Lilies and Cannas in the Yard This Year

I took the camera out into the yard the other evening, the fifth of July. Early July is when the flower beds finally hit their stride here in Neenah, and the low light at the end of the day is the best time to catch them. Here are a few of the lilies and cannas I am growing this year.

The evening lily

This pale, lemon-yellow one is my evening lily. The petals are long and narrow, almost spidery, and they curl back on themselves. Most of the lilies out here have folded up by dinnertime, but this one was still wide open and glowing a little at quarter to eight, well after the others had called it a night. That is where it gets its name. It saves the show for the end of the day, and the soft yellow evening types are usually the fragrant ones too.

Daylilies

This deep red one, with the golden throat and the thin pale edge running along each petal, is a daylily. If you have never grown them, here is the part that surprises people: each individual bloom lasts exactly one day. It opens in the morning, does its thing, and by the next evening it is spent. The plant makes up for it in sheer volume. A single clump keeps throwing up stalk after stalk of buds, so there is a fresh set of flowers waiting for you every morning right through the summer. They are about as tough and forgiving as a plant gets, which is exactly what you want in a Wisconsin yard.

Cannas

The cannas are the showoffs of the bunch. This one sends up a thick stalk of orange-red flowers over big, paddle-shaped leaves, and it gives the whole bed a tropical, almost jungle look that you really do not expect to find in northeast Wisconsin. They love heat and they love sun, and once summer settles in for real they just keep climbing.

And there is plenty more on the way. This is the top of another canna stalk, the buds still packed in tight and layered like shingles before they open. I like this stage almost as much as the flower. The one catch with cannas up here is that they are not hardy. They will not survive a Wisconsin winter in the ground, so if you want to keep them you have to dig the rhizomes in the fall, dry them off, and store them somewhere cool and dark until spring. A little extra work for a plant this dramatic. I think it is worth it every time.

That is a good slice of what is going on in the beds right now. There is always something new opening up out there, and that is the best part of July.