It would be impossible to write about the summer garden without mentioning daylilies. From the last week in June until the third week in August, they are my garden.

Their botanical name, Hemerocallis, tells you what to expect. The Greek word hemera means “day” and kallos,”beauty,” and they are just that — beautiful from first light until dark. Then, sometime in the night, the flowers wilt and die. But in the morning, what an explosion of color! A new round of fresh flowers open in colors that takes your breath away!

The reds and oranges are rich and bold, and the yellows run the gamut from buttery to lemon to gold. Thanks very largely to amateur hybridizers, daylilies come in a range of pastels and in-between colors that defy description, but I’ll try anyway.

My favorites are the creamy ones. Some lean toward their yellow parent, others more toward the rosy one. All make me think of ice cream and make my mouth water. I know each one because every evening for at least six weeks, I pick off the perfect flowers and gently dump the bucket of blooms onto the mulch pile. Sometimes, I bring special favorites into the house. They don’t need water. They are programed to remain open until after dark.

Besides being beautiful, daylilies are easy to grow but do best in full sun, which means what it says — sun all day long, or at least from 10 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon.

Also, they perform best with adequate water. I can’t give mine any extra because my well is not good enough, and the daylilies get along just fine. If the summer is very dry, however, they do begin to drop some of their buds.

In my first book, A Patchwork Garden, I devoted a chapter to dayilies and another to daylily people, who are definitely a breed apart. But when the publisher suggested a book about the daylily world, I realized that I was out of my depth. There are currently 6,000 members of the American Hemerocallis Society, who live, sleep, eat, breathe and often, breed daylilies, and for the next two years, I, too, lived and breathed daylilies.

I met and interviewed gardeners from Florida to New York and learned from them what the daylily world really is about. It is about passion and hard work.

Most of the well-known breeders are amateurs in the dictionary sense of the word — people who love these plants with a passion and devote their lives to growing and breeding and learning about them. At that time, Bill Munson (R. William Munson, Jr) was one of the most important breeders of daylilies in the country, and I was lucky enough to spend a day with him in his Florida garden.

Photographs never do this place justice. Most photographers employ a wide-angle lens, which limits the field of vision to a horizontal slice of the garden, but it is the cathedral effect of the tall pines shading the daylily beds from the hot Florida sun that make it magical. Strolling the grass paths beneath the trees, Bill gave me his definition of “a good garden daylily.”

Many daylily breeders are obsessed with color, and color mattered to him, too, but so did performance, and here is what he had to say: “For years, we have taken the daylily out of the garden and put it on the show table where the flower, its petals, ruffling, and the novelty of its shape are very important,” but what he looked for was a plant that developed into “a nice symmetrical round clump” with many strong scapes bearing lots of buds and the promise of many flowers.

I commented that his cultivars, no matter how large their flowers, had strong enough scapes to hold them up. He laughed and said, “Right. You don’t want creepy-crawlers!”

That day while Bill and I were absorbed in the daylilies, a car appeared in the driveway. The occupants were a young couple in their thirties. The young man rolled down the window on the driver’s side and called out, “Is this private? Or open to the public or what? It’s outrageous, it’s so beautiful!”

Bill invited them to park the car and come in, which they did, and when they left half an hour later, they thanked their host and expressed the hope of coming again.

Later, I asked if this happened often — perfect strangers turning up in the garden — and Bill laughed. “Yes. It happens all the time. I guess it’s something about daylilies. When you get hooked, you get hooked.”

I think of Bill Munson often when I am up to my waist in daylilies, removing the flowers. At the height of the season, it takes me about an hour and a half, but as the blossoms dwindle down to that “precious few” and the sun slides behind the trees earlier and earlier, I feel wistful for June and the beginning of the season, when there are hundreds of daylilies in bloom all through the garden.

Love your gardening, ‘til next time!

Sydney Eddison has written seven books on gardening. In addition, she collaborated with the Color Wheel Company on The Gardener’s Color Wheel: A Guide to Using Color in the Garden.

For her work as a writer, gardener, and lecturer, she received The Connecticut Horticultural Society’s Gustav A. L. Melquist Award in 2002; The New England Wild Flower Society Kathryn S. Taylor Award in 2005; in 2006, the Federated Garden Clubs of Connecticut’s Bronze Medal. In 2010, her book Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older won the American Horticultural Society Book Award.

A former drama teacher, lifelong gardener, and Newtown resident for sixty years, Eddison’s love of the English language has found its most satisfying expression in four volumes of poetry: Where We Walk: Poems rooted in the soil of New England (2015); Fragments of Time: Poems of gratitude for everyday miracles (2016); All the Luck: Poems celebrating love, life, and the enduring human spirit (2018); and Light of Day: Poems from a lifetime of looking and listening (2019).