About Us
I’m Beryl Whitfield, and I’ve been growing daylilies and other perennials in my garden in the Adelaide Hills for more than 45 years. I started Daylilies in Australia because I was tired of reading gardening advice written for gardeners in the United States, the United Kingdom, or continental Europe — places where the seasons, soil, rainfall, and pests are nothing like what we deal with here. A frost date in Ohio means nothing in Perth. A “spring feed” schedule written for an English cottage garden doesn’t translate cleanly to a Brisbane summer or an Adelaide heatwave.
So I set out to write the resource I wish I’d had when I started out: practical, honest, Australia-specific advice about growing daylilies and the perennials that pair well with them, from the tropical north to the cool hills where I garden myself.
Why I grow daylilies
Daylilies are, in my experience, one of the most forgiving, generous flowering perennials you can grow. A single well-established clump in my own garden produces dozens of blooms across a season, and while any one flower only lasts a day, a good variety planted in reasonable conditions keeps producing new blooms for weeks. They shrug off the kind of heat that flattens fussier plants, cope with a wide range of soils, come back reliably every year, and don’t demand much once they’re settled in.
What keeps me hooked after all these years is how varied they are. I’ve got varieties in my own beds ranging from soft creams through to deep reds and near-black, some with ruffled edges, some spidery and elegant, some heavily doubled. There’s a daylily for almost every garden style, which is part of why I think they deserve a proper Australia-focused resource rather than another generic list copied from an overseas gardening site.
What you’ll find here
I’ve organised the site around a few core areas:
- Daylily Care — planting, watering, feeding, mulching, and dividing daylilies through the Australian seasons.
- Varieties — how I think about colour, form, height, and bloom habit when choosing daylilies for a garden.
- Seasonal Notes — a season-by-season guide to what daylilies need, adjusted for our climate calendar rather than the Northern Hemisphere one most gardening content assumes.
- Plants — companion planting ideas and border design notes for building a garden around daylilies rather than growing them in isolation.
- The blog — longer articles on specific plants and problems, from troubleshooting non-flowering clumps to profiles of other perennials I grow alongside my daylilies.
My approach to giving advice
I try to be specific rather than generic. Instead of vague instructions like “water regularly,” I try to explain what that actually means for a daylily clump in sandy soil through a Perth summer versus heavy clay through a Melbourne winter. Where climate or region genuinely changes the advice, I say so, because there’s no single “Australian climate” — a guide that pretends otherwise isn’t much more useful than one written for another country entirely.
I also try to be honest about uncertainty. Daylilies are generally easy-going in my experience, but I’ve had my own share of clumps that sulked in poor drainage or deep shade and refused to flower. Rather than promising a guaranteed fix, I try to walk through the range of likely causes so you can work out what applies to your own garden.
Who I’m writing for
Whether you’ve never grown a daylily before and want to know where to start, or you’ve already got an established clump that’s stopped flowering and you’re trying to work out why, or you’re simply after tough, attractive perennials to fill out an Australian garden bed, this site is written for you. I don’t assume any gardening background, but I try not to oversimplify to the point of being unhelpful — I’d rather give you genuinely useful information than filler.
How this site is put together
Everything here draws on what I’ve learned growing Hemerocallis and companion perennials myself, cross-checked against the realities of different Australian climate zones. I know my own conditions in the Adelaide Hills well, but I try to research and flag how advice shifts for tropical, arid, and genuinely cold-winter gardens too, since I know most of my readers aren’t gardening in my exact conditions.
Get in touch
This site is still growing, and I’ll keep adding guides as I learn more and as readers ask questions. If you’ve got a suggestion, a correction, or a topic you’d like me to cover, get in touch through the contact page — I read every message.
P.S I recommend using Internet Stability Test for your wifi