Nederlandse naam: Daglelie
Latijnse naam: Hemerocallis

Smaak: Fris-zoet met een verrassende wat peperige nasmaak.
Gebruik: Daglelies of Hemerocallis-bloemen behoren zonder meer tot de lekkerste eetbare bloemen. De vrij grote bloem-bladen of ‘bloem-kelken’ smaken fris-zoet en hebben een verrassende wat peperige nasmaak. Hierdoor zijn ze geschikt voor zowel desserts als voor hartige gerechten.
Als prettige bijkomstigheid hebben ze ook nog een heerlijk knisperige structuur. De meeldraden, met het stuifmeel, worden verwijderd.

Er zijn Daglelies in heel veel verschillende, maar prachtige kleuren, met elk een eigen- en typerende naam. Daglelie-bloemen zijn maar één dag open, maar de volgende dag zijn er weer nieuwe, om andere ‘dagdroom’-garneringen waar te maken.
De Daglelie moet een traktatie blijven, dat verdient niet alleen haar smaak, maar ook haar schoonheid.
Het eten van Daglelies is overigens absoluut niet nieuw. In het Midden-Oosten worden ze, al sinds eeuwen, eerst gestoomd, vervolgens gedroogd en dan in soepen verwerkt.

These edible flowers record to ages back. Their edible and medicinal usages have been noted since ancient days. This flower was mentioned n the Chinese book called Materia Medica for the first time in 656 A.D. it originated from East Asia. It is assumed that daylilies were first introduced to Europe in 1500 A.D.

Daylily herbs are undoubtedly very nutritious but like all consuming things these herbs also have some side effect.

These plant leaves are known to contain hallucinogenic properties.
If anyone is allergic to the any of the nutrients that these herbs contain, then the person should consult experts’ opinions on this herb’s consumption.
Over consumption of anything can be harmful anyway. Daylilies are no exception to this norm.

Medicinal Use
  • Daylily has some medicinal property which can cure arsenic poisoning effect. That is why they are used as an antidote to it.
  • Extracts of this herb is also used as anti-tumor.
  • Ancient folk tales suggest that these herbs were used in cancer treatment.

Other Uses
  • These plants are good for landscaping. They are very effective in sweeping masses.
  • These plants can prevent brush fires. Since their roots are deep merged in water, they put down the brush fire.
  • They can prevent soil erosion if planted in slopes.
  • This tremendously beautiful flower finds admiration amidst floral bouquets and flower vases.

Daylily During Pregnancy
No recorded side effect or extra health benefit of consumption of daylily is there. But due to hormonal changes in the body during pregnancy the body reacts in different ways to many things. It is advisable to consult experts’ suggestions on consumption of this herb in the pregnancy duration.

Daylily Storage
This herb is consumed both fresh and dried. So there is no particular way or norms regarding its storage.

Daylily Interesting Facts
Daylilies are tasty, nutritious and are interestingly in common culture in eastern Asian countries.

In a common local omen culture expecting women are asked to wear daylilies around their waist in order to give birth to a male child.
This herb has many cultivars and their sub-cultivars, all of which count up to more than 1000 in number.
Some cultivars of this edible flower are poisonous.

Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 1998 Apr;52(2):136-7. Effects of Hemerocallis on sleep in mice.
Freeze-dried flowers of the Akinowasuregusa (Hemerocallis fulva L. var. sempervirona M. Hotta), a Hemerocallis genus of the lily family, were fed to C57BL strain mice. The slow wave sleep and paradoxical sleep of the Hemerocallis-treated group increased during the dark period. The differences between the control group and the Hemerocallis-treated group were significant (P < 0.05). The Hemerocallis feeding did not cause a change in sleep time during the light period. As a result, there was no significant change in the sleep-time percentage over a 24-h period.

Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2007;16 Suppl 1:196-203. In vitro and vivo antioxidant activities of daylily flowers and the involvement of phenolic compounds. Que F1, Mao L, Zheng X.
Daylily (Hemerocallis fulva Linn.) flowers were hot air-dried and freeze-dried after harvest. Antioxidant properties of water and ethanol extracts prepared from these dried flowers were evaluated in terms of total antioxidant activity, reducing capacity, and metal chelating activity. Extracts from daylily flowers exhibited strong antioxidant activity. Ethanol was more efficiency to extract antioxidants than water, and freeze-drying preserved higher activities than air-drying. Rutin, (+)-catechin, and gallic acid were identified in the extracts by HPLC, and were highly related to the antioxidant activities. The antioxidant activity was further evaluated by feeding mice with ethanol extract from freeze-dried daylily flowers for 60 days. The results demonstrated that the extract at dosage of 40-225 mg/100 g significantly increased the activity of SOD (superoxide dismutase) and reduced the lipid peroxidation in both blood and liver of rat.

