Approximately 25 years ago I saw daylilies in a catalog and thought I had never seen such beautiful flowers. I knew of Stella but these were so much better. I ordered four from another catalog and shared them with my sister, Lynn. The next time Lynn visited from Broadwell, Illinois, we spent hours looking at photos of daylilies on the website of a woman named ChaCha. (BG ) I made lists of the ones I thought would survive in my zone 3 in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Lynn told me her daylily club's next meeting featured Curt Hanson as speaker and I decided to fly to Springfield to attend. I hoped I would have a chance to meet him and I did get to visit with him. He encouraged me to start a daylily club as there were none in zone 3. On the flight home I kept thinking about the idea of starting a club. At the next Garden Club meeting I asked if anyone would be interested in joining a Daylily Club. 12 hands went up and 12 more at the next meeting. The Central North Dakota Daylily Society started in 2002 and continues today.

It has been 14 years since my husband, Ken, and I moved to this beautiful home just beyond the city limits of Bismarck. It is on two acres and initally had a 40' by 40' vegetable garden I named the North 40, an oval flower bed, a round bed and triangle garden. The North 40 quickly became a daylily garden with many companion plants, the oval bed is now a rock garden and the circle bed has a fireplace with iron swing and chair. I tried to make the triangle bed an oval but it looks like an egg from above.

In this bed I have a large concrete statute of a woman kneeling in a garden with trowel in hand. Her name is Charlotte and we call this flower bed Charlotte 's bed. I have my favorite daylilies here along with tall white David phlox, variegated spurge that reseeds itself every spring, tiger lilies for my granddaughter, Ciara, iris, liatris, and whatever annuals I find I can't live without. In another area I have nine varieties of peonies and three hydrangeas. In our two acres are over 100 trees of many varieties and lots of shrubs, mostly lilac.

I have hybridized on a small scale and name my seedlings after members of my immediate family. In North Dakota it takes three years for a seedling to bloom and another three or four to determine if it is good enough to register.

Age and uncertain health means Ken and I have had to cut back a great deal. We are slowly getting used to this and actually now have time to stop and smell the roses.

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