This club’s project is firmly planted in the ground

Rutland, Vermont, Herald
http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080819/NEWS04/808190383/1002/NEWS01

Next month, the Rutland Kiwanis club is set to launch a city beautification project they believe has the potential to give Rutland a new identity—as the daylily capital of the country.

The organization will distribute bags of about 15 daylilies, brightly colored, long-stemmed perennials that multiply with each passing year, to anyone in the city who’s interested, whether residents, businesses or the municipality.

The only conditions they ask are that participants promise to plant the flowers in their front yard and water them during the first few weeks, according to Richard Macaluso, the club’s coordinator.

“We think this has the opportunity to really be good for the city,” Macaluso said in a phone interview last week. “We really do see the possibility that Rutland could become a capital for daylilies. When we started doing some research into how to purchase the plants and how many we wanted, one of the companies we spoke to asked, ‘Are you planning to have a daylily festival or something like that?’ ”

If the 2,000 plants the Kiwanis club has purchased are planted this fall, the club expects they will multiply to 5,000 flowers within two years, Macaluso said. If another 2,000 flowers are planted next fall, an extension of the project the club hopes to sponsor, they believe that by 2011 Rutland could have 15,000 daylilies in bloom.

The project is one the Kiwanis club has been considering for nearly a year. Before asking the city to commit to the project, they wanted to run a trial themselves, so they planted batches of the flowers in three different locations in September. As they had hoped, the flowers, which typically bloom from late July until September, all bloomed, and with little maintenance. Daylilies are considered a hardy flower, meaning they can survive the region's temperatures and are relatively deer-resistant.

To start, the club has chosen two daylily varieties, the Aztec gold and the white triangle, which despite its name is a saffron color with white triangles on the tips of its petals, Macaluso said.

The Kiwanis club hasn’t set a date or location for distributing the flowers next month, but Macaluso believes it will likely have a booth set up in a central downtown location. So far, the group has spent between $2,000 and $3,000 on the project. Normally, the plants can be purchased for about $12 each and can be found at local garden centers, Macaluso said. He hopes residents will grab hold of the project and even take the initiative to purchase additional plants, which come in thousands of varieties and hybrids, on their own.