Tell us a little about the history of your garden.
When I moved from my apartment in Boston, I dug up a lot of my plants and I moved them here. A friend of mine moved from Fairfield, Connecticut, to Las Vegas, and she gave me some of her daylily collection. I had never really liked daylilies, but I always thought her garden was beautiful, so I happily agreed to take some.
What I realized was that if you don’t deadhead daylilies every day, they’ve got these slimy, dead, ugly blossoms and that’s why I didn’t like them. So I deadhead every day. I started keeping track of how many heads I take off and that way I know when the peak color is. The peak last year was 775 blooms in one day, which is usually around the second or third week in July.
I took 70 daylilies from my friend, but that was way back. I now have 400 or 500 daylillies. The other perennials number more than 1,000, plus the many annuals that round out the color each summer.
