2012 National Convention Recap | The Osman Garden

About ten years ago, I visited a garden on a National Convention tour that brought me to tears.  Many of you might have been there at Faded Flamingo Gardens - owned and created by Ralph and Becky Adams.

I mention this here because there are those places in time, that grab your soul and change the way you want to garden.

My visit to the Osman Garden during the 2012 National Convention was such a time. It transported me to a place of giving - a deep giving of the gardener's soul.  1400 cultivars spread out over five acres awaited me as I got off the bus.  It was misting heavy, so I got a chance to use the large, white umbrella I sought for just this occasion. No one complained about the rain...not even I, who chose a white cotton dress for the day's tours.  The custom white sails on the Osman pier made for a nice snapshot.  I'm saying - "Come on y'all, let's go see some more daylilies!"

The rain did not spoil the blooms at all. This collection of daylilies reminded me of my own; no one form dominates, colors are saturated and lots of textures are present.  I also saw many things I had never even heard of!
The purples were regal...

H. 'Foxy Filly' and H. 'Heartbeat of Heaven'

H. 'Henry Boykin' and H. 'Quicksilver Girl'

The yellows and blends were radiant...

H. 'Give Me Eight' and H. 'Bonnie Holley'

H. 'Peasant Blouse' and H. 'Dream Machine'

The fabulously gaudy things were not to be outdone...

H. 'Candie Dwyer' and H. 'Moses in the Bullrushes'

H. 'Love and Dazzle' and H. 'Magnify the Lord'

Aside from the pier at the beginning of this post, the best part of this garden, and quite possibly the best feature seen in any of these tour gardens, are the large beds at the back of the property filled completely and exclusively with WOMEN hybridizers.  All around this pavillion are daylilies hybridized by women!

Yep, this one is for the ladies!

As I walked the paths, I saw living history.  These are mostly modern women, and the most moving part is that I have met or know most of them very well.  

Im not sure I could have felt more proud, seeing the triumphs of women I know overcome so much personally and professionally.  Women who are still fighting battles - and winning on all fronts.

Each woman had a hand-made sign near their introductions, and I saw many women featured in these beds standing by their signs getting photos taken.  It was like a red carpet and this was the Grauman's Chinese Theatre of daylilies!  

Here is Carol 'Seajay' Mock's H. 'Supreme Tangerine'...

Nan Ripley and Karol Emmerich were featured, and were on my bus!  I saw daylilies from Margo Reed and Kathy Lamb and Pat Salk and Heidi Douglas and Gerda Brooker and Nancy Eller and Cindy Dye and Jane Trimmer and Grace Stamile and Bobbie Brooks and so, so many other women I admire and cherish as friends.  

It is a thoughtful tribute, a time capsule and a total treat.  The signs for the women's feature were hand made by her and her husband all winter long.  What a wonderful effort, and a lasting legacy for daylilies!

Nan Ripley's H. 'Love of Ruth' and Karol Emmerich's H. 'Wall of Fire'

Call it 'Girl Power', but this bed had a ton of energy in it.  I enjoyed seeing a body of work from one hybridizer on display.  I liked seeing several of Kimberly McCutcheon's introductions growing in clump strength in one place.  It is a testament to the whole of the work.  

You rarely get the chance to answer the question:  Are all of the plants from a particular hybridizer worthy of adding to a collection?  

Seeing the daylilies on display like this helped me to fall in love with hybridizers work I may have not otherwise considered.  

For example, I had the opportunity the night before this garden visit to win Carol (Seajay) Mock's H. 'Supreme Tangerine' in the auction at a very reasonable price.  I did not purchase it; the picture used wasnt that great and I had never seen it in a garden before.  Buuuuut, seeing it in clump strength the next day in this garden made me regret not taking the chance.  It was a real stunner for something that someone may describe as just-another-orange.  Here is a close-up:

The paths were packed with photographers and gawkers and some visitors in tears - seeing collections of women who have passed on, and some who were just deeply moved by the sentiment contained in the creation of this display. 

So many neat treats here - the pond, the pier, the snacks (fresh quiche), the wagon ride (how wonderful for the walking challenged), the abundance of smiling faces, the seating areas, the perfectly mowed expanse of lawn...  

