One of my favorites of Summertime is orange day lilies growing wild in Nature in meadows & along roadsides.

Whenever I've seen them (ever since I was a very small child & before I even knew that other varieties were being grown in people's gardens), I've always admired the wild ones. For as long as I can remember, original, orange, day lilies in the wild, have always made me think "Summertime". They still do, even today, maybe more so than the cultivated ones that everyone is familiar with. There is something magical about old fashioned, orange day lilies growing wild in the summer landscape. When I was little, our family would go for a special drive in the country just to see them in bloom. These flowers are a part of American history.

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The story of the original wild orange Daylily

"First of all, it isn't really wild. It isn't native to North America. And it isn't really a lily. The famous old orange Daylily is named Hemerocallis fulva, and is native to China, Japan and Korea, but today is common all over the world. From these 20 plants, more than 20,000 hybrids have been created.

This old plant arrived on our shores early during the colonial period, and it was so popular, and "passed along" from so many gardeners to their neighbors, it now grows happily from coast to coast, often along roadsides. And how did it get to the far west? Simple. When the wagon trains went west, the old orange daylily rode along. Many a frontier gardener brought his or her daylily roots along from "back East." The botanical histories say big clumps of old daylily roots were simply tossed on the backs of the wagons, and made the journey along with the families. That's how tough and durable daylily roots can be." American Meadows