The Girls of Summer

Ecclesiastes says "for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under Heaven" which is to say: Everything has its place. The Daylilies are fading now. We've harvested most of our seedpods. There are a couple of rebloomers standing like that unidentified man in front of a tank on Tienanmen Square in China oh-so-many years ago as if to say "Daylilies will last all summer... someday." The time for Daylilies has passed. Now the dog days have begun and while most things in the garden are wishing they had an umbrella to shade the scorching heat of the sun and one of those crazy hats that holds two cans and lets you take a drink anytime you get thirsty, a few stalwarts are standing in the middle of the ring, belligerently taunting the others in their corners saying "bring it on..." These are the "Girls" of summer! Veronica 'Sunny Border Blue' and Phlox 'Nikki' to name a couple. But pictured below is the queen of the heat. This is a patch of 'Blackeyed Susan' (Rudbeckia 'Goldstrum') beside our driveway.
The summer heat and drought have thrown their best punches and this little gal is still standing with only a black-eye.



Now, allow us now, to introduce our only staff person at Molehill Gardens. He has no name but his title is "Keeper of the Falls." He keeps watch over the goldfish pond and waterfalls, reminding us to keep the water level up. He was referred to us by our good friends Tonya and David Nash. He works real cheap and hasn't quit us yet (even though we left him outside all winter one year). A true garden lover, he is always smiling. Or maybe he just likes sushi?

The rest of the story

The OBXperience is over and we have once again left a piece of ourselves out there. I sure hope it isn't another seven years before we get back. Alison commented that she is infected with "OBitis" and regular hits of it are necessary to sustain a tolerable quality of life. I think fate has over looked the fact that I was cut out to live somewhere extreme like that... maybe someday. The OBXperience included an all to brief visit to a Nature Conservancy site called Nags Head Woods that is a unique ecosystem called 'forested dunes' that will almost make you believe that you are in the mountains on the other side of the state. Miles of trails wander through this gorgeous place. A bit of arm twisting was required to get the boys out to Jockey's Ridge. "What's so special about a big sand dune?" was heard more than once. Well, once there we had to twist arms to get them to leave (that and a reminder that we could hit the beach when we got back to the rental). Jockey's Ridge is the highest sand dune on the east coast and is quite a site. In its wandering around over the years (as active dues are want to do) it has swallowed a motel and most of a putt-putt golf course. The latter still has a castle visible on the east side.



Later in the week, the surf began to get higher and higher. The undertow was quite strong by Friday thanks to swells from Hurricane Bertha waaaaay out in the Atlantic. Great boogie boarding conditions were there for the waiting, although on a less sloping beach the conditions would have been to die for. A care eye was kept for Rip Currents and some additional instruction given in the boarding school. Despite the rough conditions, those boys learned pretty well how to handle a wave and best of all how to shake off getting flipped when a big one hits!

OBXtrordinary

Not a garden post this time. After the Open Garden, which I will blog about at a later date, we lit out for a well earned vacation to the Outer Banks of NC. We snagged a house on the Upper end of the town of Avon, NC. A grand time... sight seeing, relaxing, hitting the waves and let me tell you, despite my age, I can boogie board with the best of them.

At right, my youngest son Colin, is offering the gratuitous Hatteras-in-hand pose from the day we visited the south end of the island. When we lived out here by the OB, we actually got to visit the lighthouse before they moved it. It really was in danger from the encroaching sea. Now it is safe and a nice place to visit. We made it up the highest lighthouse in North America with no incident!

On the other end of the scale, there is the shortest lighthouse on the Outer Banks, the Ocracoke Lighthouse. Alison and I agree that if you want to vacation in the village of Ocracoke, you have to really want to be a beach bum for a week. The is just about nothing else to do except fish, sunbathe, wave play, and just hang out. You are a ferry ride from anywhere and there are only a few touristy shops in the village. Sounds like my kind of place.

Boogie boarding has long been my favorite thing to do at the coast. The day before this video was taken, I broke a board when I dropped off the top of a 5-6 wave and got flipped and rolled a couple of times. Now, I can't tell you that I bounced back up after that like I did when I was 21, but I did get right back in the saddle. Had to show those boys of mine how to get it done!

OBX... if you haven't ever been there... you gotta go. Beats the heck out of ANYWHERE on the Gulf Coast and all of those over crowded mega vacation spots on the East Coast (Myrtle, Daytona, Va Beach, Charleston, etc.