Daylily flowers, commonly called yellow flower vegetable (Huang-Hua-Cai), golden needle vegetable (Jin-Zhen-Cai) and Xuan-Cao flower in China, are the flower and bud parts of Hemerocallis citrina Baroni or H. fulva (L.) L.. Traditionally, apart from being food materials, the herb has been used as an anodyne, febrifuge, sleep-promoting and sedative agent, and for stimulating the secretion of milk for women in childbirth in China [1]. It is also well known as Wang-You-Cao in Chinese, meaning forget-one’s sadness plant, and has been recorded to exhibit antidepressant effects in ancient medical books of China, including the famous textbook “Compendium of Materia Medica”.

In modern pharmacological and clinical studies, the neurological actions of daylily flowers have been documented. Several studies showed that significant sleep-promoting and sedative effects were elicited in mice treated with daylily flowers or the extracts compared with mice in control group [2, 3, 4]. In a clinical study, daylily flowers exhibited significant better efficacy in treating insomnia than the control treatment with diazepam [2]. In addition, many previous studies have also demonstrated that the hydroalcoholic extracts of daylily flowers conferred antidepressant-like effects in acute stress-induced, chronic unpredictable mild stress-induced and corticosterone-induced depression-like models of rodents and improving learning and memory in animal models [5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. In these studies, the underlying mechanisms for the central nervous system (CNS) modulating effects were not entirely clear and were considered to at least partly involve in the anti-inflammatory property and the ability to mediate the brain levels of monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin (5-HT), noradrenaline (NE) and dopamine (DA) [7, 9, 10].

The major constituents responsible for the CNS modulating effects remain unclear. Some previous studies speculated that such effects might be related to flavonoids [8, 9]. Indeed, Du and colleagues found that in comparison to the aqueous extract, the higher flavonoid content in the alcohol extracts of daylily flowers resulted in better biological activities [9]. In particular, the work also revealed that the combination of rutin and hesperidin, two main flavonoid ingredients, displayed similar antidepressant-like effect to the alcohol extracts. In our previous in vivo screening study on the active ingredients of daylily flowers, the fraction containing ~60% flavonoids exhibited significant antidepressant-like effects whereas the fraction lack of flavonoids showed no effect in mice model by forced swimming test, tail suspension test and antagonism reserpine experiments [11]. However, daylily flowers contain various types of chemical ingredients including flavonoids, phenolic acids and derivatives, di- and tri-terpenes, essential oils, steroidal saponins, alkaloids, amino acids, polysaccharides and so on [12], the potential neurological effects of other constituents in daylily flowers are largely uninvestigated. Therefore, the objectives of this study were to separate the extracts of daylily flowers into different fractions and to evaluate the neuroprotective effects of each fraction using PC12 cell damage models induced by corticosterone and glutamate with also a view to identifying the active fractions and their potential effect on the neurotransmitter release in the cell culture medium.


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EETBARE DAGLELIE (Hemerocallis hybr. 'Stella d'Oro')

Iedereen kent ze wel, de sierlijke gele tot paarse bloemen die je vroeger op elk boerenerf terugvond. Wat weinigen weten is dat de daglelie ook eetbaar is. In Azië zijn de bloemen vooral gekend om hun lekkere smaak en worden ze in de supermarkt verkocht als groenten.
De selectie ‘Stella d’Oro’ geeft de hele zomer bloem en is een van de populairste daglelies vanwege de verfijnde, zoete smaak.
Daglelies zijn enorm makkelijk te kweken, ze zijn meerjarig en wintervast en kunnen zowel in een bloemenborder of in pot gehouden worden. Liefst staan ze in de zon, hoewel een plek in de halfschaduw ook kan. Geteeld in halfschaduw bloemen de planten wel minder productief.

Heel de plant is eetbaar, de bloemen, de verse bladtoppen en de vlezige knollen. De bloemen kunnen in elk stadium geoogst worden en zijn in elk stadium verschillend in smaak en textuur. De bloemknoppen worden gebakken, gefrituurd in tempura of toegevoegd aan roerbakgerechten. De bloemende bloemen zijn lekker knapperig en extra zoet door de nectar. Deze worden dan dikwijls als zoete garnering gebruikt in allerlei desserts. De uitgebloeide bloemen worden meestal gebruikt om stoofpotjes of soepen te dikken.