Nettie Favara has been growing daylilies for about 15 years.
She has 28 varieties featuring buds and many colorful blooms in her Greenwood backyard.
“They’re called daylilies, and that’s all they are good for is one day,” she said.
Daylilies are perennial plants. Once they flower, the blooms typically last about a day. The flowers of most species open in the morning and wither during the following night. Often, the bloom is replaced by another one the next day.
“It’s always exciting,” said Favara. “You know what it is because you recognize the bud, but until it blooms, you really don’t know.”
Favara said she can’t recall what prompted her interest in growing daylilies.
“I guess I saw some, and I just liked the way they looked. And they are beautiful; they really are,” she said.
Nettie Favara looks at the flowers on one of her daylily plants. Every morning, she deadheads the plants. On Wednesday, she picked off 98 blooms from the day before.
She began by picking out different daylily varieties to try out in her yard from grower Reidis Nash, who grows and sells them at his home in Duck Hill. One of Favara’s daylily plants she calls “Mr. Nash” because it didn’t have a name, and he was the grower.
Favara said she didn’t do much flower gardening before she got into growing daylilies.
“I started out with African violets. I had bookoodles of African violets, but outside I don’t guess I did much” gardening, she said.
She said her husband, Johnny, has always been the outside gardener, growing an assortment of vegetables such as tomatoes, beets, cauliflower and cabbage. She usually cooks or pickles whatever is harvested.
But she took up growing flowers outdoors when she began planting daylilies. Before then, the only type of daylily Favara knew about was the common orange daylily, which she thought was plain.
“They never impressed me because they are just so ordinary looking,” she said.
But once she saw the many varieties of daylilies with their showy flowers and diverse color range, she was impressed.
“You know, there is no telling how many of varieties there are,” she said.
According to the American Daylily Society, more than 70,000 daylily varieties are registered and more than 1,000 are introduced every year with 200 registry requests each month.
In her yard, Favara has single and double flower daylilies, large and small, some plain and some extravagant with brightly colored flowers, and several with ruffled edges.
Favara knows the name of every variety in her yard just by looking at the flower. Most of her favorites have ruffled edges and include Smoky Mountain Autumn, a blend of rose and pink with a hint of golden apricot; April LaQuinta, pink with a gold edge; and Siloam Double Classic, which has a double peachy-pink bloom.
“Usually my color is a peach-pink color, for some reason,” she said about the flowers of her daylilies.
In a notebook, she documents when each variety blooms every year.
“It kind of keeps me on track of when they might bloom,” she explained.
She’s found an interesting trend.
“All of them that have bloomed this year have bloomed anywhere from six days to two weeks before they bloomed last year,” she said. “Some of them bloomed earlier last year, and this year they bloomed earlier than they did the year before.”
For instance, her Smoky Mountain Autumn daylily bloomed on May 19 last year, and this year it bloomed on May 10.
“It’s just strange how they do,” she said.
All but four of her 28 daylily varieties have begun to flower.
“They started blooming in April, and they will bloom, probably some of them might bloom, through August,” she said.
The four that have not bloomed yet had their first flowers in June last year — one on June 1, one on June 4 and two on June 7.
But Favara suspects “they may bloom earlier because most of them have bloomed earlier this year.”
She said the daylily plants will continuously flower throughout the summer.
“As long as you see a stalk that has buds on it, they will bloom,” she said.
Favara said growing daylilies doesn’t require much work.
“They are easy to grow, and apparently this soil in this part of the country is good for them because they grow so well,” she said. “The main thing I do is I go out and pick the dead blossoms off, and I might start fertilizing in the early, early spring before they start blooming. But other than that, they just don’t require much care.”
Each morning she inspects the plants and deadheads each one.
On Wednesday morning, “I took off 98 blooms,” said Favara.
“I took off 75 or 80 a couple of days ago,” she said. “Ninety-eight, that’s the most I’ve taken off.”
She said her husband asked her, “You mean you count those things?” “So I said, ‘Well, I do but just out of curiosity.’”
Favara’s prolific-blooming daylilies are beautiful, but she credits that not to her gardening skills but to a higher power.
“It’s not just me, God has a lot to do with it, too,” she said. “He has more to do with it than I have.”
With each flower only lasting a day, this reminds her that all too often people take things for granted.
“It’s amazing to me how many beautiful things that God made that we all just take for granted,” she said.
Favara said she loves growing daylilies, watching them grow and seeing what they will look like once the buds blossom.
“And sharing them with other people. I love sharing them with other people,” she said.
Since the flowers only last for a day, it’s important to her to share as many as she can.
She took some to the women in her Sunday school class last year.
“One of the ladies told me the next time that we met, she said, ‘I was so proud of my daylily when I put it in water, and when I got up the next morning, it was gone,” she recalled. “That’s what they are going to do. They are going to bloom for a day, and that’s it.”
Favara doesn’t mind that the blooms are just forone day.
“I just enjoy it while they’re there,” she said.
• Contact Ruthie Robison at 581-7235 or rrobison@gwcommonwealth.com.
