Looking Back --- Looking Forward!
It all started back in 2007 when I went on a city-wide tour of gardens in Green Bay, Wisconsin. So many beautiful private gardens! However, I want to zero in on just one of them that has made a BIG difference in my gardening hobby.
This is one of the first daylilies I hybridized. That was in the summer of 2007.
I am fascinated by the complex of colors in this bloom.
You should see it in the early morning dew – it becomes iridescent!
Really the colors sparkle and shine.
I was slowly walking around one of the gardens and stopped to look at some daylilies. There was an elderly woman standing there and I mentioned how beautiful the lilies were. I said to her, “that must be difficult to get such beautiful lilies” and she said “no it is rather easy”. She then went on to tell me that this is her garden and she hybridized all the lilies that I see there. Then she said, “it is rather easy”. I said, “really!”. She then went onto explain how she did the hybridizing. In that moment I caught the “bug” and decided I had to try hybridizing daylilies.
I have shown here in this Blog Posting only a few of the many daylilies I have hybridized over the years. Each plant is given a code number or letter and year hybridized so that I can keep tract of the ancestry going back these many years, as I have often (combined) hybridized some new plants with older plants hybridized years ago.
From that short encounter over seventeen years ago, I went on to hybridize so many daylilies. To date, I have now hybridized “created” over 550 different individual plants all with different blooms. As I combined different colors and bloom structures, I kept a list of all the parents and even grand-parents of each daylily that I created down through the generations. I now have this extensive log of my work over the years. It is interesting to me that even though I thought I knew what the end result of each combination of plants I hybridized would be, in many cases the final results in colors, combinations and characteristics were different than what I was expecting – must be some recessive genes coming to the foreground.
Once I have harvested the new seed, I plant it the following Spring and it then take a minimum of three to four years before the first new hybridized bloom appears. It is a rather long time waiting to see if what I created meets my expectations.
Here are a couple of the most recent hybridized plants created in 2017
blooming for the first time this year.
This little hobby has now become an obsession. Even though I have given away well over one- hundred and fifty of these plants as I have tried to find more garden room, I have finally run out of garden space. Time to find a new hobby!!!
