Ditch Lilies

Among things flourishing in our current month of deluge are those half-hidden, out of the way, orange day lilies.  Do you notice them at all?  Or are they just part of the background, like puddles and clouds, political blah-blah-blah, and green weeds sprouting everywhere?

Occasionally, there are big clumps of them, like here on the Business Loop:

Hard to know if those are nurtured, or simply not yet "improved."

More often, these lilies are scattered along the road, in ditches, in odd little clumps.  Along North Brown Station...

  

 Here, around a country mailbox...

 Or just in the ditch...

Or in big clumps in the field, where no one is building yet...

Here, for instance, a new and unfortunate little development has a sidewalk that just goes nowhere--nowhere being a field of flowers.

In town, along Rangeline, between Bus. Loop and Wilkes (where I not only drive back and forth, but got to walk several times today, my Jeep having decided to plunge into the 260 degree + red zone)...

Odd clumps of flowers...

 

Lilies sort of forgotten or not noticed, back by the AC unit, or a garage...

  

Or in that margin between the incessantly upgraded asphalt and the tilted, cracked sidewalks, beside an electric pole.  On the strip of Vandiver I drive, the only day lilies were around an electric pole in front of an older house.  None of course around any of the car dealers or state buildings.

On South 9th, those old apartments that J-school students have long inhabited, which almost, and maybe still soon, are slated for the endless destroy-and-replace-craze Columbia is in:

 

Where these lilies are, and where they aren't might have a lot to say to us.  They aren't anywhere that hires people to keep "the grounds."  They aren't anywhere that wealthy people live.  Nor, in my quick survey, any place there are new homes.  Almost a formula:  the more groomed the lawn, the less likely day lilies will be left to bloom.

Our friend, The Missouri Department of Conservation, tells us that the Orange Day Lily is "found along roads, disturbed stream banks, railroads, fields, pastures, old cemeteries, abandoned homes, and waste places. Native of Eurasia. Old-fashioned ornamentals, day lilies were widely planted by early settlers. This plant is sterile and has escaped from cultivation coast to coast by root divisions. Today there are thousands of garden hybrids but, strangely, none of those have been reported as escaped into the wild."  That explains a bit.  The MDOC continues:  "The flowers are rich in protein and are eaten in China; they can be fried or broiled much like squash blossoms or used as a flavoring in soups. The roots can be eaten raw or cooked and are said to taste like salsify. Neither insects nor diseases bother the plant."

Now that has possibilities!  I stopped yesterday at the edge of that sidewalk to nowhere and picked a few blossoms.  Haven't tried them yet.  In salad?  Quick-fried in olive oil?  Hmm...  (Ah, the possibilities...)

But to the point--day lilies seem to have quite a bit to say about how we live right now.  Once prized by 'early settlers'--you can imagine life without the luxury of bits of color, and here, some plants that just have to be stuck in the ground and left alone, little spots of joy just at the corner of the house or beside the barn.  Today, they survive when they aren't easily in the path of mowers--in wet ditches, around mailboxes, which county road crews sometimes try to miss, in forgotten spots at the edges. Interesting is how often, at least in Columbia, they are paired with catalpha trees, a few elder trees towering, and lots of seedlings sprouting up, tolerated as weeds or shrubs, till they interfere with one of our civil projects.  (Both day lilies and catalapha trees tend to be scorned in the designer lands of Bradford pears...)

 

Wouldn't it be fun, given enough leg-power, to just inventory a few neighborhoods around here, create one of those Denis Wood maps, like in Everything Sings?  To test out what space we left, what space isn't yet deliberate.

later, bob