Out With The Old

January 1, 2012

31.8° here on the mountain, windless and the only noise comes from deer, walking through the lower field and crunch, crunch, crunching through the wet snow. The sound of cars three miles below on Route 2 is absent today as people rest in preparation for the first day of 2012. There is a lazy fog hanging above the snow and no sense of urgency to jump into anything this morning.

Alex just turned off his lights and went to bed. He is 19 now but still and forever will be a member of the autism spectrum of life. He has had this thing for many New Years where he stays up well into the new day checking New Years events around the world and continuing his study of world and military history on his computer. I checked him at 1:30 and he smiled as only Alex can smile and he reminded how well 2012 was going. He also studies the actual history of alcohol as well as mixology and last night he ended 2011 with an Irish Whiskey Sour made with Bushmills, an Irish whiskey dating from 1608. I asked if he has chosen a drink to celebrate today with and he only replied "Contemplating".

I cannot recall the origin of "Out with the old" but it is an appropriate saying for the first day of a new year. As I finish writing this morning I will return the last of my garden books to the shelves of my newly painted, reorganized, freed-of-bushels-of-paper office. I never throw away a book but do recycle some here and there to where I know they will be appreciated. I also never throw away a plant even if I don't like it and that's what Gail and I have spent three years now doing with some of our daylilies at the nursery.

Daylilies are a fine perennial and appropriate for modern day gardeners who want color with almost no care needs. Gail has been taking rows of daylilies that no longer sell well and selling them each fall as bare root divisions to free up more garden space and get more people growing daylilies. I don't know the current count of registrations held with the American Hemerocallis Society but it is somewhere around 64-65,000 different registrations. Daylilies are the second most popular perennial, following hostas which have always held first place despite a contrasting registration count of under 7000 last I knew.

The very first daylily was registered in 1893. It was a cross between the species Flava and Middendorfii. It was named Apricot and here are some pictures. There are obvious characteristics that make this easier to identify but admittedly it took me years to get ours, an unnamed gift from friends, properly identified. That is understandable with so many to choose from.


So New Years has long been known as "Out with the old, in with the gold" but in the case of daylilies at Vermont Flower Farm, the "out" part only means that we reduce the number of each less popular daylily to a spot in a display garden where the name with remain as "gold" as the day it was first registered.


Writing from the mountain above Peacham Pond where my second walk of the morning with Karl the Wonder Dog spotted three sets of coyote tracks that weren't in the field two hours ago. Karl looks funny pushing his nose into the snow to get a good smell. When he identifies "coyote" his head raises quickly and he freezes momentarily before he scoots for home. Some dog!

Happy New Year!

George Africa
The Vermont Gardener
Vermont Flower Farm
Writing on Facebook at Vermont Flower Farm and Gardens and also at George Africa
On Twitter at vtflowerfarm
Helping you grow your green thumb into 2012!

Doctor, Doctor

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Sunday evening and I'm on a different schedule today because of Daylight Savings Time. I can always remember that "spring ahead, fall behind" reminder but I can never acclimate to the change for at least 3-4 days. I've been laying low for a couple weeks now after carpal tunnel release and trigger finger surgeries. These are minor things that instantly make you feel better. For me the problem is I like to be an active gardener and one handed activity is not a great deal.

Our son Alex is into H.P. Lovecraft reading and now he is showing interest in writing. That's a different story but when you have been waiting for him to write anything as long as we have, this is monumental. Last night we lit the candles and the gas lamps and sat by the stove listening to him read two stories to us. He picked the choices and they were great! When he finished he said he was putting together a story and needed some old fashioned names. Gail said a trip to one of the local cemeteries could provide plenty of names including some none of us had ever heard of so we planned a trip for today.

The wind was howling but the sun was shinning and even Karl wanted to get involved. I was reluctant to bring a dog into a cemetery but I'm old fashioned I guess and show different respect than some do. I was outvoted. The Lower Cabot Cemetery is old and new and there are ranges of monuments from slate markers you can hardly read, to encrusted granite letters, to marble markers that have lost all lettering and split markers that have respectfully been cemented back together.

