Activities Through the Year by Lisette Brisbois

Our first event is the Spring Slide Show. This is always a sheer delight. It is usually held on a weekend afternoon when there is little competition from the garden. No matter what the theme of the Slide Show, we begin to feel that there will be daylilies blooming in our gardens again, as impossible as it seems in the cold winter months. The club usually provides coffee and tea, while club members bring goodies to be shared and enjoyed.

The Spring Banquet is a more gala event that takes place in March. There is a featured speaker who is usually a hybridizer of renown who is flown in for the occasion. The food is great, the company could not be better, and there are door prizes. What more could one want on a day without daylilies in bloom?

Daylily Day is the must event for any daylily grower. First of all, there is the locale - the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., a fantastic place to see all kinds of plants. Furthermore, we have daylilies actually in bloom at the daylily display bed, maintained by the Arboretum staff. There will be tours at 10 a.m and 2 p.m. by the Curator of Perennial and Boxwood Collections (and daylily expert), Lynn Batdorf. And of course, there are daylilies for sale for $5, all grown by NCDC members. We haul out our educational displays and share daylily secrets with one and all. There's much speculation about the most beautiful daylily, the most spectacular daylily, and whether the show could possibly be as beautiful as last year... [NOTE: Daylily Days on our calendar and the assiciated sale has been replaced with the Spring FONA sale at the Arboretum.]

The NCDC Flower Show is normally next, but sometimes it is preceded by the Garden Tour. It is usually held close to the Fourth of July, when daylilies are at their peak in our gardens. Anyone is welcome to bring in their named varieties and seedlings to display and compete with other daylilies. There is the challenge of transporting very fragile scapes (stalks) of daylilies without damaging them. The result is a fantastic display enough to take the most jaded gardener's breath away. (We have excellent literature available with recommendations on transporting blooms and scapes, and exact directions on how to groom your entries.)

The NCDC Garden Tour is more relaxed than the Flower Show. We take luxury buses from one exquisite daylily garden to the next. The hosts have been primping, improving the soil, and labeling to a fare-the-well, and it shows. We visit Maryland gardens one year and Virginia gardens the next. Naturally there is a stop at some delightful restaurant so we can eat and compare notes before drifting into the next dream of a garden.

We hold our largest public sales and an auction in mid-August. Many NCDC members dig for this sales. The first sale is in Virginia and the second is at Brookside Gardens in Maryland. Most plants are sold for $5. After the frenzy and excitment dies down, we auction off the more expensive plants and our Club Plants (at the Virginia sale). These are expensive, top-notch, newer introductions, purchased by the club and grown by NCDC members for two years to provide sufficient increase and then auctioned off so our members can enjoy newer cultivars at less than the going rate.

The beauty of these sales is that the plants you purchase are acclimatized, and you never know which cultivars will show up. We feature other mini-sales during the season as opportunities present themselves. They will be announced in our newsletter and on our web page.

The NCDC Fall Picnic is a great pot-luck event. The daylilies are well past their peak, and we can enjoy other plants being grown by our hosts. We look at the daylily labels while enjoying each other's cooking. We elect our new President, Vice President and Board of Directors. In addition, we present the trophies and awards from the flower show to the many winners.

Reprinted from an article by Lisette Brisbois in the February 1997 NCDC Newsletter. Revised October 2002.