Finally some roses... and daylilies on sale

Between trying to replace the master bathroom sinks and faucets (what a struggle that’s far from over!) and the slimmest rose pickings I have seen since that first horrible summer, I have not had much to blog about. Throw in the heat and humidity and I am barely crawling to the finish line of summer. I am ready for mid-October’s break in the weather. R-E-A-D-Y !!

This evening was a good time to run out to the front garden with the camera. Instead I fell asleep on the sofa until it was almost too late. Still groggy I put a strong battery in the camera and dragged myself out into the waning light. In a mere fifteen minutes the light was going, going, gone, and focusing became impossible, but I managed to capture a few beauties among many deletes.

‘Le Vesuve’ is starting a show after a long, unusual drought of blooms. Two and a half weeks ago I fed the front roses with a complete organic rose food. Then on Sunday it occurred to me that I hadn’t applied any epsom salts since spring. Perhaps that is why the rose bushes have looked so dreadful, leaves scarce and not green, flowers substandard and even deformed. I’m not very scientifically knowledgeable about this, so I can’t say these are signs of any true deficiency. It’s just a heat-weary gardener grasping at straws and trying to stay in the air-conditioning. Tossing out ten pounds of epsom salts in the cooler evening on Monday required little energy, thankfully.

The flowers of ‘Le Vesuve’ are just as big and fluffy in person as they look in these photos. He’s definitely trying to cheer me up.



‘Bermuda’s Anna Olivier’ has struggled this summer. Feeding and sulfur applications don’t seem to perk her up. I think her deepest roots must be down into the native limey sand that looks like road bed, and being less than eight feet from the curb this ground may well be road bed. In taking this wide shot of Anna and ‘Softee’ in the pot , ‘Enchantress’ snuck into the picture, and I didn’t even notice but I'm happy she did. Her tiny bright magenta flowers really pop against her deep green foliage. Anna’s leaves are normally more of a yellow green but not this yellow.

“Bermuda’s Anna Olivier’ has always had the same impact on me as ‘Maman Cochet’ because of her lovely fat flowers. Lots of petals in there – just the way I like them.

We’ll just call this type of photography dreamy rather than out of focus.


I can’t show you ‘White Maman Cochet’ even though she has some lovely blooms on her. By the time I got over to her bed the dim light demanded an absolutely steady hand with the camera which I don’t have, and my monopod was inside. It was blur city! So I went back to ‘Le Vesuve’, hoping for a bush shot. Don’t panic. Your eyeballs aren’t failing you. No light, no focus.

Here it looks like it was raining roses, doesn’t it? This is what happens when you shoot and lower the camera while it’s still trying to suck in all the light it can with it’s slowest shutter. Kind of a beautiful mistake, don’t you think?

I’m so glad you stayed with me until the end to see what my tease was all about. Fifty percent off daylilies!! Fall is the traditional time for daylily sales. I had four or five tabs open on my browser last week checking out the sales of several daylily nurseries when much to my delight I discovered that Shaw’s Sunshine Gardens in Augusta, Georgia is having a sale until October 15th. I first ordered from Charlie Shaw, a true gentle-man, back in the fall of 2009. Being a total novice with daylilies, he was very helpful and patient with me, helping me choose from among the hundreds of enticing photos on his website. Choosing is a painstaking process for me of analyzing and agonizing. I remember that that sale was a buy-one-get-two-free sale, and he was just hoping to break even for the year. I sure hope he did, and since this year’s sale is only buy-one-get-one-free (or half off), I hope that means that 2011 was a better year for him. When my first order arrived, the size and robustness of the daylily tops and roots took my breath away. I just had to buy more which I did a few weeks later. I bought so many that some of them didn’t get planted until February or March.

This year I was thrilled to see many Bob Carr daylilies on Charlie’s list. They’d been there all along, I suppose, but I didn’t know just how magnificent they were until recently. Someone on the Daylily Forum mentioned that Bob Carr’s daylilies are known to do very well in the south. Naturally, I jumped on Google to learn about this man who was the hybridizer of ‘Sherry Lane Carr’, my beautiful almost-namesake daylily. I found out that Dr. Bob Carr passed away in 2007 and that he was a pediatrician here in Ocala whose very serious hobby was hybridizing strong, gorgeous daylilies. From that moment I had to have as many of his daylilies as I could find. I felt like he had created his daylilies just for my garden. I already had three of them, the other two being ‘Key To My Heart’ and ‘Pearl Harbor’ from my first two orders from Shaw’s Sunshine Gardens. So among the ten I just ordered yesterday there are three more Bob Carrs. I know…why so few? There were thirteen others (more if you count dormants), but I was choosing for color and rebloom and sadly for price. There’s always next year, right? And after all, there were thirty-five DLs on my whole list. You can imagine how painful it was whittling that list down to a reasonable number, using DH's definition of the word, of course. D'ya think I should tell him they're on the way? Nah. I’m excited about the plants that are coming next week, because I know they will be beautiful, well rooted and well packed by Charlie Shaw. And you’ll see them right after they arrive. I can’t wait!

By way of disclaimer I receive no compensation for bragging on my favorite daylily nursery.