What I know about .... The Daylily

A daylily, is not a lily.  No relation at all.

Commonly misspelt ‘day lily’, it’s a daylily.  Not a lily, it’s its own thing.  Daylily.  

Difficult to kill, easy to grow, very colorful flowers, most around 4-5 inches long, plant is about 2 feet tall.  I have one with 8-inch flowers, nice!

Lotsa lore.  ‘Poisonous to cats!’  ‘Poisonous to chickens!’ ‘Poisonous to humans!’ ‘Delicious!’

I can tell you my chickens eat them, probably because daylilies are among the first things to green up in Spring.  None have gotten sick.  My cats have never munched on a daylily as far as I can tell.  I’ve heard daylilies are edible for humans, I’ve heard daylilies get people sick.  Indeed, a fellow Permie on an old thread here, goes into detail how sick she got after munching on them.  Here's the link: Ditch the Daylily

She convinced me, I don’t want to go through what she did, I’ll pass.


Daylilies are not invasive.  They stick to their own clump, the clump gets a little bigger each year, that’s it.  They don’t spread, with one exception.  Called orange daylily, or Asian daylily, they’re those orange ones that always seem to accumulate on the edge of roads and highways.  They don’t clump, they spread.  Quickly.  And I believe that’s the only daylily that does not keep to itself.


Growing daylilies is a reasonably popular hobby (of which I participate), and there are folks who do the pollen exchange thing with the little brushes, trying to invent a new attractive flower.

What prompted this post, was the emergence of my first daylily of 2022, called Radiation Biohazard, coincidentally the one with the 8-inch diameter flowers that I mentioned earlier:

My kids eat daylily petals like they are candy. I think they taste like sweet lettuce. No one has ever gotten sick. But we have the very plain common yellow ones. Maybe the fancier colored ones might contain different compounds?

https://www.eattheweeds.com/daylily-just-cloning-around-2/
Someone posted this article on another daylily thread and it is super informative on why some daylilies are edible and others might make you sick.

I have the orange ones!
They do spread.
I have recently started using their abundant leaves as mulch around more desired plants.
I figure they are like mulberry trees, minimally useful as food, close to indestructible and therefore an inexhaustible source of biomass.