Each season 'Chance Encounter' is one of my reliable and prolific bloomers. This lovely raspberry-rose blend really holds its own and earns every bit of its garden space. Chance Encounter was given to me by my friend Carol almost 20 years ago. Over the years I have shared divisions of this beautiful daylily with my friends as well. 

Hybridized by Patrick Stamile in 1994, this dormant tetraploid grows wonderfully in Wisconsin. Although registered at 25 inches tall, my plant grows between 27 and 28 inches. Flowers are 6 inches in size. Last summer, even though the season was shortened due to weather, my daylily bloomed from July 5 to August 6.

This popular daylily has 121 children on record in the daylily database!

American Daylily Society Awards:
Award of Merit: 2001
Honorable Mention: 1998
L. Earnest Plouf Award: 2000

Believe it or not, as of today there are 95,107 daylilies registered in the American Daylily Society database. This is the official registry site of daylilies. I use this database if I need information about a specific plant or hybridizer, all the details are right at my fingertips. Advanced search capabilities are available to save you time. Before I put plants on my wish list, I always verify the details here to make sure they are what I want. Plus I love seeing all the creative daylily names the hybridizers come up with! Check out the American Daylily Society database:  https://daylilies.org/DaylilyDB/

The second database I use is The National Gardening Association. There are 174,193 images of daylilies in this database.

What I like about this database:

• The wide variety of photos posted on each daylily's profile, taken by people in many different locations. Before I buy any daylilies, I make sure I check out the photos that home gardeners take instead of relying on one photo from a sales site. Believe me, a difference can exist! You can also get a sense of the plant's consistency.
• Comments from gardeners who already grow the daylily
• Links to view the registered parent daylily cultivars
• Links to view all the registered child daylily cultivars
• The ability to also search for a variety of perennials including daylilies, irises, roses, sempervivum, lilies, hostas, dahlias, peonies, and daffodils.

Check out the National Gardening Association database: https://garden.org/plants/group/daylilies/

The daylily season in western Wisconsin was uncharacteristic this year. After weeks of very cold spring weather, bloom started about two weeks late in early July. At that point temperatures instantly turned tropical with 90+ degrees just about every day thereafter. Most of my daylilies bloomed in a heated rush lasting, on average, a little more than three weeks each - four weeks tops.

In a typical Wisconsin season most of my daylilies bloom for at least four to six weeks, many going even longer through August and early September as they are all sizable clumps. My local gardening friends had the same experience as me, which was so disappointing! We waited all year for bloom season and it was over before we knew it. I hope this is an isolated year and bloom returns to a more usual pattern in the future. 

My season came to a fitting end on August 13, after four days and nights of constant rain. Being unable to spray deer deterrent in between the pockets of rain, I woke up one morning to find that all the remaining daylily blooms and scapes had been eaten by deer.

How was your 2021 daylily experience?

Daylily pictured: 'Spanish Glow' with two companions

One of my favorite parts of gardening has always been working with landscape rock. I find such satisfaction putting together the puzzle of a plant border. I have these borders around most of my flower beds.

Every rock in our yard has a story, as we have recycled them all from old, razed barns. When Ange and I would drive around in the country and see a barn being torn down, we immediately found out who the owner was so we could get permission to remove rock. In many cases we got there just in the nick of time to remove rocks that were being bulldozed and buried. I can clearly remember the two of us running around the bulldozers frantically grabbing what we considered  just the perfect rocks. It felt so gratifying to rescue these beautiful limestone rocks to live a second life.

We always keep an extra stash of these rocks in a pile in our field. They come in handy when an occasional rock cracks and need replacing over the course of time.