botanical nomenclature.

My tendency to label and list things extends to the garden; if you walk through the yard, you'll see little plastic (in the vegetable bed) or metal garden labels marking everything from the 3 varieties of lavender in the herb bed to the potted Chardonnay to the particular kind of lettuce growing in the veggie patch. Yes, it's anal-retentive, and I embrace it.

The summer after we moved in, Grandma gave me a half dozen daylily bulbs for my birthday or Christmas, I can't remember. We planted them along the border in the backyard, and I carefully recorded the variety name on a little metal tag which I stuck in the ground next to each one. For four or five seasons we watched as they grew, sent up buds—and were thoroughly munched by the deer that roam our neighborhood. Seriously, the deer seemed oblivious to the plants themselves, or even to the flowers, but boy ... those flower buds must be tasty.

Fast forward to the two-year period when we were in Jersey. The landscaping company we hired to keep things while we were away completely obliterated my careful little plant labels.

Last year, Rob engineered a deer-proof system involving netting and stakes—for the first season, we had a fully blooming crop of daylilies. But we had no idea what their names were. So as they bloomed, we made up new names for them, and I made little metal labels. Like Ninety-Nine, which has a gold/orange/red scheme that looks like the sun on a very hot day. Or Jackson, which has a crimson and gold palette that reminded us of the colors of USC, whose football games Keith Jackson broadcasts every fall. Or Butters (the color reference is obvious), named after a South Park character. Or Pickelson Slammer, which gets its name from the house cocktail (you'll have to ask us about that one).

So our daylilies aren't exactly up to whatever formal botanical standard exists out there. But we know what they are.