Deadhead party

No jerry Garcia was not here, nor was Bob Weir, or any of those guys. The Grateful dead did not play here but the "morning dew" was all around. We did have a dead head party, but not that kind of Deadhead party.

What we call deadheading is all about removing the blooms from Friday so that they aren't hanging and mushy the next day at our Open Garden for the visitors to see. Every year on the evening before the Open Garden, we start at one end and move to the other end picking off that day's blooms. The picture shows you what it looks like after you've walked through a garden with hundreds of daylily plants blooming their heads off and removed every bloom, piled them in the wagon for disposal. It is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

What would you do?

I don't get very many chances to do hybridizing as the flowers are just beginning to open when I leave for work. On big bloom days though, I come back home for an hour or so, if I can, and dab some pollen. Alison usually leaves the "diploid" hybridizing to me. Diploids are flowers with the correct number of chromozomes. The majority of daylilies in the trade today are called "tetraploids" they have two sets of chromozomes. I digress. So there I was yesterday, standing in the garden, pollen in hand... what should I cross??? The pollen I had was from a spider type called 'Skinwalker,' pictured left. It's registered at 9.5 inches in size. As I stood there, a devilish thought crossed my mind... "do it... do it..." it said. So I did. And I didn't stop there. What I did was to cross it with every miniature I could. A "Mini" is the smallest size category of daylily, less than three inches in diameter. Not only did I just cross it to minis, but to this mini-double (below) called 'Micro Dots' registered at 2.875." Who knows what will come of it? A mini spider? An extra large double spider? A big pink/orange mess? Time will tell... if it makes any seeds that is. That's the beauty of hybridizing with daylilies, you never know what you're going to get!

Call us weird, but we get excited about our seedlings. We were happy enough that we bloomed 'Maret,' (pictured below) one of the darkest red/purple daylilies that we have ever seen, and happier still that someone saw it and purchased the naming rights for it last year in a fund raiser we had for the Africa Mission. I can speak for myself (Craig) when I say that we were just plain beside ourselves when we bloomed two progeny of 'Maret' this year. This is my favorite of the two but not by much. If I can find a pic of the other I will post it.

Got Maret?

Well, we're one week and one day from our Open Garden and things are looking good. It is always hard to predict three months out which weekend will be closest to our peak bloom. Peak bloom is the day when the most number of varieties of daylilies are blooming. We have more than 350 varieties and on the day of peak bloom we have generally had around 210-225 varieties blooming. One year, 2006, we hit it within one day. This year, beacuse of the cool spring, the bloom seems to be spreading out over a longer period. Yesterday we had 163 varieties blooming; some are nearing the end of their bloom period and there are many that have yet to start. If I had to predict right now, I would say about Tuesday June 24th would be peak.

Our hybridizing is coming along nicely. Alison spends most mornings in the garden dabbing pollen on pistils, making tags of what she has crossed, and checking for pods that have set from the previous days. We have acquried several very new, cutting edge varieties (by purchase and trade) over the past three years to accelerate our hybridizing and we are blooming our first efforts from that and I hope to post a seperate blog on that in the next few days. Although I dare not speak for my wife, Alison seems to be working heavily with full formed flowers that are green edged and heavily ruffled, as well as some with patterned eyes. I like to work with reds, and those with unusual characteristics like streaks, doubles, bicolors, and highly contrasted colors. Sometimes, when Alison sees what I am hybridizing, she will howl like a coon hound. This is to signal to me her belief that what I am hybridizing will turn out to be what is refered to in the trade as a "dog." A dog is a flower that has muddy color, spotty or blotchy, bland or just plain ugly. I just respond with "You never know." I get to do very little hybridizing however since it is best done in the mid morning hours when I am at work.

This little gem, named 'Maret,' is one of eleven seedlings that we have been bringing along that, last year, several friends paid for naming rights by making a donation to our Africa Mission to Sierra Leone. For $100, interested folks got to select a flower from our seedling beds and tell us what they'd like to name it. Mr. Tom Sinemma named it after his grand daughter. I really need to post a blog for those to. My favorite name of those submitted was 'Downtown Millie.' As I recall, it is a medium red with a dark red eye and petals that curl back to a point. Another of those named seedlings is on the upper right of this page. It is a stunner that is named after the village where we go in Sierra Leone for our Mission work, 'Taiama' and is pronounced "ti-AM-uh."