Gardening, Stella D'oro Day Lilies Do Not Disappoint!

Close up of  Stella D'Oro day lily, the most dependable landscape and bedding plant you could ever choose

Stella D'Oro day lilies rarely disappoint. My experience is one of plenty and awe. One hand me down pot of compacted clay and inseparable rhizomes has covered my garden with masses of prolific yellow-orange Stella D'Oro flower heads. Their chrome yellow color is stunning and shocking. It will bloom in profusion now, and continue with more blooms over the summer.  Masses of them certainly have a different effect than planting one or two clusters in your perennial bed.  This experiment in propagation was more of a resounding success than my wildest dreams could have imagined. Let me share some pictures with you and they should tell the story.

Stella D'Oro lilies, 3 year old plants from 2 leaf sprig subdivisions, swallow a concrete bench

I started with on large compacted pot of lilies that had sat at the bottom my friends deck steps for several years. Once they failed to bloom as usual she recognized that they needed transplanting but when she went to do it she could not get a trowel in to move some plants out of the pot. The rhizomes were in there so thickly that they could barely breath and survive. She vowed to replace the boring greens, and presented me with the overstuffed pot. So started my odyssey. I bought a new house, she had lots of nonblooming plants she wanted out, so she handed them over to me.  I transported them three states away to my new garden.

Over a many week process I worked the plants out of the pot in a process much like microsurgery. I soaked, I levered, I gently cajoled and the first few plants finally cooperated and came apart. After getting out that first small chunk I then had to divide each into a single rhizome and figure out how to handle these in a way that they could divide and prosper. I made the decision to separate each rhizome with its skinny leaves into a separate plant, and then plant them along my walkway to create a Stella D'Oro allee. It looked pretty silly for the first two years with these little skinny day lily leaves that didn't look much bigger than a blade of grass. As in most impressive feats faith played a roll and I continued to pamper, water and nurse my little green wisps along, and they grew a bit bigger with each passing week. This went on for two years before blooms to speak of, and now four years later it is a spectacular compacted mass of rhizomes and color.

clump of Stella D'Oro lilies in a perennial bed, unfortunately not thick enough yet, to fight the invasive wire grass here