Hemerocallis ‘Double River Wye’
Hello everyone! It has been almost a month since I posted last. A lot of great things have been going on and I have been in the process of moving my office to my home, which has taken a little longer than expected. I’ve had very limited and extremely slow internet access up until just a few days ago, so now I’ll be back on a regular basis. Things are continuing to happen in the garden and there’ll be lots to tell as summer progresses.
One of the things that’s happening now is the flowering of the daylilies. I only brought one with me to the farm and it’s one of my favorites. I found it at a local nursery a few years back and have never seen it again, although I do know that a few places offer it for sale online. It’s called ‘Double River Wye’ and looks almost like a double-flowering form of the old standard ‘Hyperion’, another one of my absolute favorites. It’s just a little smaller in stature than ‘Hyperion’, standing about 30″ tall when its in bloom, with narrow almost grassy foliage. It has multiplied very well, even in a container, and when I do get it in the garden a little later this summer I think I’ll be able to divide it into at least three good pieces.
The flowers are almost what I would call a “loose” double, or perhaps even semi-double. They don’t have that full, overblown, rose-like appearance that some of the doubles do, and while I like those, too, there is something infinitely more charming about the “looseness” of the petals in this particular flower. It has a charming, old-fashioned kind of appeal. It doesn’t re-bloom (or at least hasn’t), there are no eyezones or watermarks or piecrust edges, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good garden plant. It presents exceptionally well, with the stems carrying the flowers well above the foliage (one of my biggest pet peeves with many of the modern hybrids is that they often have their flowers buried in the foliage).
I’m anxious to get it in the ground and see what happens when it really has good soil and an unrestricted root run. I think it’s going to turn into a great garden plant!