primer will help people to understand why daylily enthusiasts correct those who refer to their plants as 'lilies.' Both families have plenty of amazing cultivars to choose from, but neither of them have true blue flowers. So maybe that's a project we can work on!

Wordless Wednesday: A little light reading...some great books (I hope!)

More interesting new blues from plant breeders.

We all know that in flowers, blue is the rarest colour. Which means some of us go koo koo for cocapuffs over it. Quite a few of us, actually. That number would include me, of course. From the glorious of the difficult, divaesque, but oh-so-beautiful blue poppy...


To the stately cobalt splendor of blue delphinium...

And even the dainty, delicate, spring chorus of scilla drive mere mortals to frenzies of bountiful blue blossom blissdom.

Well, you know how plant breeders are. They're never content to rest on their laurels, and they've been at work developing some more blue flowers for us to enjoy. The following stealthy, shaky, grainy photos are of a few cultivars that your intrepid correspondent risked life and limb to get photos of for your viewing enjoyment.

For those who are thwarted by growing blue poppies, perhaps you'd like to try this dandy geum, 'Til I'm Blue Cooky'. I think it would work particularly well, like most geums, in full sun with well-drained soil.

We're always taught that hemerocallis come in every conceivable shade except black and true blue. Well, we can cross the latter off the list with 'Crazy Iovanni', which to the best of my understanding was created by genetical manipulation, introducing the DNA from the blue April Fish into one of the showier of yellow daylilies, 'Fools' Gold.' I wasn't able to ascertain, from my lofty perch in a truffula tree, whether the foliage of this new hemerocallis was evergreen or not.

Ah yes, the blue rose. We've all heard about how some things are as 'rare as blue roses.' Well, once again, the GMO wizards have been at it, splicing some DNA from that blue delphinium with multiple excited protons from the Large Hadron Collider, and zapping them into a pimpernelifolia rose. Meet 'Harison's Blue.'

And apparently pollen from the bluebanded bee, when stolen from a blue Eryngium planum and dipped onto a double white coneflower, yields this blue eyed beauty, 'April BlueNose.' Because I was in deep ninjacover while clambering around in trees, I couldn't hear the breeder say when any of these blue beauties would be released, but I suspect it will be probably around June 31st of next year.

Whew. It's sooooo good to be out of March, isn't it?

The Gardener's Bookshelf, Part the First: Books for Plant Lovers

We are currently in the middle of a frigid gale, one that's impressive even for those of us who are regularly scoured by gale-force winds. The house has stood here for over 100 years and withstood worse, but it does moan, grumble and shudder by times when a particularly virulent blast comes in off the Bay.

This makes it more than a little hard to concentrate, to sleep, to work...so I'm quasi-working by attempting to reorganize my bookshelves, and then getting distracted by titles and falling into them. I have a lot of books, both from my days at university (where I majored in Can Lit and minored in Can History and biology) and from my life as a bibliophile in general and plant/gardening nut in particular.

Since we're heading towards Christmas at a speed even faster than those galeforce winds, I thought I'd post some of my favourite books, both new and old. I do book reviews for the provincial newspaper, including garden books whenever possible, but there are a lot of books that don't get the attention they deserve. Perhaps they're a couple of years old, or more. Perhaps they're caught up in the deluge of books that are published every year, and get lost in the shuffle. Or maybe they're just so good that I think everyone should have them.

So while the house shakes, Bruce Springsteen croons on my speakers, and I amuse myself by checking in with Twitter every little while (yes, I capitulated, finally. You may now laugh), I offer you the first of several lists of books I think every plantlover should have. We're starting off with books about plants: not so much about how to garden, but merely about the awesomeness of plants AS plants.

My friend Kylee also wrote about Planthropology at her book-blog, Gardening By the Book, and she also loves it. I keep it at my bedside so I can peruse a section or two and ogle the photographs and just be glad of authors like Ken Druse, who writes deliciously about the plants of his life. Last year in my garden roundup column for the paper, I wrote "If you add only one gardening book to your library this year, Planthropology should be that book."

What's the must-have book for this year, in my opinion? Come back to the next post to find out.

I simply HAD to have the two volumes of The Botanical Garden when they came out a few years ago. (Actually, I just checked. It was seven years ago. Gleep!) They are two of my most cherished books, and if you have any books by Phillips and Rix, you know why. They developed an innovative and stunning way of photographing plants, showing individual structures and not just the whole plant.

What I especially like about books like the two Botanical Garden volumes is that they introduce me to plants from around the world that I would otherwise never see, unless in passing mention on someone's blog or in a book. The plants are divided up into families, so it's very cool to see what all is in the Ericaceae (heath) family, or the Caryophyllaceae (pink) family along with the standards that I know.

Though this may seem sacrilege to many Canadian readers, I'm not a big fan of Marjorie Harris. I do, however, love this book, which is a wonderful course in the native plants of North America. There are wonderful stories of the plants' places in history, in their uses past and present, far beyond just as mere garden ornamentals.
I get sent a lot of books in the run of a year by publishers, some that I've requested, others that just arrive here in hopes I'll review them. This one, Flora Miriabilis, I ordered myself after seeing it on a few lists and seeing Kylee's review of it. I use the Missouri Botanical Garden's website as a source of great information on a regular basis (and hope to get to MoBot some day--I did go to Powell Gardens last year when I was in Kansas City, but MoBot is in St. Louis). So knowing that people from MoBot were involved in this book, and that National Geographic published it...I ordered it promptly. It just arrived today, and by the time you read this post, I'll be in bed, heating pad on my feet, reading away at it. But just a half-hour browse through the book showed it was well worth purchasing. My library is happier for its arrival. So am I.