Today's Flowers - June 14

"Lusty Leland" - 2009

My daylilys have been blooming almost faster than I can keep up with them. I learned that "dead-heading" them every day is a good practice, and I perform this routine both morning and evening. One morning this past week, I removed 87 spent blossoms; that same evening, I removed another 64, for a total of 151 blossoms that had flowered and died within 24 hours.

Even with that many gone, it made no appreciable difference in the appearance of the lily beds, and the blooming plants are still loaded with huge buds, ready to burst into full bloom over the next few days/weeks. Some varieties are just now sending up their flower spikes. I've forgotten what some of them look like and am as excited as a kid in a candy store!

I had a couple of pleasant surprises at the beginning of this past week. First, I discovered a new lily growing in the bed by my back door. I have no recollection of purchasing said lily (the name of which variety I have no idea), but I just love it. It's tiny, as you can see by the photo below in which I hold my 62mm camera lens cap close enough to touch the bloom.

New Kid on the Block

The second surprise is that lilies which I moved from my former home and planted along the back fence line in this garden in 1991, and which haven't bloomed for several years, have flower spikes! I attribute this to the cutting down of a group of trees that had shaded that part of the yard almost continuously. Unfortunately, that row of lilies is beset by and about to be overtaken by Dewberry vines and some other noxious creeping vine, the seeds for which were, no doubt, either blown in or deposited by birds. My gardening daughter and I are already making plans to isolate the lilies I want to save, dig them up and move them, and then apply a liberal application of Round-Up or another heavy-duty weed killer to get rid of all the creepy vines. It would be a pleasure to have a row of colorful lilies across the back fence, but the vines have to go first.

I reported in an earlier post that my daughter had gifted me with two Oriental Lilies. "Tom Pouce" (photo below) bloomed this past week, and it is elegant! Huge blooms, and very fragrant. To get a good idea of the bloom's size, consider that the bricks shown behind it are 7.5 inches wide and measure 3" between the mortar lines. As the plant is actually leaning against the wall, there is minimal skew on the relative size.

Tom Pouce - Three Blooms (6/12/2009)

The bloom has much more yellow in it than I expected from the plant information tag, but that may be due to the amount of sunlight the plant has received. I planted it somewhat in haste in a flower bed close to my front door, which is on the north side of the house, and while the bed gets some direct afternoon sun, this lily doesn't get as much sun as it needs to generate the pink in its petals. After the blooms are gone, I will move it to a sunnier permanent location. "Stargazer," the other lily she gave me (which also will have to be moved), has six buds on it, one almost ready to open. I'm hoping to have a photo of it to include here before post time. (I'm writing this on Friday.) NOTE: Sorry. . no photo. The flower is open, but I've been without electricity since 5 p.m. Friday, and cannot upload photos from the computer I am currently using. Don't know when I will have power again; the electric company has been "promising" restoration since midnight Friday.

I've learned (again) that one is never too old to learn something new. This past week, I discovered a marvelous (and new to me) day lily site on the Internet, Wright's Daylily Garden, in Hilham, TN, between Nashville and Knoxville. They have over 1,100 varieties of daylilies at their farm, and photos of most of them on their web site. I've been in daylily heaven just looking at the photos! The new thing that I learned from looking at their photos is that the lily I have always thought of as "Butterfly Kisses" is not! I do have "Butterfly Kisses" and it's blooming beautifully, thank you, but it's not the one I thought it was. That's what I get for not placing permanent markers by the fans. (Photo below)

The Real Butterfly Kisses

What the other gorgeous lily is, the one I have mis-named for years, I have no idea, but will search for photos of it. I'd love to know what it should be called.

One last photo -- of a mid-sized lily that is so purple it's almost black! It has bloomed profusely this year and I get great joy just looking at its color. Do I know its variety? No. There is another very small lily in the background; pale pinkish purple. It's also about the size of my lens cap.

Today's Flowers is a weekly Meme created by Luiz Santilli, Jr. and may be found here. Please visit to see others' lovely flower photos. If you have a flower photo of your own to share, please join us.