The Osmans also had a wonderful bed for Guest Plants, seen below, with a great totem featuring the names of all the gardens who had sent plants!  I'm not sure you can get more thoughtful than this...

Looking back at the Women's Hybridizer Bed, I can see the magic hovering above it.  The horses playing in the morning mist added to the majestic mood of the area.  I just cant get over how carefully laid out these beds are, and how proud the women who were featured must have been.  

I wish I would have had another hour here.  Or maybe even another day.  This is the one garden I felt cheated for time.  Happiness lives here and I wanted more.

Here is a wide shot of the Women's Hybridizer bed, looking out from near the house - the horses were out of the barn in the back left corner.  

Dear Osmans- from all of us, thank you.  

Your years of hard work and attention to making every part of our visit meaningful could not have been better spent.  You played our heartstrings and our creative minds, and I am sure you inspired more than one of the 600 us to go home and do something meaningful in our own gardens.

SEE ALL THE RECAPS OF THESE TOURS HERE!

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More grows in the garden than the gardener sows... | Daylily Blog on Kindred Spirits

Most of the time I feel like I'm on the cusp of a particularly spectacular nervous breakdown.  You know, the kind where you sit rocking back and forth on the cold bathroom floor, crying over the five extra minutes it took to peel potatoes? 

Yes, that kind of spectacular.

It just hasn't been a great week for my insides- I'm feeling overwhelmed with autumns tasks, lamenting over some huge events in 2011 and generally feeling alone and sad.  Woe is me. (insert collective sigh here.)

Last Friday was Grandparents Mass at my son's school, and since his grandparents are all at least 500 miles away, and ours are all passed on, my husband and I went to mass and represented our past generations for our son.  Thoughts naturally drifted to my grandmother, Elizabeth (Lizzie, to her friends) - a Polish lady of great church stature, with a quiet voice and loud, kind laughter that could stop a clock.  She died at 53 - way too young - just after my ninth birthday.  This photo was taken by her of me in her backyard in 1977. 

Those marigolds behind me still haunt my senses; I'm teleported to this exact photo - this moment - everytime the sour odor of marigolds floats by me.  This was my first garden - the place where I smooshed dandelions in my palm, ate sour clover, rode a go-cart for the first time, stepped on way too many stinging bees and chewed on honeysuckle vine.  It's where her old, cranky poodle growled at me from across the yard, daring me to come any closer to him so he could bite me again.  It's also where I was when I learned she died.

We never gardened together, but today I never garden without her.  I hear her voice and feel her soft skin on the warm breeze of autumn.  She's still yelling at me for bending tall scapes of Hemerocallis Fulva down to my level - you can read more on this here.  Last Friday, on the way to work after the morning mass, I found her in my thoughts more than usual. 
"I'm doing it."  I told her.  I'm raising my son, sending him to a really good Catholic school, tending to my husband, making our home fabulous, voraciously sharing my love of dirt with others and caring for my aging parents from afar. I think she is proud that I leave my corporate office and spend my lunch time working the lunchroom of my son's school - a job that she held full-time at the parochial school my mother attended as a child.  Quite often my grandmother would take me with her for her lunch duties, and I would spend hours in the kitchen, underfoot of many smock-adorned lunchladies who treated me like their own.  

"I'm doing it,"  I repeated.  I hope you are, too.

Gardening forms the strangest - and strongest - bonds.  Reach out today to your kindred gardening spirit, because so much more grows in the garden than the gardener sows... 

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Daylily Haiku Thursday | A Course of Action

crisp, hazy mornings

bring all new discoveries.

possibilities

H. 'Course of Action'

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Daylily Haiku Thursday | 86 pounds of daylilies!

generosity

knows no bounds (in daylilies)

i'll pay it forward.

The Southern Michigan Daylily Society is hosting the 2011 Region 2 Summer Meeting and Garden Tours.  I am chairing the planning committee and let me tell you...it is a lesson in delegation and teamwork.  Each week someone does something that makes me smile and remember that I'm not the only one obsessing about things continuously.

Two weeks ago, the Region 2 newsletter editor Narda Jones sent me an offer I couldn't refuse.  Her club, SWIDS, had a plant sale which left them with some extra plants.  She sent an email asking if we could use them for the 2011 meeting.  YES!  I think she could hear me screaming YES from three states away.

