DAYLILIES and CONEFLOWERS by Margaret S. Hamilton

I’m saying goodbye to my perennial gardens before leaving Cincinnati for a month. When I return, the plants will have withered to handfuls of brown stalks, soon to disappear underground until next spring.

We’ve had brutally cold winters that produced magnificent daylily blooms, each lasting just one day. This year, our mild winter and late spring hard frost produced smaller daylily flowers, fewer in number. Daylilies bloom in June and July, starting with what Adrian Higgins of the Washington Post terms the delicate tawny ditch-weed daylily, growing wild after escaping from the original Asian imports.

The coneflowers have been magnificent, early to bloom, shunned by deer, lasting forever on sturdy stems, the workhorse plant of native prairie gardens. They are a butterfly magnet; goldfinches delight in picking seeds out of the cones in the center of the flower. I have two purple varieties, Magnus and Pica Bella. I found a white hybrid planted in front of the local police station. Coneflowers have been extensively hybridized, though the purple prairie descendants are the most reliable.

Coneflowers are the backbone of my perennial beds, just as compelling main characters are the mainstay of my stories and novels. Other flowers—daisies, brown-eyed Susans, raspberry monarda—bloom in conjunction with them, never lasting as long, or having the same visual impact.

Daylilies are more ephemeral, spectacular during their day of bloom, like a momentous event in a plot, a sparkling character or buxom diva, sitting on the sidelines until their day in the sun. I have reblooming varieties, including the reliable front-of-border Rosy Returns, equally at home with lavender in June and raspberry monarda in July. Nature creates its own harmonious perennial bouquets with never a clash of colors.

Each year, after the daffodils have finished blooming, perennials emerge in the same sequence: iris, daylilies, daisies, blue salvia, coneflowers, monarda, brown-eyed Susans, sedum, false sunflowers, asters, and finally, the mums. Flowering bushes—knockout roses, hydrangeas, and crepe myrtles—provide a continuous floral backdrop. But every year is different, some varieties outstanding rock stars and some barely making the effort.

My short stories are much the same. Though I use the same setting and cast of characters, different secondary characters assume a more important role in each story. Some earn a repeat performance, battling a different set of circumstances or solving a new problem. Six-foot-tall thistles are always the villains, coupled with an insidious twining vine that wraps itself around the dogwood trunks and climbs up the shutters, refusing to let go without a fight.

I’ll deadhead the daisies and clip the daylily stalks, but leave the coneflowers to wither on their stalks until late fall, a source of seeds for the birds and a final memory of a perennial bed bursting with colorful blooms, butterflies, and swarming bees.

Readers, what are your favorite perennials?

Margaret S. Hamilton has published cozy stories in Kings River Life and the Darkhouse Destination: Mystery! Anthology. She is completing her first crime novel, Curtains for the Corpse.