A variety of valuable vegetation at Rotary Gardens

Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you support Rotary Botanical Gardens.

That’s not quite how the rhyme goes, but it’s an appropriate beginning for a story about this weekend’s plant sale at the gardens.

The sale runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. today, Saturday and Sunday.

This year’s sale includes:

-- 250 varieties of daylilies from the gardens’ William Potter Day Lily Collection. Colors range from pale yellow to a deep red that’s almost purple. The lilies are divided by color, and tags specify height and variety. A small selection of “mystery lilies” with no variety information also will be sold.

“Daylilies can handle sun or part shade. They tolerate a wide range of soil conditions and are very low maintenance,” said Mark Dwyer, gardens horticultural manager.

-- 25 varieties of sweet peppers and 25 varieties of hot peppers. The sweet peppers range in color from ordinary green to yellow, orange, red and purple. The hot peppers range in heat from a tiny nip of fire to a major conflagration.

-- 25 varieties of basils: Lemon, Thai, lettuce leaf—and those are just the ordinary ones.

-- 25 varieties of heirloom runner and pole beans seeds with names such as Greasy Grits, Christmas Large Speckled Lima, Marvel of Venice, Rattlesnake and Pretzel Bean.

The Cherokees carried one of the varieties, Cherokee Trail of Tears, during the march from Tennessee to Oklahoma in the winter of 1838.

-- 100 varieties of heirloom tomatoes. These tomatoes are pink, yellow, purple, black, red, white, orange, yellow with red streaks, yellow with pink streaks, green, green striped and just about every other combination you can think of. Variety names include Woodle Orange, Zapotec Pink Ribbed, Sausage, Purple Calabash and Oxheart Giant.

All the proceeds benefit Rotary Gardens. The garden receives no tax dollars.

Although the garden instituted a $5 entry fee this year, the annual spring sale still is a crucial part of the budget.

The garden has a small staff and runs on tens of thousands of volunteer hours. This year, volunteers divided 250 daylilies from the gardens’ Potter Day Lilly Collection under the direction of Potter himself. That work yielded nearly 2,500 divisions.

On Thursday, volunteers were charged with the tedious task of placing wafer thin, annoyingly flexible plant tags into thousands of vegetable and herb plants. Another set of volunteers prepared the area for visitors.

Their only reward? A piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie and an “attaboy” from Dwyer during a mid-morning break.

Of course, any person who volunteers 36 hours a year is rewarded with a free membership to the garden. Many of the volunteers who worked Thursday had already reached that mark.