Val Bourne picks out some favourite types of hemerocallis

As a busy garden writer I do try to get things right, honestly!

However the human condition prevents me from being perfect so I do get the odd, or should that be occasional, letter questioning my reasoning — something I often do anyway.

One article in 2003 led to a deluge of very unpleasant letters. It was on hemerocallis and it’s still on the Daily Telegraph website, entitled Overgrown, over bright and over here. It was a pun on the wartime saying about American military personnel and my unsuspecting editor thought it up, thereby stirring up the wrath of hemerocallis enthusiasts.

At that time the hemerocallis world was divided between traditionalists who loved simple elegant hemerocallis and those who loved the chemically- enhanced American tetraploids with thickly petalled flowers of ample proportions. Graham Stuart Thomas (1909–2003) had walked out of a meeting a year before his death in high dudgeon about the chemically-induced American triffids which he though were horrible. Feelings were definitely running high.

Chemical enhancement is nothing new in plant breeding. The chemical colchicine is extracted from colchicums (autumn crocus or naked ladies to you and me) and has been used to alter the number of chromosomes for almost 60 years by American breeders of irises and hemerocallis. At that time this toxic chemical, still used to treat gout in humans, could be obtained from pharmacies with ease. The advent of tissue culture, growing in flasks under lights, made it easier to add the chemical.

Graham Stuart Thomas felt very strongly that modern breeding was creating something monstrous and I share his view, having had terrible trouble placing these ruffled, beefy flowers in traditional herbaceous borders. Like adults in an infant class they seem to dwarf everything planted around them. In any case, there are too many hemerocallis! They take up 21 pages in the RHS Plant Finder, often listed by only one supplier, and I’d calculate that there are more than 3,000 of them on offer.

Partly it’s because the hemerocallis could have been specially designed for plant breeding with the style and stigma wide apart and each flower only lasts a day, lessening the chance of insect contamination. The plant itself is robust and, once the seed is set, it produces variation in seedlings. Combine this with the fact that you can raise a flowering plant in two years and, if it looks stunning, it can be bulked up fast in tissue culture, should the breeder be prepared to pay lots, and you fast-track the process even more. There are some monsters on the nursery bench, but I grow some lovely traditionally bred English beauties. I wouldn’t be without ‘Whichford’, a cool lemon-yellow with good foliage that shaded blue-back at the base. This has plenty of flowers over many weeks and it’s fragrant. Bred by Harry Randall, who was better known for Tall Bearded Irises, it also has an AGM. Randall, the first chairman of the London Electricity Board, often named plants after places. There is pink called ‘Stoke Poges’ and a red named ‘Stafford’, both worth growing. ‘Stafford’ is one of the most floriferous. My most favourite is ‘Red Precious’, bred by Coe in 1968. The good green foliage supports neat tomato- red flowers and this is later than most. I avoid black-tinted hemerocallis: they hide in the garden like a sulky child.

Oxfordshire had its own hemerocallis breeder, L.W Brummit, who owned an outfitters, or was it a toy shop, in Parsons Street. His wife bred irises with a Banbury prefix and he raised hemerocallis on a plot behind Harriers School opposite his home in Bloxham Road. The Nursery Further Afield at Mixbury, near Brackley, run by Gerald and Mary Sinclair, holds a national collection of British-bred hemerocallis raised by R. H. Coe, L .W. Brummitt & H. J. Randall, in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. They’re planted in a field to create a river of colour and they sell a range of hemerocallis and fine perennials. (www.nurseryfurtherafield.co.uk / 01280 848808)