Blossoming
CONCORD TWP — Karen Hall has a growing obsession. For the last 20 years she's been expanding her flower bed — it's now 100 feet by 150 feet — to accommodate her vast collection of different varieties of daylilies.
Her hobby has spilled over into an “overflow flower bed,” muscled out her tomato patch completely and requires hours each day to pinch off the fast-dying blooms.
“It started as a really small flower bed, then I got carried away,” said the retired elementary school teacher.
She estimates her bed contains 410 daylily varieties.
“Twenty years ago I bought a few at a local greenhouse,” Hall said, adding her growing didn't really take off until a friend of hers, Ora Shay of Butler, gifted her with some different types of daylilies.
Hall said daylilies form clumps called fans that eventually become so thick they can be dug up. The fans then are divided and transplanted, given away or sold.
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“You can split a daylily just about any time of the year,” she said. “Just take a shovel and dig it up and divide it.”
“I've given starts to many, many people. I've sold lilies just so I could have money to buy more lilies to fuel my obsession,” she said.
Hall orders daylily varieties from the Internet and scours daylily growers' websites for information.
Of the daylilies she does have, Hall said, “They are all numbered and have stakes with their names on them.”
The different daylilies tend to have dramatic names such as “Primal Scream,” “Mystical Rainbow” and “Forsyth Paleface.”
They're beautiful but very temporary, she said. Blooms typically only last a day. A plant may have several blooms, but the flowers are all just as fleeting.
She spends her mornings pulling the fading blooms from her plants. Hall said at the height of the growing season she “dead heads” up to 2,000 spent blooms a day.
Keith Hall, recently retired from Snyder Industries, has worked to bring his wife's vision to life.“Four hours a day she's out here,” he said. “She'll come out and redo stuff. This is her thing. I cut trees. I cut the grass.”“My husband is wonderful for this. He put a pump in the creek and ran an underground water line so I can irrigate it,” she said.Not that she's had to use it so far this summer.All the rain, she said, “has really been good for the lilies.”“Blooming season lasts from mid-June to August,” said Hall. But the different varieties bloom at different times during the summer.“You could have a whole different garden from one day to the next,” she said.Hall said she plants other flowers — blazing star, phlox, dahlias, gladiolas — in with the daylilies to provide a little color once the daylilies are done blooming.She said daylilies are hardy and doesn't require much special handling.“We mulch really, really heavily with cypress mulch. We use Miracle-Gro, and obviously it works,” she said. The Halls renew the mulch every three years, spreading about 250 bags' worth by hand.They plan to expand the flower bed three feet into their yard this fall.“We just move the borders,” she said. “We add about four inches of soil. ““My husband will bring soil up from the creek. It's nice and sandy. The only thing daylilies don't like is heavy clay.”The expansion will bring Hall's goal that much closer: to have 500 varieties of daylilies blooming in her garden.“My friends think its ridiculous to spend so much time on this,” said Hall. “For me it's fun and very relaxing.”