Four days later, three large boxes containing 86 pounds of daylilies arrived on my doorstep. Yes, folks, that's eighty-six.  8. 6.  86.

Kathy Rinke quickly arranged to have the three boxes picked up at my house and carted to her place near the center of the state for safe planting until next year.  She is chairing the 2011 plant sale and this makes her job so much easier.  How often do 500 fans of daylilies just fall on your doorstep when you need them?  And even more, how often do you find a volunteer like Kathy who steps up and says she will plant them until next summer?  In the daylily community, it happens all the time.  Which is why most of us give so much, because we know it will come back to us just when we need it.

Amazing contribution to the region by the Indiana group.  The bargain table plant sale at the regional meeting in 2011 will now be UNREAL thanks to their generosity and forward thinking.

WAY.  TO.  GO.

                                              

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My Place In Space | Daylily Blog on Sharing

In some circles, some view having the same specimen plants in their garden that can be seen in another as a crime punishable by exile. I say "some circles" but maybe I just mean my own. There are 65,000+ registered daylily cultivars, so there are many to choose from when adding daylilies to your landscape. I heard a story this week about a lady who doesn’t use plant markers and won't share variety names just so people won't know what she grows in her garden and so visitors can't replicate or purchase what she grows. Really? Why have visitors at all? Why share it at all? Where is the joy in this type of "secret garden?" (those are NOT rhetorical questions, by the way, please post your answers in the comments link below this post!)

My friend Nicole and I share an eerily similar taste in daylilies. We like the unique, the eccentric, the road-less-travelled daylily introductions. Just when I think I've discovered something that is amazingly obscure…she's already heard of it. And when she sends me information on something new she found, quite often I've seen it somewhere along the way and have a picture to share. We share a lot, trade a lot, buy a lot, talk a lot and "do daylilies" a lot. She has her niche tastes and I have mine (she also collects some cool sedums and clematis and I treasure my lilium and miniature hosta) but overall, we like the diversity that the daylily brings to our gardens.

Have I shared some of my lesser-known beauties with her? Of course. (and she has done the same for me)

Do I tell her what I've found or seen on a tour? Totally.

Would I ever be so elitist to think that my garden is the end-all-be-all of daylilydom? Never.

Gardening is a hobby that quickly engrains itself in your soul and hydrates your very being. It’s a type of therapy you'd never get from Dr. Phil on a good day. Gardening is a common thread that binds some of the least likely cohorts together and makes them all the better for it. Don’t be scared to share – much like the perennials we all love, the karma created from sharing information or actual plant material is magnified and quickly replaces any sense of self-importance you may have.

No one appreciates your hard work more than a fellow gardener.

You just have to be secure enough to really let them in to your place in space.

Daylilies pictured above (from top to bottom): H.'Golden Hibiscus' , H.'Night Embers', and H.'Joan Derifield'

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Today is quickly becoming yesterday...

Anticipation is an enemy to productivity.  Quite often my mind is diverted from "what should be happening now" to "what will be soon" and I miss out on some intricacies of the moment.  This phenomenon is never more true than it is in gardening with daylilies.

This time of year, my mind has visions of fields afire with blooming daylilies.  I'm thinking of upcoming exhibition shows, garden tours, my own garden open house, and the hundreds of different daylilies that will show their beautiful faces in my garden for the first time this July. 

I am thinking of what flowers I will show, what arrangements I will enter in competitions and what guests will snack on when they visit.  I am not concentrating on properly fertilizing the grass, edging the easements, power washing the gutters, or repainting our front porch.  These tasks are not fun.  They are not full of blooms.  They are necessary distractions to my dreams of later days - the very things of which honey-do lists are made.

Daylilies are truly only open for one day, which helps greatly with my gardening-attention-deficit-disorder.  If today's blooms arent great, no problem, tomorrow will be different! 

The blooms you see open on your daylily plants today will not be there tomorrow.  Yes, it's true.  The good news is most daylily plants produce multiple scapes which produce multiple buds, which means more flowers (see picture to the left of multiple buds on multiple scapes.)   Although each bloom only lasts one day, you will quite often see at least a month's worth of bloom from each daylily clump you have planted.  This brief lifespan contributes to my anticipation affliction.  I gear myself up for the flurry of flowers in July and August, looking past much of what is happening now in the garden.  It doesn't help I live in Michigan where summers seem an eternity shorter than any other state in the union. 