Older names were plentiful and some even made us chuckle. Men's first names included Ransom, Lemuel, Erastus, Theron, Alanson, Azro, Smiley, True, Orlando, Orson, Elihu, Asa, Levih, Quinton, Welcome, Phineus, Elvin, Luther, Ebina, Azariah, Matthias, Shadrack and Asahel. We were looking for men's names but some of the women's names were different too. How about Adaline, Lovina, Thankful, Eliza, Prudence, Philena, Irenus, Tamer, Augusta, Chastina or Adeline? But the monument that interested Gail, Alex and I the most is pictured up top. It was dedicated to Dr. John Q. A. Parker and said so nicely: "He Went About Doing Good".

Right now a member of the American Hemerocallis Society is gathering information for a historical inside to daylilies. So far he has solicited information on older hybridizers including, Childs, Lenington, Marsh, and Spaulding. In my thinking, these hybridizers went about doing good too as they produced some beautiful flowers to bring smiles after bad times for years to come. If you're interested in daylilies, join the society. It's a flower that was here when Welcome and Thankful were living and probably farming in Lower Cabot. If you come to Vermont some time soon, stop by the place an enjoy some history. You can't beat Vermont!


Writing from the mountain above Peacham Pond where the roast has another hour to go and the butercup squash, sweet potatoes, parsnips, Irish Cobbler potatoes, onions, and cauliflower, now diced and roasting along side, are producing aromas that are making me real hungry!

George Africa
The Vermont Gardener
Vermont Flower Farm

Christmas Afterthoughts

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Just in from a brief walk with Karl the Wonder Dog. His feet and mine weren't doing too well this morning on the glaze that covers the walks, driveway and road. That glaze arrived yesterday morning but is nothing like what is en route in the next few hours. It's 26 degrees right now and the wind is clocking at 9 mph. The humidity is 76% and that makes the air feel heavy outside and colder than the thermometer suggests.

Christmas Day has passed but the spirit and happiness we enjoyed here continues. I always try to take time off now to be here with Alex as sometimes the senses of the holidays get confusing for him and us too. Autism, just like gardening, is something everyone should try to learn a little more about in today's world.

Gardeners and especially flower hybridizers enjoy using Christmas names when they register a new plant. We grow a lot of hostas and daylilies and although we don't have such individual collections specific to Christmas, we're aware of the numbers out there. Each of these plants has its own society and membership is worth every nickel.

The American Hosta Society ranks number one with us but folks could debate that either way. We belong to both societies and a bunch of others too. For years now the hosta group have had an incredible journal of table top book quality paper and a pictorial display that's unmatched among the societies. I recommend membership for yourself or friends if you even think you should learn more about hostas.

During the past year the American Hemerocallis Society (hemerocallis=daylilies) has revamped their journals and taken on a larger paper/print/picture format. They are moving along with much more content and still publish seasonally four times. Again, a great journal with lots of information and details about regional and national events, plant sources, and growing information.

So the registered names, what are some examples? With hostas the list is a third that of the registered daylilies but still interesting. Actually that's not a bad ratio because there are probably 15 times as many registered daylilies as there are hostas. I recently wrote to the daylily registrar asking for the actual count because I don't know what it really is any more.

With hostas try Christmas Candy or Christmas Cookies or Christmas Cup; try Christmas Dome, Christmas Gold, or Christmas Jewel. How about Christmas Lights, or Christmas Pageant or Christmas Stocking? Try Christmas Tree, Christmas Tree Gala, Christmas Surprise or Christmas Tart. If you want to see what these look like, try the Hosta Library .

With daylilies the list is longer than I want to write. It's probably around 50 registrations. Try these as example, all with the prefix "Christmas". There's Christmas Angel, Balls, Blessing, Candles, Candy, Carol, Celebration, Cheer, Cherub, Chocolate, Colors, Comet, Concerts and another 40 or so. If you use Tinkers Gardens daylily database, many of these are pictured. Just enter "Christmas" in the database and you will get the list.

