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Dead Daylilies

I moved to my present garden in April 1966.  During the summer, I found 
myself one day chatting with a next-door neighbor, who was busy 
in his vegetable garden.  "Hey, Harry," he said, "You're more into 
flowers than I am; maybe you could tell me what's the matter with this 
pile of daylilies my mother-in-law gave me two years ago."  I replied 
that I didn't see anything wrong with them, except that they seemed not 
to have been planted.  Some of them were blooming!  "Well, that's what I 
mean," he said.  "I didn't know what to do with them, so I just put the 
bags over there all together like, and I never could decide what to do 
with them."  "That was two years ago?" I asked.  "Yeah, and the bags 
rotted; I can't figure out why they're blooming, when they're not even in 
the ground.  They're supposed to be dead."

I don't remember now (that was thirty years ago, and the words in 
quotation marks represent gist, not verbatim), but I suppose the roots 
had made contact with the ground.  After all, in paper bags the roots 
would have been at the bottom, and the rotting paper might have given 
them some nourishment as they sought sustenance.  But apparently none of 
them died.  I advised him to separate them and to plant them as a border 
around his vegetable garden.  He did, and they throve, and thirty-one 
years later (I'm looking out an upstairs window) they're still blooming!

And you're worried about leaving them out of the ground for a few days?

***

Does anyone besides me miss the table of contents that used to grace the 
Perennials Digest edition?  Lindsey, can we have it back?  It was a great 
help.

Harry Dewey, Beltsville, Maryland, zone 7a 

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