In dreaming of the diamond dusting on H. 'Corinthian Pink' or the deep purple stain on the eye and edge of H. 'Sabine Baur' or the metallic gold edge on H. 'Prickled Petals,' I forget about the garden path that should be swept out or the fence that needs a good scrubbing. 

(seriously, who could resist the diamond dusting seen above on H. 'Corinthian Pink?')

H. 'Sabine Baur'

My right brain collided with my left brain today in a small anxiety attack as I looked over the garden.  I have been daydreaming ahead too much and I think I lost sight of what should have already been done.  Darn it.  Breathe.  Breathe, Nikki.

It is okay.

Tomorrow is a new day.  Someone more wise than I coached me to begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with my old nonsense.

I give us all permission to anticipate tomorrow with all the mouthwatering goodness that it promises.  It does not mean you aren't appreciating today, it just means you are comfortable in your current moment and preparing for the next.  Make your plans for tomorrow, start a list, make a pile to be cleared another day.  For me, it means I have "skin in the game" of tomorrow, which gives me a little more hope that it's coming - and that it's going to be great. 

After all, I planned for today yesterday and I'm already working on tomorrow right now. 

It is the perfect testament to the fleeting lifecycle of the daylily.

 

H.'Prickled Petals' - Don't you love the gold edge?  It almost seems embroidered on there!

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(Daylily) Angels Among Us

There are lots of angels among us, but they are especially present in the daylily community. Sharing ideas, time, sweat, pollen, plants, and laughter is part of what keeps us coming back to daylilies, and keeps us feeding the cycle of sharing with others.  There aren't many people who "do daylilies" alone, or who have caught the daylily bug without the help of another hemaholic. 

While enjoying the sounds and sights of my spring garden this weekend, I recalled several angels in my own daylily universe.

I remembered visiting a friend here in Michigan in about 2002 who was moving to warmer climates and said to me - "Dig anything you want.  Better to go to you than the new owners!"  Wow.  She had more than a thousand varieties, and I was like a kid in a candy store.  (Seriously, who hasnt dreamed of hearing the delicious words - "dig anything you want.")  She wouldn't take a dime from me for the carload of new and vintage daylilies dug that day.  Almost ten years later, I still have many of those and count them among my favorites.  (H. 'Fresh Start' and H. 'Brookwood Wow' were two I got that day.)

I remembered Harris Olson, who was the quintessential daylily man and also the same man who endowed the current Harris Olson Spider Award through the American Hemerocallis Society.  He maintained quite a daylily collection at a local church and sold clumps by the armload to eager daylily fans.  He taught me how to dig and divide daylilies using a pitchfork.  It was my first hands-on learning (not to mention I had stopped by the church in my "work clothes" just to look at the daylilies and ended up digging in my high heeled work shoes!)

I cannot think about generosity without thinking of Martin Kamensky.  His 2009 Englerth Winner (and several other of his seedlings and introductions)grows in a prominent spot in my yard.  Receiving this gift from Martin truly did bring tears to my eyes.  He is a golden gem of a person who has spent decades with daylilies and daylily people.  His story is as unique as his accent.  Some of you may have seen his garden during the 2002 AHS National Convention and some more of you may see it in 2011 on the Region 2 Summer Garden Tour. 

I laughed when I remembered a picnic at Judy Davisson's house, where I admired a huge four-foot wide hosta clump and her husband dug it out for me on the spot and loaded it into my car.  I had to drive almost an hour with the trunk open - it was THAT big.  How generous of her (and Glenn!)  It still grows in my garden.

I thought about friendly faces at daylily meetings who allowed me to share a table with them when I didnt know anyone and everyone seemed to know everyone else.  Now I make sure everyone has a "seat at the table" at daylily events if I notice them.

I thought about the hundreds of garden owners, who over the last 12 years or so have allowed me (and thousands of other folks) to invade their personal space and tour their daylilies.

I thought about stumbling upon my first daylily friend Delores Bourisaw and her little table at a craft fair in the early 90's selling daylilies.  If it weren't for her entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to talk to me kindly about daylilies, I may not be where I am today with my gardening passion.

Think about your gardening angels today and send some good vibrations about them into the bright, sparkling spring skies.

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