Slim availability here at Vermont Flower Farm which is probably surprising to anyone who knows us and knows how well we decorate for the holidays. We have the daylily Christmas Is pictured up top and then the hostas Night Before Christmas and Christmas Tree pictured below. Sometime maybe we'll move along with a collection.

Better get going here! From the mountain above Peacham Pond where a lone blue jay is sitting on the platform feeder outside my office asking "Where's the breakfast buffet?" Guess it's bird food time.

George Africa
The Vermont Gardener
Vermont Gardens
Vermont Flower Farm

My Friends, Hemerocallis

Saturday, January 19, 2008

A cold, clear morning here on the hill. It was one below when I got up at 5 and it's only moved up to three degrees above zero here at 7:30 AM. The sky above Peacham Pond is red suggesting the two fronts which are moving this way. Tonight is supposed to be 15-20 below zero. B-r-r-r-r!

Karl the wonder dog has already been out for a quick walk and now he is barking at a roving dog. He is very territorial and if he thinks he is being intruded upon, he lets the world know. It's nice to see that he is returning to his old self although I can't say I am enamored by early barking.

I want to finish up some thoughts on daylilies, one of our favorite flowers, by mentioning a few more and then talking about resources. As I have said, you don't have to spend a lot of money putting together a nice daylily garden. They work well with most perennials and don't require a lot of work. This one is Posh Design. It's not more than a couple feet tall but the 5 inch peach-rose blooms have lots of potential to combine in various settings.

Ruffled Valentine is now a thirty year old plant, first released by Gilbert Wild in 1977. The velvety red with a small yellow throat confirm many garden possibilities and it's inexpensive, multiplies well and just plain looks nice. Alex included this one in his collection many years ago and Gail and I can see why he chose it.

Up at the top of the page is Red Ribbons which was released in 1964. It's in the four foot tall range. The combination yellow-green throat on an 8"-9" flower makes it a stand out. Pricing has gone up instead of down over the years but this is a worthy addition to your garden. It's an evergreen type so late season frosts and early spring freeze-thaw cycles might make you wonder if you'll ever see it again but it actually does very well here.

Since there are thousands of daylilies, there are hundreds upon hundreds of growers and websites. We belong to three daylily listservs although many others exist. Basically there is only so much you can read and there's little sense belonging to a group if all you do is push "delete" all the time. Lately I have been doing a lot of deleting and less reading as it's income tax time and I have to get that responsibility out of the way.

There are two listservs from Yahoo Groups that I recommend. One is the daylily-spider list and the other is the daylily image list. If you sign up for a Yahoo account, you can go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/daylily-spider or http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DL_Images and sign up.

There is a list on the ICORS listserv that is maintained for hemerocallis growers and members of the American Hemerocallis Society. Just go to the ICORS list and scroll down to Daylilies and enroll from there.

There are many websites available which recommend other daylily grower sites. My favorite is Charlotte's Daylily Diary 2008. Charlotte lives in Quebec but just over the Vermont border so I am partial to good neighbors to start with. Her site is a treasure, is regularly updated, and has a Garden of the Week section which is very good.

Not nearly enough folks want to take the step from being interested in a specific plant to actually joining the national or international society which studies and promotes it. I wish that was not true. We belong to a dozen societies and can't say enough about the benefits. The American Hemerocallis Society is about $20 a year and includes quarterly journals such as this one from 2004. This particular issue featured Ruby Spider and I was interested in learning more about a plant that gardeners want to buy faster than I have been growing it.


Time is flying this morning and Karl has reminded me it's time to go get the paper. Hope you'll give daylilies a thought and of course, take a look at our outdated, soon-to-be updated site Vermont Flower Farm and see what we grow.

From the mountain above Peacham Pond where I just missed a great picture of a red squirrel and a hairy woodpecker on the feeder at the same time.

Saturday greetings,

George Africa
The Vermont Gardener