I have never found the foilage to look scorched at all, not even in the dead of summer. And, why would you have to pull the "ugly dead sticks" out from the center? I just clip them off at the base with my pruners if I want to. I think daylilies are wonderful and stay nice and green all season long until frost begins to nip them back. But then, frost will begin to nip back everything else too.

I'm not a daylily fan. I don't have a single one in my yard, never have.

The main reason I'm turned off by daylilies is they are **so** overused - it's almost like "I don't know what to plant, guess I'll just plant a daylily". I'll plant them in the ditch, I'll plant them along the driveway, I'll plant them around the mailbox, I'll plant them by the porch, I'll plant them next to the patio etc. etc. etc.

I think they can look good if used well. Prime example of good use is mmqchdygg's beautiful pics ;-) Those look wonderful all mixed together.

But I don't care for them too much either. There are some colors/types that are interesting, but not enough to tempt me to buy more. There are one or two in the garden that I think are nice, but overall they just fail to impress me; they are mediocre.
CMK

Daylilies are nice in their place, just like most perennials.

I am not impressed by regular daylilies but I like the reblooming ones and I like them separated. I would never put more than 2 in a bed and I divide them often so I keep the plants small. I don't like a big clump of them. I clip off the flower stem just below the foliage as soon as they quit blooming to encourage repeat bloom.

I water and fertilize and never have them go brown.

Do you mulch? Mine never get scorched.

Also, some have great foliage right into frost. Others peter out early and start looking ratty after blooming. Depends on the cultivar.

It's just a case of personal preference. Everyone has their favorite perennial. There are many daylily lovers out there. It is a very popular plant. I don't grow them, because I prefer a different look and different perennials than that. Every once in awhile, I see a daylily that I really like but I don't ever get to the point of wanting to grow one. I love the standard lily. The lily flower is very beautiful. So I suppose the foliage on the daylily is most of the reason I avoid them. It's not quite 'grass-like' enough for me. Especially since they have made the large flowers with the thicker foliage.

Where would we all be, if we all liked the same thing? [g]

One of the best thngs about daylilies is that they are so adaptable. I probably have about 100 scattered throughout my garden and they fit in almost anywhere, part shade, even dry soil, etc. I also grow lots of N.Am. native plants and hardy geraniums, as well as bulbs. The daylilies are a perfect complement to my other plants. I do grow many of the older style daylilies from the early 1900's up to the 60's and 70's. They often fit into a perennial garden better than the newest and fattest cultivars.

I like daylilies and enjoy their beautiful blooms, and find them to be useful because they're rugged adaptable plants for hard-to-grow areas. I have never bought any though - mine were inherited from the previous owner, who purchased an assortment of common cultivars from White flower farm.

I grow them in hard-to-grow areas, generally dry and sandy, and don't irrigate or fertilize them, so the foliage does get ratty on some after blooming. But that's okay, I don't expect plants to remain static and perfect looking.

I agree that the senescing foliage after bloom is a pain. That is why I limit the number of daylilies I typically grow. I've cut them down to the ground after bloom also and new foliage resprouts, but that's alot of work, so I usually just remove the bad looking foliage on my daily or weekly rounds.

In my area daylilies are very popular and for good reason. In our climate there are precious few perennials that give such a long season of bloom in so many colors and heights. And even then, they only bloom about a month here. Rebloomers are sporadic and unpredictable from one year to the next. I read an article by Colson Burrell in which he talked about turning to daylilies more and more now that he has lived in the south. They are, quite simply, good doers in a land where our perennial choices are far more limited than in other places.

That being said, they are definitely high maintenance plants. To grow them well, they need plenty of fertilizer and water and mulch and grooming and deadheading and frequent dividing and deadleafing....

Daylilies were the very first perennials I ever grew. They got me hooked on gardening. I think this may be a pretty common tale. As I am growing older, I am limiting their numbers in my beds due to their neediness, but to say I don't like them? Nope. I DO like them but only in the right places and in manageable numbers.

donnabaskets helped me decide why I love daylilies. I don't have gigantic acrage, so I can take the time to do the watering and other maintenance that many gardeners don't do for their daylilies after they've bloomed. What is really nice is that when the leaves start to look ratty you cut them to the ground and beautiful new leaves appear. And cutting the stems to the core ensures that the energy for the remaining growing season is sent to the leaves. It does make a big difference if you can pamper them after they've bloomed instead of ignoring them like I used to do.

Everyone is different. I love daylilies. Here they are so easy to take care of, and they have beautiful blooms. You know what I can't stand that many people love? Hosta. I just can't like them no matter how hard I try. I do grow a few because my husband likes them, but I don't think I will ever develop a fondness for them.
Remy

Remy- that's how I feel, too. I have a hosta/heuchera bed, but find that I really am not "fond" of hosta. But they compliment a shade garden nicely.

I was unaware that DLs are high-maintenance, as I have never done anything to mine except move them because that's what I do...I move furniture, I move plants...whatever. I've never found that they are needy at all. YMMV, probably.

I do have cultivars which are 'vigorous' growers...certainly those need dividing every few years or so- I have a black-eyed stella that is quite vigorous, as is "Streaker." Most of mine are average-slow growers, though, and I find that they fill in nicely and I have some to share at swaps.

