Of Time and the Garden

The garden never looks the same two days in a row much less two years in a row. Indeed, itdoesn’t look in the evening as it did in the morning. Most daylilies open each day and lookfresh throughout the daylight hours but exhausted by night; but there are some that would bemore correctly called night lilies—Hemerocallis citrina (syn. H. altissima) bloom at night and lookexhausted by morning. Either way, none of my daylily plants look the same two days in a row.Rain lilies are in full bloom now and each morning the areas where they grow look different because most forms and species have flowers that last only a day.

Photography by Ellie Meade

Zephyranthes smallii, a medium yellow reblooming species, has flowers that stay open all the night and the next day. Not only that, they continue to produce new flowers throughout late summer. The dianthus walk contains many clumps of this species making that garden a cheerful early morning welcome for several months.

Verbascum chaixii blooms from spring through summer; however, it isn’t always at its best. In the early morning listen the flowers glisten with dew but by late afternoon, they droop from the heat and by the next morning they have recovered their glory. After they ripen their seeds, we cut the stalks to the ground and have only a few weeks to wait until they are back in bloom.

Often, we plant small trees, such as styrax, which give us flowers in mid-spring, only to discover in a few years that they have outgrown their allotted space and after a brief display of flowers, we have dense shade and greedy roots, which take up the moisture we had counted on for our summer display of annuals and perennials. We remember that special spring when they were the right size for their space. Daffodils, carefully planted and spaced, eventually grow into thick clumps and no longer bloom. Rescuing daffodils is one of our favorite winter tasks as we change this year’s plea for help into a broad mass of recently divided bulbs and eventually a spectacular display of flowers. Whether plants live or die, they present us with challenges, the most delightful of which is a mass planting of a something, which came to our garden as a single specimen. The worst of which is a mass of weeds, from an unexpected bully.