Cracking the Concrete, thanks much. You must have been writing while I was answering, I love sitting in the garden. when I walk, I wind up pulling weeds...which need it, I might add. the weeds love the rain as much as the daylilies do. Thanks nat4b. I love garden shots, so I post them. Debra, I am very surprised to still have this much bloom. It started the 2nd of May. I have had so much rebloom it is phenomenal. I wish I knew why:) I Shovel pruned a big clump of Ida's Magic. (pictured below) It is just not my favorite, and it is as bad as a red or purple to get thrips. At present it is under the big oak tree, which is where I always toss any I am doing aways with unless or until they find a home.

dang I can't believe I photographed the wrong label for atlas! phoeey. but still it was pretty. that was from the "Historic bed" which was fun to see all the huge clumps of things. I did like the yard, a lot of antique farming things all around. great tour overall. :)

Hi Rita, I'm worried about you girl! I am thinking of you as we wait for the hurricane. My favorite of these is 'Olallie Keith' and I'm slightly annoyed that they don't seem to have it this year (or Vt Butterscotch Harvest)...at least I don't see it on their website. I noticed when I visited their fields, they had lots of yellow tags on rows of daylilies and those were the ones they were sold out of and only had enough to hold for increase. I searched for 'Olallie Keith' when I was there but didn't find it (although it was 90 degrees that day and my husband was itching to leave so I may have missed some things). I also like Fountain of Life and Hard Times. Celeste

Lavender or purple will likely be the color of the next CM we put in our yard. I prefer purple, mainly because it should give a more appealing contrast to the blue of the vitex we envision planting next to it. I can understand the interest in pruning to maintain a certain "fill" of foliage and bloom in a certain space. What I don't understand is how that awful, whacked look can be tolerated, even for a moment, while awaiting the return of the next season's growth in that desired look. Not meaning to sound all self-righteous here...it's just my gardening style, to use plants that are suited for the space available to them, instead of filling a space with a plant that has to be pruned to hideous (my opinion) to keep the plant within bounds, even if the view of the whacked look is only temporary. If I put, say, a CM variety with a mature size of 15 feet in a 5-foot space, that would just be too much work for me to keep the plant in bounds every year. I would want a plant with a mature size that fills the 5-foot space. I'm not a crape myrtle expert. But experience and intuition tell me (correctly I believe) a couple of things about the "radical annual pruning" of CMs (just my alternative term for the "murder"): (1) It weakens the plants overall; (2) It possibly deprives the plants and visiting wildlife of mutually beneficial, balanced and natural interaction, and (3) While enabling more concentrated bloom and dense top-growth, it raises risk of losing what might be preferred (a more appealing resultant appearance, that is) to storms or pests because of the naturally weaker new growth. My memory is always "dumping," but I believe I remember seeing some summer storm damage to CMs that were whacked the year before. So all the CMs had for foliage and bloom were the short, weak new branches all clustered together. Maybe I just saw some photos of that damage. Anyway, the damage made them look as if they had never leafed-out and bloomed at all, because all the new growth was torn and bent down, if not torn completely off. Those images, more than any others, swayed me away forever from the "murder" manner of pruning.