Here in my corner of Z5, I have dormant and many semi-evergreens that do well. Dormants don't get terribly ratty looking until late August when they are done blooming (my DL beds are essentially DLs exclusively), and the SEs just stay green. I clip them all back though in the fall to tidy up. I do have hardy mums which are planted in the front of one of the smaller DL beds, which takes attention off the ugliness in the back later in the season. I think I'll try starting some nasturtiums late in the season to also add to those beds when the weather starts to turn again.

I plant and maintain a garden for a local museum that is completely volunteer staffed. With limited time or resources, daylilies fill a need for blooming over over a long season and requiring minimal labor. Some are blooming now almost to Thanksgiving. All the daylilies were donated by gardeners needing to divide theirs. Al

Plse keep in mind that 'bad foliage'(going brown and ratty) is a problem many daylily hybridizers are well aware of. The really good daylily nurseries will mention in their catalogues which varieties have good foliage attributes, so you may want to seek out some varieties with excellent foliage and give them a shot.
best,
mindy

I have gradually added a few daylilies to my garden over the years and now have maybe a half-dozen varieties total (including a couple planted by a previous homeowner). There's a red ("Chicago Apache") which adds to a subtropical bed by flowering for several weeks; the foliage does start to look a bit ratty after awhile but taller plants in front block the view by the time that happens.

Daylilies do have ordinary foliage at best and require attention if placed in a conspicuous spot to look their best. I once read that a daylily fancier whose garden has been featured in numerous magazine articles spent about an hour a day deadheading flowers and doing other maintenance, just on the daylilies.

That's one reason I'll never end up being a daylily nut. The other is that while the flowers are nice enough, the plants as a whole just don't add enough to go whole hog and start collecting them en masse.

Too many other great perennials to explore.

eric- you have a point. I started a DL exclusive bed several years ago, and while they are gorgeous in bloom, I find that I'd really rather have a mix. There aren't quite enough of them to keep out the weeds, which means that the bed (because it's exclusively DLs) "looks" weedy (as opposed to my other mixed beds where the weeds just add a 'cottagy' look to it, and I can weed or not and it still looks nice with the mix of everything in there.
Seriously thinking about turning that bed into a butterfly haven now that you mention it. Where's that Bluestone catalog?! Hurry! Hurry!

Remy, that's funny - me too on the Hostas. I thought I was the only one!

I bought about 30 DLs last year. I have them mixed into the perennial bed and the front bed...four together in one spot is about as many as I put near each other. I noticed the same thing with the ratty foilage and got very worried about what I had done. LOL I spent a little time pulling out dead foilage every week in August, and they looked pretty crappy, but since then some of it has filled back out, and no more has died.

I do love the blooms, and the easy care, but can see your point about the foilage. We'll see how bad it bugs me next year. Some of them may be getting swapped!

I have both dormant and semi-evergreen varities. At least in my zone, the dormants are the ones that get ratty looking. The semi-evergreen ones stay nice and fresh looking. Most of my dormants are older kinds, and those seem to have the most problems with foliage. I thought I could not grow semi-evergreens in my zone, but I was wrong.

I think they look best mixed with other perennials. The miniatures are really nice: smaller footprint.

I'd give my eye teeth to have Daylilies ever since I saw photos of Black Swallowtail Butterflies nectaring from the lovely flowers.

Unfortunately, the deer finish them off quicker than I can have my eye teeth pulled!

One neighbor got so tired of them being eaten he put up a 3 wire electric fence around half of front yard where daylilies grow among Pachysandra.

newbie in nj- How funny, deer on the west coast don't seem to care for daylilies at all, they go for roses. I was a DL nut (hemerocallis ~ hemnancy) and got up to 380 varieties at one point. But I have bad vole problems and found that voles love to eat the roots off. I got around this by putting lava rock in the bottom and sides of planting holes, and interplanting with daffodils and irises, which they don't like. Some really good DL growers also interplant lilies, clematis grown on poles with wire mesh at the top, roses, etc. They also cut the leaves to the ground after blooming so new fresh foliage comes in.

My main problem with them is that I was once gone the whole month of June and lots of weed grasses went to seed, and since then I have not been able to keep up with the weeding. DL and irises have vertical growth so the weed grasses can creep in among the canes, so I am seeking to grow plants that grow in balls and cover the ground so the weeds will be shaded out. I also don't like the short bloom season of DL's where I live and like to grow a mix of plants to cover more of the growing season.

hem,
i'm curious- short growing season? in new england d.l. are mostly july and august.what are they for you? most other perennials here have about a 2 week season; do yours not?
thanks,
mindy

Most of the daylilies I have also get yellow ratty foliage when they are done blooming. I consider them a high maintenance plant, but I enjoy the flowers so I have a few cultivars. I go around every few days to deadleaf them which is actually more time consuming than deadheading the flowers. Once a plant is done blooming, I cut the foliage down to the ground and fresh green foliage emerges.

RE: the "scorched" foliage -- I thought mine were doing same. Not the normal yellowing as they die, but the leaves looked faded with muted yellow mixed in with the green. I realized I had some sort of infestation way down at the base. Nothing I could see visually, like bugs or slugs, but something that was leaving brown or black "poop-like" stuff. I think whatever it was was sucking the life out of my leaves at the base because once I pulled off the ones that had the "poop" the rest were healthy looking. Just an idea for you.

I found, especially this past season that with plenty of water, I had very little yellowing.

brit5467, you might have a problem with earwigs. I find them in the leaves on summer nights when taking the dog out for her walk.

Here is a link that might be useful: Earwig