Hearts Afire Daylily

You can easily invent your own jokey introduction to this plant, but its beauty certainly isn’t a joke. An outstanding, unique variety, the Hearts Afire Daylily has flowers that open in the morning and last right into the early evening, so it’s a great choice if you work, because it will still be looking great when you get home – and ‘great’ is exactly how it does look. The very large flowers have 5 arching petals that are slender and oblong, although not narrow enough to be called ‘spider’ flowers. They are a wonderful, rich orange, arching up and curving back from the center, where there is a yellow throat that extends into the petal as lighter-orange central veins. Flowering earlier than most daylilies, it will get the season going for you, blooming as early as April in the South, or in June further north. This is also an evergreen variety, meaning the leaves re-sprout in fall, growing all winter and staying until the following fall.

• Magnificent very large flowers with oblong, arching petals
• Wonderful fiery orange flowers with a yellow throat
• Flowers stay open right into the evening hours
• Blooms earlier in the season than most other daylily varieties
• Evergreen foliage stays green from fall to spring

For the best results, grow the Hearts Afire Daylily in full sun, but a couple of hours of shade each day will do no harm. Plant it in any well-drained soil – it’s incredibly tough and resilient, but for the best results a moist loam is ideal. It isn’t eaten by deer or rabbits and almost never has any pest or disease problems. Remove spent flowers to keep the other buds going strong, and take out the entire flower stem once the last bloom has dropped. Remove old, dying leaves in late fall, but leave the short new green leaves – they are the ones for the following year. Being evergreen, we don’t recommend this variety for zones 3 and 4.