The Beginning..........

Located in the Camden, South Carolina (Zone 7-A), and just 25 miles up I-20 from the state capitol of Columbia, we are fortunate to have conditions that allow both evergreen and dormant daylilies to flourish. Jackie has a long heritage with daylilies, as her mother was a collector in the early beginnings of this wonderful flower. We remember back in the 1950’s, when we were young marrieds, busy getting careers and a family started, when her mother, Eula McDaniel, sheepishly admitted that she paid $25.00 for a daylily. “TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS!! Has she lost her mind?”, we said. Now we laugh understandingly after that same bug bit us hard in 1991. That was when we moved from our residence of 26 years - one with a tiny, hilly yard, many trees and sugar-like sandy soil, to our current home with almost one acre of flat, black, loamy soil.

Getting started..........

Like most newbies, we began buying $3.00 & $5.00 daylilies but quickly discovered spiders, doubles, miniatures, etc. and had to have some of everything. Later Jackie saw the beautiful newer edged and eyed creations and she fell head over heels. Now our daylily collection varies between 400 and 500 named varieties and several thousand seedlings.

“Seed happens!!” ...........

In 1993 Jackie innocently pollinated a few blooms, just to see what would happen. You know the rest of this story.......... and now we’re hooked even worse! In 1994 she pollinated in earnest more heavily. When our first seedlings bloomed, nothing could have been more exciting. That started us on the track of improving our parent stock and developing hybridizing goals. It also started Dan making more beds to hold all the new seedlings, which quickly became an almost impossible task. Since 1995, we have continually upgraded our plant collection, adding many leading cultivars each year.

Changing our focus.........

With time we have come to realize that we must focus our efforts more narrowly to conserve both space and energy. We are evolving toward Jackie concentrating on large tets, with her hybridizing aimed at heavily edged whites, and at boldly contrasting eyes and intricate edges. Dan is working on spiders , with emphasis on diploid near whites and others. So we will gradually adjust the makeup of our garden collection and continue to add new introductions to improve our hybridizing programs.

Selling daylilies and seed........

“We will not sell daylilies. This is for fun - not a business”, we both declared. But what we discovered is that selling plants became a necessity as we quickly filled all available space and more. Eleven years ago we could not squeeze one more daylily into our garden and decided to have a one-time sale. We called it a “Firesale”. The response was very gratifying and it reclaimed some welcome space for us.........which we immediately filled with more purchases! So we have continued each year with our Firesale. We are fortunate because we are retired now and love what we’re doing, and look forward to it every day! And we also receive a wonderful bonus.........interacting via e-mail with the best people that we have never met. Hemerohollics are great folks and we feel a very close affection to all our daylily friends.

The future..........

To aid us in our quest for better seedlings we built a greenhouse in 1999. This was a fun project, beginning with greenhouse study and research, visiting other greenhouse gardens, choosing the design, selecting the site and finally doing the actual assembly and finishing work on it.

We do much of our hybridizing in the greenhouse. By harvesting seed in the spring rather than mid-summer, we hope that the longer growing season will give us bigger seedlings faster and we will get a higher percentage of first year bloom and larger, more robust plants the second year. We are having a blast with our daylilies and pray that we can continue for a long time.