- [Announcer] "Making" is presented by the Coal Yard Cafe in Ithaca, New York.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - A daylily is really the centerpiece of the summer garden because it starts blooming in late June and will bloom right through July and a pretty fair chunk of August.

The daylily gets its name because each bloom lasts only one day, but there are other blooms right behind it, there are more blooms forming on the tree.

And so when you have your daylily in bloom, it's just it's wave after wave after wave after wave of blooms.

And depending upon how big the plant is, every scape is probably gonna produce somewhere between 15 and 25 buds.

(upbeat music continues) My name is Cyril Weller, and I'm a daylily gardener.

(upbeat music continues) I was born in Washington, DC.

When I was 12, my dad was transferred to Syracuse and my mother always enjoyed gardening.

A garden at that time was a luxury that the family could not afford, but we used to go over to the edge of the property and we'd look at Mrs.

McDaniel's garden, which was small, but it brought joy to my mother, and I always remembered that.

So when I got into daylily gardening, I thought, "You know, this may be an opportunity because it's a perennial."

And so when you have some, they will increase each year and you can then give that to other people.

After graduate school, I met my wife Mary.

We've been here in Vessel now about 25 years or so.

And when we came here, there was a very nice couple across the street, Anne and John.

One day Anne came over and said, "What do you think about down in the corner just stripping off some of the grass and putting in some flowers?"

I said, "Sure, I could do that."

So we started in the corner of the yard.

The plants grew well, whatever we put in, and it turns out that as the street slopes down from the back of the yard to the front, you had built-in irrigation so they were just as happy as could be.

So each year, that corner island bed moved a little bit more uphill, so that was the first one of nine garden beds.

Everybody who comes here initially is surprised at the range.

Now we grow 500 daylilies, but there are gardeners I know who grow 3 or 4,000.

So when you go to a garden like that and you look, it's got a tremendous wow factor because there's so much variety and the mix of colors that you see.

So there's really nothing out there as a perennial that competes with daylilies.

When you look at the pictures of the daylilies, you can see that there's spectacular variety.

That daylilies, some of them are round and have different colors, so not just one color at all, and others look like a small peony.

They might be five inches in diameter, but they have lots of petals.

And the third group is a spider, where the pedals are very thin with big spaces in between.

(upbeat music continues) For years here, people had been urging us to apply for Display Garden status, but when we heard it enough times from enough people said, "All right, all right, we'll apply."

What the Display Garden requires is you, it's like a collection, your daylilies.

So it's not about who has the most expensive one, or who has the oldest one, or who has the one with the wildest color, but it's really a mix of all kinds of things that you can get in a garden, and also it has to be well cared for.

(upbeat music continues) When you have a Display Garden, one of the requirements is that each daylily be labeled.

And so the labels would specify the registered name of the daylily and also the name of the hybridizer and the year.

So you can go out to any daylily here and you can find a stainless steel marker.

(upbeat music continues) There are ways to keep the expense of daylily gardening down.

The one way is to swap plants with other gardeners.

You have a plant, they have a plant.

One gardener who came though he says, "You buy these daylilies and some of them are certainly pricey, and then you grow them and increase them, and you divide them and give them to other gardeners so that they can have daylilies in their yard."

And he said, "So what's the catch?"

And I guess that there's no real trick to this.

You know, if you want to have a nice garden, we can help you do that.

We provide technical advice, we've gone to people's gardens and help them, and we've certainly provided a lot of plants.

We have so many connections by this point there's not too much we can't accommodate.

I've done gardens for a number of people in this neighborhood.

That one couple lost their last house in the flood in Vessel some years back.

It was a devastating loss.

So they moved here after the flood and I said, "Well, if your wife likes gardening, then I will provide the whole garden."

So I did the plants, the labor, the design, and that's just up the street.

I did some work on the house across the street.

I'm doing some work right now in the house next door to it.

And gardening is a nice therapy because it's not hectic like work, you can do as much or as little as you have time for, And it's also an opportunity to socialize.

(upbeat music continues) A woman who was previously the president of the American Daylily Society, she said, "We came for the daylilies, but we stayed for the people."

You meet so many great people in the hobby and so many generous people.

(upbeat music continues) Thinking back to my mother's love for flowers, I think it's mostly the joy that you see in other people's faces when they realize that they can have a garden like this.

Let's remember that it's a hobby, that we want it to be enjoyable for everybody, we don't want it to be stressful.

Everything doesn't happen today.

You know, there's tomorrow, there's next week, there's next year.

(upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] "Making" is made possible with support from the Coal Yard Cafe in Ithaca, New York, from Beer Properties, and from viewers like you.