With their gorgeous colors and large blooms, it's hard to imagine a prettier flower than a daylily. They are undoubtedly some of the world's most favorite plants, and they're also incredibly easy to grow and care for! To help you enjoy these bold beauties in your Bettendorf garden this spring, we've put everything you'll need to know about shopping, planting, and caring for daylilies into this handy guide!

Daylily vs. Lily: The Inside Scoop

Before we get you all excited about planting daylilies, let's get some of the scientific stuff out of the way: what is a daylily, and how are they different from real lilies? While it may seem like we're playing semantics here, there are actually some big differences in bloom time, toxicity, and appearance between the two. Here are a few key differences to remember:

• Daylilies grow from tuberous roots, while true lilies grow from bulbs.
• Daylilies have multiple stems, while true lilies have just one.
• Daylilies bloom for only one day, while true lilies bloom for 7-10 days.
• Daylilies have leaves that grow upwards out from the soil, while true lilies have broad leaves that spiral around a single stem.

Daylily Care and Maintenance Tips for Iowa

One of the great things about planting daylilies in your garden is that they are super easy to care for, making maintenance fairly low-key. They're drought and pest resistant, disease-free, not at all picky about where they're planted (so long as they get plenty of sun), and they don't need much in the way of fertilizer, making them some of the best hardy perennials to plant in Bettendorf, especially for water-wise gardens.

Although daylily blooms only last for one day, they will rebloom with the proper care. To encourage your daylilies to rebloom, snip off spent flowers as they occur. When all the buds on each scape have blossomed, cut their stems back to the ground. Daylilies are also prone to spreading, so you may need to divide them every few years to prevent them from taking over your garden.

How to Use Daylilies in a Bettendorf Garden

Daylilies are extraordinarily diverse and are great for attracting hummingbirds, butterflies, and other important pollinators to outdoor spaces, making them a popular choice for every type of garden. Here are a few of our favorite placements for these bountiful bloomers:

• Rain gardens: Because they can tolerate both dry conditions and soggier soil, we love using daylilies in our rain gardens or anywhere water collects or runs off.

• Slopes: Daylilies are great lower-maintenance (and much more attractive!) alternatives to grass on slopes or in other hard-to-reach areas of your landscape.

• Borders: Another of our favorite uses for daylilies is in a shrub border alongside woody plants like hydrangeas, evergreens, and spirea. You can also include them in your perennial flower borders. Their dense growth habit makes them excellent at keeping weeds from popping up and will quickly fill a border with color! We recommend planting different varieties with alternating heights, colors, and bloom times.

• Containers: Choose dwarf varieties of daylilies—like Purple De Oro, a profuse and compact bloomer–for container planting. If you choose to plant them in containers, your daylilies will require a bit more maintenance to keep them happy, so make sure the pots are large enough to allow their roots to spread and that their soil is well-draining and doesn't dry out.

Beautiful Daylilies to Try This Year in Bettendorf

In case you couldn't tell, we love daylilies and have some stunning cultivars in stock at our garden center! If you're after some dazzling colors this year, try some of these hand-picked varieties:

• Bela Lugosi: Award-winning and available in the most vibrant purple, you'll want to plant this stunner in a jewel garden, perennial border, or containers.
• Fragrant Reflection: A soft yellow flower with large, trumpet-shaped blooms and a lovely light fragrance!
• Lies and Lipstick: A compact summer reblooming daylily with lovely pink and red flowers.
• Moroccan Sunrise: Another great reblooming daylily variety with rose-pink petals surrounding ivory throats.
• Pink Wing: A dwarf daylily variety with pink flowers that reblooms continuously in the early season.
• Punch Yellow: An exotic-looking daylily with yellow and coral blooms. Flowers from spring until fall.
• Red Hot Returns: A crimson red bloomer that flowers in the early midseason.
• Red Ribs: This orange and red daylily blooms continuously from spring to fall, giving you nonstop flowers all season!
• Strawberry Candy: The perfect daylily for a cottage garden with pretty strawberry pink and coral red blooms, this one ranks high among our personal favorites and is a triple award winner.

We hope we've helped you learn a bit more about the care and maintenance of daylilies in Bettendorf and that you're just as excited as we are about these fabulous flowers! We look forward to seeing you soon to help you pick out the perfect daylilies for your unique landscape!