My favorite landscape plant is the stella de Oro (star of gold) day lily.
Stella de Oro daylilies are herbaceous (non-woody stems) plants that come back year after year (perennial), and are successfully grown from Georgia to Wisconsin and beyond.

What I like about Stella:
Stella is an early starter, blooming around May in the Chicago area, and will flower all summer long and even into the fall if cared for properly. In fact, her ability to re-flower over a long period, along with her adaptability to a wide range of planting zones and conditions, makes Stella de Oro daylily the most popular of all daylilies. She’s a real “MILF” in the perennial world!
The flowers are bright yellow and trumpeted, sticking up around 14″ high. The sword-shaped foliage is very classy-looking, forming a dense clump that spreads about 12-14″.

Sun and Soil Requirements for Stella de Oro Daylily:
Stella will spit out more blooms if grown in full sunshine, but will also do fairly well light shade (dappled sun), thus offering a lot of flexibility in location. She’s also drought-tolerant and prefers well-drained soil. Think about it, Stella is not only a MILF, she fits in just about anywhere, and she’s low maintenance too!

How can you use Stella in your landscape?:
I have stellas going solo like any other shrub, but they can also be planted around landscape boarders, or in mass groupings (Stella looks good in gang-plantings). They also look very nice placed in a large pot on your deck.
In addition, Stella is deer and rabbit resistant, making her a good choice for critter infested areas.

Care for Stella de Oro Daylily:
Her individual flowers survive just 1 day, but Stella de Oro daylily will re-bloom. She will put out more profusely if the spent flowers are deadheaded: remove stem and all (Here’s a complete article with pictures involving Stella pruning and deadheading).

Overall Stella de Oro daylily is a fairly low-maintenance perennial: just cut her to the ground before winter and like most MILF’s she’ll return again in Spring.After 3 years or so, you may consider splitting your larger, mature Stellas into multiple MILFs. I usually do this in early spring, splitting them with an ordinary shovel. Cut the root ball in half and re-plant in well-drained soil.

Recently, Stella has been propigated further, and comes in brilliant red! If you’d like to purchase your very own Stella MILF, try Gurney’s Seed and Nursery

I’m watching the Daytona 500 right now and the infield there is perfectly green and striped nicely (it’s 81 degrees in Florida!). To me, the running at Daytona is the first sign that Spring is near. In addition, today’s weather in Chicagoland is around 40 degrees, windy and rainy; a perfect Spring-day-prelude. The next sign will be my crocus flowers popping, and I will be sure to share pictures.

With all that in mind, I figured I’d share some of my upcoming lawn and landscape tips with you, and also share a little about what I hope to accomplish with this blog, Life and Lawns.

(1) Upcoming Major Lawn and Landscape Tips and Advice

• The first major addition to Life and Lawns will be a video post about “How to Perform a True Spring Clean-up.” My very good buddy and fellow lawn pro Bryan from Monkey Crash will be assisting with the video (he is not aware of that yet! )
• Another very informative series will tell you step by step “How to Build a Simple Retaining Wall.” A related post will teach you “How to Build Simple, Clean Landscape Border.”
• I will also be showing you “How to Split and Transplant Hostas and Other Perennials.”
• Finally, and most importantly, I will give you 2 or 3 ways on “How to Stripe Your Lawn Like a Golf Course Fairway.” This one will be a first on the internet as far as I can tell. I have always marvelled at the way Major League Baseball outfields look so perfectly striped. It’s done the same was as golf course fairways and NASCAR track infields. I know how it’s done, and I’ll teach you how.

I ask that you subscribe now to my RSS feed so you don’t miss these and other important postings. If you wish, you can have updates sent to your email address. See the box in the top right sidebar. I don’t send you any garbage, Feedburner just sends you an email each time this site is updated… it’s simple!

(2) The Future of Life and Lawns

I’ve only just entered the blog world during the Summer of 2007. My good buddy Julio got me into it. I had a free Google blog for a while and then moved here later in 2007. Since then, my readership has tripled, and the search engines are sending lots of searchers here daily. I sincerely hope the advice I offer is helpful. I want all of you to be obsessed with your lawn like me!

As far as the next few years go:I’d certainly love it if this blog takes off and I’m able to offer more professionally produced video posts. I’d like to find a sponsor who’d finance some of the production. Eventually, it’d be great if I could be on HGTV (why are you laughing at me?) … but I don’t have pretty long hair or a baby face like those guys. I’m just a regular dude with an attitude and a knack for being too blunt at the wrong time. Whatever happens, I’ll always be in love with my lawn!

Ramble Ramble… Don’t forget folks, subscribe to my feed so you don’t miss any free tips! Your comments and questions are always welcome.

–AL

This has been another lawn tip from Life and Lawns dot com, tell a friend!