The Garden of the Seasons: Daylilies, Natural Drives, and the Delights of Midsummer

If you grow daylilies the first couple weeks of July will be a kind of Christmas in July. Most, though far from all, daylilies bloom in this mid-summer period. A time I both love, and wait for each year, but also experience with a kind of anticipated regret, knowing that each passing day -- according to the absolute law of this hard-blooming species -- means that I will lose the previous day's entire cohort of beautiful warriors in the battle to bring color and the rare, fundamentally indescribable -- not for want of trying -- pleasure of living things that succeed on planet earth, century after century, millennium after millennium, simply by making themselves appear "beautiful" to species of an entirely different order of being! 
           Flowering green plants: they spread their seed, disseminate the means to perpetuate the species, perform in effect the same responsibility 'higher' animals such as ourselves do when we mate, reproduce, and guard our offspring with our lives, doing everything in out power to protect and further their existence. We keep our species going, individual by individual, generation by generation, obeying a command of our deepest nature. The example of flowering plants suggests that beauty, growth, the urge to survive, the instincts by which to achieve that goal are all means toward achieving the goal and end of any single living thing -- to perpetuate life itself. 
           If flowering plants have a religion -- this is it. And they express it so beautifully. This is why, perhaps, some of us get wrapped up in the success, or absence thereof, of so many of the plants we spend the summer with. We desire to know how well some of our favorites -- the daylilies, say -- are going to perform in a given season. It excites me, pleases me, to notice that the most common member of this family, the native orange-blooming 'ditch lily' has spread its seed to some corner of the garden where it hasn't appeared before. 
           Plants can 'spread out' or disseminate, or send new colonies, or new family members, perhaps, into different patches of ground in our flower garden because this is a garden, a space, without fixed dominions. Natural selection is given room to operate here. Things grow, expand, march forth, occupy territory. Some unfortunately decline in numbers, and even disappear. I try to protect the smaller and more vulnerable species, but I can't keep track of everyone. 
          Too much is going on. I like it that way. I am a player in the arrangement of species here, but not a dictator. I don't have the time, or taste for that kind of role. This is a living kingdom. When the orange daylilies jump over to a place near the white fence that once was occupied by what -- I don't think I remember: all various plants species are all simply playing by the same rules. Blossom, flower, send forth your seed. Go forth and multiply.
           Plants in this garden, as plants have everywhere this summer, have multiplied with enthusiasm. They are doing their thing. They are shooting out their blossoms, firing the flower and fruit of their nature. They are reaching for the sun. 
           I salute them. I exult in their effort, their vitality, their strength, their beauty. I am sorry only that the fireworks cannot last. Every day I admire their work, and realize that they (and we) are one day nearer to the end of things in this glorious season. 
           Reach for the skies, people. I'm with you in spirit.