Those ditch lilies are very common in the countryside here in SW Ohio. I even have some on my property... a garden remnant of the previous owners. But my favorite old homestead flower is a bearded iris I've nicknamed 'Wild Lakota'. The roadside places in which I've found it are nowhere near any existing home. So I can't imagine how many decades they've been able to persist, untended. And I've found it growing in a few rural locations between Cincinnati & Dayton, so I assume it was a pass-along plant a very long time ago. I collected a few pieces years ago and now have a big patch of it in my front garden. For years it had never set seed, but then last year there were a couple bee pods. I've seen other, more modern irises blooming at abandoned home sites. And once I visited an abandoned trailer park... all the trailers were gone but the remnants of their gardens were still there... irises... hibiscuses... monardas... lobelias... sempervivums... it was pretty cool. On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 10:05 AM, Boyce Tankersley < btankers@chicagobotanic.org> wrote: > In the Chicago area the older homesites often have patches of Scilla > sibirica, Lycoris squamigera, the common orange Daylily and sometimes a > peony or two. My favorite however is a 'grove' of tiger lilies, probably > 250 - 300 plants - when in full bloom it is a show stopper. > >