Backyard Wisdom

Dividing Daylilies

Our curved patio is edged with a flower bed about 40 feet long and roughly 3 feet wide. When newly planted about 10 years ago, it was lovely from spring until fall. The last several years, it has fallen on hard times as I devoted gardening time to other places in our yard. But enough is enough and I’ve begun renovating the bed.

Daylilies are a vital part of the bed. Set in the back of the bed, their blooms add bright splashes of color, and the hardy, pest-resistant foliage is a great backdrop for other perennials as well as annuals.

The truth is that I’m sentimental about daylilies, too. I learned to garden from my grandmothers, and one of them had a passion for the hardy plants. Her yard was filled with a huge array of daylilies in all colors. I’ve bought some of my daylilies but many have been passed on to me by friends and family. I will even confess that there is not a single Stella De Oro daylily in my entire garden. While it is a nice cultivar, I think it is overused, and I prefer larger forms.

Late yesterday afternoon, I began lifting clumps of daylilies out of the bed using my garden fork and dividing them. A fork is better than a shovel because a shovel can cut many of the plant’s roots.

How large a division you create is really based on your needs. I tried to divide them into clumps of one to three plants.

I had more daylilies than I needed for the bed after I finished dividing them. Like many gardeners, I find it hard to toss great plants on the compost pile because there is no more room in my garden.

My solution—divide the remaining lilies into 1- or 2-fan divisions and drop them in an oversized nursery pot. I brought the pot into the office this morning and have been sharing my bounty with anyone who wanted some. Daylilies are a great plant to share because they are so hardy.

You will find excellent information about daylilies in this publication from the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. The American Hemerocallis Society has a huge amount of information on its Web site and the U.S. National Arboretum has a great photo gallery of daylily cultivars.

I will post updates on my progress renovating this flowerbed.

Turf—What’s Best for Your Yard?

My family and I live on 6 acres. We have more grass to mow than most folks. It’s a task normally handled by my husband. The bulk of our lawn is Zoysiagrass with a small patch of centipedegrass. Johnny uses a lawn tractor for this. The area we call the pasture is in common bermudagrass, and Johnny mows this with a small tractor and a bushhog.

Here in Auburn as in many places across the state, there are lots of new homes being built and new lawns being installed. One of the most frequent questions that Dr. David Han, our Extension turf specialist, gets asked is what’s right for my yard.

In this week’s Backyard Wisdom, David will try and answer this question.

For more information on lawns and turfgrasses, visit this publication from the Alabama Cooperative Extension System.

Out Comes the Heavenly Bamboo

More than 10 years ago, my husband and I planted new foundation shrubs at our home. We installed Carissa hollies fronted by a row of dwarf nandinas also known as heavenly bamboo. Both did quite well, but the more rapid growth of the nandinas quickly outpaced the hollies. For the last several years, I have looked at the nandinas that were almost as tall as the hollies and thought about removing them.

Over the last week, my industrious husband dug up all of those nandinas leaving a nice open edge in front of the hollies perfect for planting annuals and bulbs.
I think for the summer, I’ll plant a low form of my favorite summer annual, zinnias. Zinnia ‘Thumbelina’ reaches about 6 inches while the Dreamland series grows 10 to 12 inches tall. When fall rolls around, I will plant several varieties of daffodils and perhaps some other bulbs such as grape hyacinths or Siberian squills.

Now we haven’t given up totally on those nandinas either. Like most gardeners, it’s hard for either me or my husband to toss a perfectly good plant on the compost pile. It’s not the best time to transplant nandinas, but we decided to give it a try.
My husband planted most along a shady bank along the road in front of our house. If the nandinas survive the transplanting, they will help stabilize the area from erosion and add some color, especially in the winter. This variety doesn’t produce berries so there is no worry about the shrubs becoming invasive in this area.

Cold Snap Nips Garden

Like many of you last weekend, I watched the thermometer drop steadily and wondered what was going to happen to my garden. My yard and garden appears to have escaped serious damage from this April freeze.

Many of my perennials appear to have come through with no problems. Both my emerging tiger and pineapple lilies are pushing their way up with no apparent frost damage. Most of my salvias, including my Mexican sage, already had a number of new leaves and shoots. They appear unharmed as well.

In fact, the only plants that seem worse for the wear in my garden are the lantanas. All of my lantanas, including a low spreading yellow variety and the old-fashioned “Ham and Eggs” variety, were bitten hard by the cold. That’s not really surprising since lantana is native to the tropics.

For now, I plan on leaving the lantanas alone and see how they recover.

As hard as this late freeze was to gardeners, it was devastating to many of the state’s fruit growers, especially peach farmers. Extension professionals and farmers are still surveying the damage, but it appears severe. Tasty peaches fresh from an orchard in Chilton County may by hard to come by this summer.

Learn More About Roses

The rose is one of the best loved garden flowers not only here in Alabama but across the nation. I have several friends who are true rose lovers and committed rose gardeners. They lovingly tend their bushes regularly pruning, fertilizing and spraying them. I’m a lazier gardener so I’ve been slowly replacing my roses that require regular spraying to keep black spot at bay with more disease resistant varieties.

Today, there are more than 6,000 varieties, offering many forms, colors, and fragrances from spring until late fill. Roses can be as single specimen plants or in masses for an impressive color display. They may have useful places in borders, on trellises, and in cut-flower beds.

On Saturday, April 7, Dr. Raymond Kessler and I will continue our talk about roses on Backyard Wisdom, a brief radio show airing Saturdays at 2 p.m. on Troy Public Radio. We hope you will join us.

You can learn more about rose culture here from this Alabama Cooperative Extension System publication.

Enjoying The Azaleas

My family and I were in Mobile for spring break and the peak of azalea bloom time. Almost everywhere you looked there were masses of this Southern favorite blooming. Pinks, fuschias, whites and even the oranges of native varieties painted the landscape.

In Mobile, it seems people are either more laid back gardeners who dislike pruning or they understand azaleas are not shrubs that respond well to being pruned into cubes or balls. All too frequently, I see these shrubs pruned into shapes that are contrary to their natural loose mounding habits.

If you find yourself pruning your azaleas or other shrubs aggressively every year to keep them in check, you probably have planted the wrong plant for the location. For example, Formosa is one of my favorite azaleas. It’s in the Indica group of azaleas and can get up to 8 feet tall and perhaps that wide. But it would not be the best choice for a planting site just two feet wide. You would spend far too much time trying to keep it in check.

There’s another problem that can occur with pruning. If you prune your azaleas and sometimes you have to remove leggy growth, do your pruning immediately after the plants finish blooming. If you wait until summer or fall to prune, you are pruning off next spring’s flower buds.

For more information on azaleas, the many varieties and how to plant and grow them, check out Azaleas, a publication from the Alabama Cooperative Extension System.