Being a gardener is almost like being a recovering alcoholic; buying just one special plant can set off your addiction and cause you to want to add more and more plants to your collection. Going to a garden club meeting is like attending an AA meeting where people with a common addiction gather. I almost want to greet people in the Crockett Garden Club with “Hi, I am Jolene, and I am a plantaholic,” and expect them to respond, “Hi, Jolene, welcome to Plantaholics Anonymous. Tell us about yourself.”
Then I would confess to the group that it all started with a daylily given to me by my mother-in-law. It was a lovely plant that bloomed much of the summer with multiple orange blossoms, each with a double row of petals. This plant grew with little care and was, after all, free. So I took it home and planted it. It gave me my first taste of gardening success, and I craved more.
This craving led to my visiting The Lily Farm on Highway 7 in Center. Acres and acres of the most beautiful hybrid pink, red, purple, and salmon-colored flowers (along with the more common yellows and oranges) you may have ever seen on this side of heaven. The petal arrangement could be single, double, or even triple rows, and the petals themselves could be ruffled and multicolored. And these gorgeous plants even came in nice-sized clumps (enough plants for friends to share!).
I was hooked! I wanted every color and petal arrangement, but my bank account would only allow me to buy a few. Oh, how I labored making the decision – which to take home and which to leave behind. After all, which of your children would you leave behind? What could I give up in order to save money to purchase more of these beauties? Would Jim mind eating peanut butter sandwiches every night for weeks? I have a friend, Sandy, who even came out of retirement and went back to work to be able to support her daylily habit. Maybe if I robbed a liquor store, I could get the money for more daylilies – ah, the irony!
I did manage to pick five spectacular hybrids for planting in a section of my garden dedicated to daylilies. I followed the planting instructions given to me, which said to cut the leaves back in a fan shape and remove the current blossoms so that all the energy of the plant would go into building a sound root system. I dug bone meal into the dirt to encourage good root development, and later, I added a fertilizer higher in nitrogen for good leaf production. I bought fancy ceramic tags from a local gift shop on the square in Crockett so I could write the names of these new “children,” lest I forget their names by the following summer when the blooms returned.
I weeded, watered, and waited.
First, my darling “Lord of the Wind” started getting shorter and shorter. I had never heard of a plant growing smaller. What is going on?? Gophers were pulling it into the ground and eating it. Had they ever done this to my free plant? NO! Gophers have good taste in plants.
Next, “Picot Ripple Ruffles” sent up a massive bunch of blooms that year. Or I guess the blooms would have been massive. Except that the deer ate the buds. Had they ever eaten buds off my free plant? NO! Deer also have good taste in plants.
Did these disasters teach me to give up my addiction to growing daylilies? Absolutely not! That is why I joined Plantaholics Anonymous – to have someone to call in a weak moment who could talk me out of buying more plants. So when the urge hit me to go back to the The Lily Farm, I called my sponsor, Barbara. She said, “Let me change my shoes, and come by and pick me up on your way to the farm. I have a space in my garden I need to fill, and I know just the daylily plant to buy that will fill it.”
Both of us had fallen off the wagon.
So much for Plantaholics Anonymous. n
