Lily and Friends

Unlike my orange tiger lilies that bloom and spread freely along my front yard, this yellow daylily has always been polite and proper, keeping its place among the phlox and all else that grew around it. The big flowers open with the day, and in summer bloom time I look over the deck rail to see if that day’s flower is opening.

The flowers are an intense cool yellow, like a lemon yellow, rather than the yellows with a bit of orange. I didn’t plant the daylily and phlox together intentionally, but I do like the fuller contrast of the cool yellow with the warm deep pink.

I moved it from my mother’s yard when I moved here in 1990 along with some peonies and hosta, those longtime standards of backyard flower beds. When I was little I thought the buds looked like bananas—if you look at the bud at the top of the photo, even though it’s in shadow, you’ll see what I mean. After all these years and all the new daylily varieties that have emerged I wondered about this older variety. My mother got many of her plants from family and friends when they bought the little ranch house in 1956, and I found one variety that might match this daylily named “Full Reward,” introduced in 1957. Seems likely, but I still have more work to do on that.

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