Last year I bought one daylily to see if I would like it. In January I joined the AHS, and now I have a hundred.

Not knowing which daylilies might do well, I thought that a good place to start was to go to the AHS site, look at the award winners, and pick the ones that I thought were pretty. So I did that.

Also I went to a daylily farm about 20 miles from here and picked out several that I liked that do well here.

I planted them mostly in April, and I have had some bloom, some pretty profusely(the ones where I bought clumps from my local daylily farmer?.

Now of course I am a hopeless addict and want more. But even if they are pretty on line, I don't want to buy plants that don't do well in my region, which is southwestern Mississippi (McComb), where summers are brutal.

And so I am trying to figure out a way to know which of the gorgeous ones do well where I live, and then pick from that group. Good strategy, right?

Well, while the idea sounds good, I can't find any site where daylilies are evaluated or rated for any given area or zone. Thus while a daylily might be absolutely gorgeous and do well in another section of the country, it might look like crap and grow like crap here in southern Miss.

So if there is no such site, does each of you fly by the seat of your pants, buying the ones that look pretty in the pictures, planting it, and hope for the best?

I've seen the region 14 favorites on the AHS site, and after the first few the votes for each cultivar drop off enormously. So if a person wants to buy more than the top 8 (and there are two of those that I can't afford, how do I find out what grows well here?

Of course, if there is no way to know except by trial and error, or selecting cultivars from a hybridizer in my area, I will accept that. If the answer is "I don't know", that is a perfectly good answer, since it tells me that I need to search for my prospective daylilies with a hit and miss, trial by error, strategy.

If that's what I must do, I can certainly accept that. I just need to know if that's what I need to do.

BTW, Look Here Mary does so very well here in SW Miss. It is an enormous (11 inches) yellow, and I asked my local daylily grower if he'd sell me his whole clump, which must have 20 fans. He said no. If anyone else has a nice clump, can I buy yours.

And does anybody have a nice clump of Buttered Popcorn, an oldie?

Jim

Jim